“I’ve got a one way ticket to the open road …. .” A line in a song by John Fogerty.
I was playing in a four-piece band when I wasn’t even old enough to drive. And we were playing some pretty dang good rock and roll. Oh, the memories associated with that. Rich memories.
Eddie decided to leave us way back there.
I was in the Army and had driven home from Fort Campbell Kentucky on a little break between duty cycles and had, just a few hours earlier, smoked a joint with him. He gave me no clue about what he was planning to do. But, now that I think about it, maybe he did … whether intentionally or unintentionally. He gave me close to a three-finger lid and said he didn’t need it anymore. And it was good smoke. Every time I rolled a joint out of that baggie, I did it in memory of my friend Eddie.
The other three of us have seasoned with the counsel of age a bit but we’re still around. And music has always been an important part of our lives. I heard recently that Jeff retired his drums. For somebody who grew up with polio, Jeff could flat play the drums. Keith? He’s still the choir director at the big church down there.
I’m doing the Spring cleaning that I didn’t do back in the Spring. Ha. Come to think of it, it didn’t get done the Spring before either. Oh. I hit it a lick here and there to keep things from becoming a total disaster. My God. I can’t stand a dirty toilet. I did do a pretty good tidy-up in the living room, kitchen, and bathroom in early June of this year in preparation for Bob flying in from Rio Rancho. No. The place has never looked like anything on those hoarder shows. But it certainly did not reflect my otherwise impeccable housekeeping skills.
That line in Fogerty’s song haunts me.
“I’ve got a one way ticket to the open road …. .
I have grown to be very comfortable soloing in this little house.
I have no problem at all now just sitting here listening to the ticking of the clock on the wall. Sometimes I turn on some music. Sometimes I don’t. I don’t have to have noise as some kind of futile attempt at distraction to keep my free-flow of thoughts from going where they go and doing what they do. I need no distractions now. I want my thoughts to go where they want to go. And I want to feel the emotions as I relive precious memory after precious memory.
I need this little shack full of memories for a number of obvious reasons.
I also feel what Fogerty is saying in that line.
It’s not that I want to go for a drive. It is that I need to go for a drive. Huge difference. Bang. Epiphany. Shirli and I both needed this as something compelling us to drive new roads. Wow. Someone once made the statement to me that “you get what you get when you get it”. Well, I got it. I just now got it. We didn’t have to talk about why we were doing it. We just did it because that’s what we needed to do. It’s not a head thing. It’s a soul thing.
The trouble is that it is
far easier to live up in the head rationalizing and dismissing than it is to
live in the depths of the soul where we are compelled to do as we do without putting
a lot of thought into it. Huh. Now that’s interesting to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment