Sunday Reflection

Sundays, reflections.

Always.

I am several minutes away from hopping on my bicycle to head for the gym. I'll do an hour or so on the elliptical, then head back home again.

Home again.

Last night this was the song that closed my conscious mind, my ears surrounded by soft headphones and familiar memories.

403 Somerville Road, November, 1969. Friday morning after Thanksgiving at my grandmother's home, I sit at the table in a cramped kitchen as Nana prepares olive oil fried eggs. WBEN, A.M. 930 plays on the radio and this is the latest song out, released just days before. I am nine years old and too young to reflect on the words, so it is the haunting melody that etches itself into my mind and stays there forever. Forty-seven years later, almost to the day, I lay in bed, vulnerable to the ghosts of the past and the hopes of the future. As sleep arrives, it robs one of any defense...you succumb...no matter how strong you are, no matter how tough, no matter how well you have honed your sword against every adversity that comes at you while wide awake; you are now submissive.

There is no defense to fighting against the vivid recollections in that small kitchen and now, reflecting on what happened then, and what is happening now.

I was too young then to know...but somehow felt...that the world and all its promise and hope that blossomed just a few years earlier...had crashed in a heap of assassinations and riots, and that a war far away had stolen the lives of tens of thousands of those optimistic young souls, who died really not knowing why.

And melancholy seeped into music. Yet hope remained back then. Somehow, not every blossomed flower shriveled and died. I sat eating my olive-oil fried eggs as my indifferent Nana poured me another glass of orange juice and the melody and harmonies of this song made me feel happy not sad. They reminded me of my favorite things and I looked forward to my day, tomorrow, and beyond...not even thinking deeply of it, just feeling the joy.

"The world is a bad place, a bad place...a terrible place to live...ahhhh...but I don't wanna die!"

Those words were but words back then to a nine year old. What were they to my slightly older counterparts? Were the teens of the sixties becoming old souls now? This was but one song of many that reflected and that tempered the wild-flowered forever optimism spawned by these children, now jaded, to the realities of the world. And just a few months earlier they gathered by the hundreds of thousands in a farm field to...as they found out a year later at Kent State...bid adieu to the tranquility they discovered.

Yet here we are, forty seven years later. Somehow we have survived.

"The world is a bad place, a bad place...a terrible place to live...ahhhh...but I don't wanna die!"

Where's my bike?