In one of those unfortunate reminders that I’ve circled the sun a whole lot now, I saw an article this week noting it was the 35th anniversary of the release of R.E.M.’s “Reckoning.” It’s my favorite album by a band I was obsessed with for the back half of the 1980s into the early 1990s, and I’d place this album on my personal Top 5 list any day.

I already was an R.E.M. fan when the album hit in 1984. Like so many other early adopters, I heard “Radio Free Europe” and that was all it took. That was unusual for me — I was a Top 40 guy at the time — but I thought these guys would be all over the singles charts soon enough.

It turned out that it took a few more years for that to happen, and “Reckoning” didn’t contain the cut that did it. What it did have was the strength of a band of undeniable talent that obviously had been honed by playing hundreds of crap gigs, and your ears told you that they were transitioning toward a much bigger future. But at the time, before the corporate music weasels eventually had their say, the band could still get away with rougher-edged songs, more obtuse lyrics, and putting Michael Stipe’s vocals so far down in the mix that they were felt as much as they were heard.

From a nostalgia standpoint, this album pulls up warm memories of a fantastic point in my life. I had moved to Little Rock and fallen in with a bunch of journalists, writers, musicians and artists (not to mention the occasional journalist-writer-musician-artist) that had their own scene in the mid-1980s. I hooked up with my first band, which had sort of a cowpony thing going on, and my musical tastes changed — all in the year or so around the time of the release of this album.

R.E.M. was a big part of my changing musical tastes. I mean, how could you listen to the hair metal and disposable dance stuff that was clogging up the Top 40 when you could hear this? They also helped drag me toward Los Lobos, and Jason and the Scorchers, and the Beat Farmers, and the Blasters, and Lone Justice — all bands who were rootsier and less art-school-y than R.E.M., but they all were in my musical sweet spot.

I wore out “Reckoning.” I have specific memories of flipping over the record countless times in my crap apartment of 35 years ago. And a couple of years after the album came out, I finally say the band play at Robinson Auditorium in Little Rock, with Fetchin Bones opening up. It was one of the greatest live shows of my life.

I don’t have a turntable any more, although the vinyl version of this still sits in a crate in my backyard shed. This time around, I’m listening to the album through wireless earplugs synced to my smartphone. That would have been an unimaginable experience for 1980s Randy, but I’d put this slice of my past up against most of the overproduced and underperformed albums I hear today, and it’d win every time. After time. After time.

Here’s a piece from The Ringer that will tell you more than you want to know about “Reckoning.” Enjoy.

This year’s Saint Somewhere was St. Croix, the only U.S. Virgin Island that my wife and I had not explored at length before this year. For the last few years, we’ve found a Caribbean island to hang out on near the end of the winter, and St. Croix was a worthy addition to this tradition.

The big surprise was the completely uncrowded vibe. That might be in part because we choose to stay in a villa at Cane Bay, away from the island’s two major towns. There were only a few other villas around and we could walk down a hill to the beach and a trio of beach bars/restaurants. These included the fabulous Off the Wall and Spratnet — two immediate nominees for our list of Great Dive Bars of the Caribbean. We liked the area so much that we stayed close a lot of days, and didn’t explore the rest of the island as much as we could/should have.

From a tourism standpoint, St. Croix is pretty obviously still recovering from hurricanes Irma and Maria, the twin-headed monsters that struck in 2017. Irma just swung a glancing blow (unlike the other Virgin Islands to the north) but Maria dug right in, causing truly massive damage and stripping the vegetation. Since then, the island has greened back up but there still is rubble in places, the locals are great/friendly/approachable, the roads are a bit of an adventure but not as much as in St. John, and the place is ready to support tourists again. If you’re looking for a chill Caribbean island with lots of roaming opportunities. St. Croix definitely fits the bill.

