Aural Time Travel

Howard Jones released Dream Into Action at the end of my senior year in high school. Though my '79 Cutlass Supreme Brougham had an inexpensive stereo, that cassette sounded so clear and pure when I turned up the volume. I loved it. It was like the soundtrack to a pivotal time when I was truly embarking on life.

The next year, when I was in college, HoJo released One to One. Discretionary funds for buying music were hard to come by. Heck, any funds were hard to come by. I remember getting food was a big priority in those college-student days. Kentucky Fried Chicken sold chicken-on-a-biscuit for only 39 cents, and two of them amounted to a chicken sandwich. The best days of the week were when my  roommate would bring home leftover pizza from the restaurant where he worked.

Despite the hard-to-come-by funds, I saved my money and bought that tape as soon as I could. There's something magical about the right music -- how it can be more important than food.  Especially when you are young. I got a lot of play out of One to One in those struggling times. I listened to it constantly, and it often remained in my stereo for the entire weekend commute between where I was living and my hometown.

While on vacation last summer, I scored a CD of One to One for $3.99. I never thought I'd hear those songs again, because I didn't think the album was made available on CD, except for a limited run.

Listening to those tracks a quarter of a century later amounts to an aurally invoked time machine. The vocals are like a wormhole to a different time. The beats take me back. That was a chapter in my life when I was working as a clerk at a convenience store, picking up 22 hours on the weekend, while attending college and (allegedly) focusing on class and studies during the week.

I lived in a horrible little apartment with a bud from high school who was going to the same college. We watched David Letterman every night on a 9-inch black and white TV that I got for Christmas the year I was in the 5th grade.

If only all the roaches and crickets in that on-the-cusp-of-condemned apartment complex would have contributed toward our rent. It would really have reduced my monthly expenses.

The cost of my jaunt back in time was merely $3.99, thanks to Howard Jones and his synthesized sounds.

Cairn O' The Cosmos

I have a cairn on my office desk.  It is of my own making.

I scavenged the trio of rocks from Goleta Beach Park just north of Santa Barbara several years ago when a good buddy and I were dispatched to the west coast under a delightfully narrow scope of responsibility.  The late-game need for us meant the only available hotel room was on the beach.  We were merely hired guns, so to speak, who had the particular credentials to help edit a series of documents whose delivery date rapidly approached.

We had more free time than usual on that trip.  So, I took him to some of the places that I'd previously visited -- Goleta Beach Park among them.  I picked up three surf-smoothed rocks that were partially submerged in the beach sand.  And now they are stacked on my desk with such perfect appearance that a viewer might consider the result to be a fabrication, a novelty store sculpture.

Each stone's slight variation of hue divided by interstitial shadows.  A tiny tower.  An ellipsoidal, stone snowman.  A mysterious monument.

I'm certain it has a grander meaning.  I'm certain.

My Own Maxinkuckee

After flying over the lake of his childhood summers, Kurt Vonnegut remarked: "That wasn't the real Maxinkuckee down there. The real one is in my head."  

That quote has really meant something to me through the years, as I try to conjure apparitions of my past and make some sense of them.

Kurt Vonnegut died four Aprils ago at the age of 84.  With my calendar boldly proclaiming APRIL, my thoughts are haunted by the ghosts of my parents, and the vignettes of my early life that now seem so distant as to belong to a movie I saw in a previous existence.

But, my grandmother, father, and mother all died in consecutive Aprils.  Dad was just a few months older than Kurt Vonnegut.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I had a dream in which my parents were alive again.  I was riding my old red bicycle (with chopper bars and banana seat!) near my childhood home, though I was my full-sized, fat, adult self.  My sister and friends and cousins (who appeared in the dream) were all adults, too.

At one point in the dream, it was revealed to me that my mother had died the night before, and I simply hadn't been told until that moment, because others were shielding me from the grief, cloaked in the motives of their good intentions.

Friends and family were gathered in a neighbor's large home.  I sorta wandered through it in a stupor, not really speaking to anyone.  It was on my mind that I needed to find my dad and comfort him, though I never saw him in the dream.

I woke up sad.

But, of course, it has been more than fifteen years since my mother died. It somehow never occurred to my dream-self that I'd already buried both parents -- that my father preceded my mother in death, and would therefore not have been a survivor of her death, as he was in the dream.

How do dreams do that?  How do you convince me of things that are not so, foist me into some alternate, anomalous existence populated with circumstances incongruous to the reality I know.