Now that I’m listening to IQ-lowering radio pop (as I do every summer), I occasionally experience a bizarre side effect.
When I was 17, I spent the summer with my mother (as I usually did — I lived with my dad during the school year). Mom lived in a place very close to where I currently live. I had job for a few weeks, and I would drive to work, using the same streets that I do now.
Every once in a while, when a song from the early 80s comes on and I’m passing the eucalyptus trees on a certain part of C.I. Boulevard, I get sucked into the time vortex. Suddenly, I’m seventeen again, in my mom’s 1978 stick-shift Honda, thrilling to the freedom of driving! By myself! In Southern California!
It’s then and there how I see there’s very little between Point A and Point B on life’s roadmap, merely some airwaves.
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2 responses to “aural side effect”
It’s funny. I have those same kind of moments sometimes….a sound or a comment will take me back to some random but very specific place in my past. Just getting a flash of an intersection that I drove through all the time in Palatine, IL or the backyard garden at my grandparent’s place in Sylmar, CA……the mind does some interesting things.
I like this, it is a poem.