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It should be obvious to anyone who’s read my past posts that I’m a fan of structurally questionable Caribbean beach bars. They are really more about the hangout than anything else, although most of them will be happy to get you hammered if you’re after that, but I’m just looking for a relaxed vibe and a bit of rum. Here’s how I’d rank my favorites in the Virgin Islands. The ones with an ‘X’ next to them still have a chunk of rebuilding to do after the 2017 hurricanes, but they’re more or less open:

1. Ivan’s Stress-Free Bar, Jost Van Dyke   X

2. Corsairs Beach Bar & Restaurant, Jost Van Dyke   X

3. Rhythms at Rainbow Beach, St. Croix

4. The Beach Bar, St. John   X

5. Seddy’s One Love Bar & Grill, Jost Van Dyke   X

6. Off the Wall, St. Croix

7. The Soggy Dollar, Jost Van Dyke

8. Spratnet, St. Croix   X

9. Skinny Legs, St. John

10. Island Time Pub, St. Thomas

I was pasted firmly in the hump of the bell curve in high school. I had about an average number of friends and a modest personal profile, did fine but not super-fantastic in grades, played some sports early on but wasn’t good enough for Varsity Anything, got involved in a few extracurriculars but not a ton of them, and so on. I passed through, I learned a lot, and I don’t think I left any footprints.

But every year, I donate a decent chunk of money to that high school — Helias Catholic High School in Jefferson City, Mo. — in hopes of one day paying back everything they gave me. I’ve been successful for a long time in a really tough profession, and I think it is my high school that deserves much of the credit.

When you tell people you went to a Catholic high school, they start to draft a certain profile: Affluent kids, somewhat protected from life’s harsher realities, whose parents have used their money to buy an education upgrade and get God in the mix, too. But that wasn’t really what life was like at Helias.

First of all, almost all of the area Catholic kids (and there were a lot of them where I grew up) went to my high school. It was surprisingly affordable — and if families couldn’t swing the costs, the school would find a way to make things work. That meant that the school looked a lot more like the area’s overall population than a lot of Catholic schools can claim. We had rich and poor kids, townies and lots of farm kids, tough kids and pushovers, jocks and geeks. It wasn’t perfect — minorities were nonexistent and of course, there was no religious diversity — but it wasn’t some hyper-sheltered private school, either.

I was sick of Catholic school when I started at Helias, but I chose to attend because all of my friends were going there. I felt suffocated and had become confrontational with the nails-tough nuns at my grade school, and I almost got tossed from there a couple of times in my last two years. I assumed Helias would be more of the same.

It wasn’t. The nuns, Christian brothers and lay teachers brought a love of learning with them that I had not seen from many of my grade school nuns, some of whom got to keep their teaching jobs by divine right. There was the moral instruction you would expect from a Catholic school, but it was more of a lead-by-example form of teaching, instead of the beat-you-over-the-head stuff I had gotten in grade school. I loved it. And along with a genuinely terrific liberal arts education, I was taught so many practical skills.

Take Coach Jeffries, to pick just one of many teachers who filled this practical role. He was the wrestling coach at a school that took that sport very seriously, but he also was a history teacher who loved his subject.

To make sure we picked up what he was laying down, he started his classes every year by teaching his students how to take notes. His method — basically a way of writing an outline on the fly — has saved my bacon as a journalist more times than I can count and probably was the greatest factor in keeping my college GPA respectable.

I doubt Coach Jeffries ever thought his note-taking method would turn up in a reporter’s notebook, or that it would be used as the foundation for hundreds (if not thousands) of news stories, or that it would help end the careers of shady congressmen or record the thoughts of presidents, but there you go.

Helias deepened my love of music and literature. It helped me to become a critical, not just skeptical, thinker. It taught me the lasting value of real friendship. It shaped my personal ethics and morals in ways that have stuck, even after I drifted away from Catholicism. 

College was valuable — I learned and honed my journalism chops there, and got a few important life lessons along the way — but Helias was transformative. Going in, I was a smart-assed kid heading in the wrong direction. Coming out, I had been shaped into an adult with a decent head on his shoulders. I owe Helias everything, and that’s a debt I plan to keep paying off.