Panic on the streets of Trenton

The Smiths, the 609 bus and a trip to the mailbox

I was 17 when The Smiths’ “Panic” was released, and that song, plus the rest of their music and that of so many bands like them, was my Walkman soundtrack during less-than-enchanting high school, followed by College: The Madcap Years.

Panic on the streets of London
Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
"Could life ever be sane again?"
The Leeds side streets that you slip down
I wonder to myself

Hopes may rise on the Grasmere
But honey pie, you're not safe here
So you run down to the safety of the town
But there's panic on the streets of Carlisle
Dublin, Dundee, Humberside
I wonder to myself

College included an exchange semester in Reading, England, home to the rail station where T.E. Lawrence misplaced his first draft of “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” All 250,000 words of it. Ootch. And it was the city’s dim view of men sexing it up with consenting adult males that informed Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” While I was at school there — the university, that is, not the jail — Morrissey, lead singer of The Smiths, dropped by unannounced at the student union bar. Naturally, I missed him.