"Strange days…..

……

That's coming on us
Strange ways
This time of ours
There is no meaning
For this to happen….."

J.J Cale

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jp31lJieKA

Strange days indeed…..    have been walking around some of my old stomping grounds a little bit today in Livonia, Michigan.  An hour and a half walking and not one single person on a bike or walking the sidewalks.  This is what the streets looked like at about 11:30 today.

No skate boards, no roller-blades, no kids playing in their yards - simply not a soul.  Plenty of folks speeding by in their wheel mounted coffins however, turning into Taco Bells and McDonald's, Outback and 7 -Eleven's.  Just felt so lonely.  Longed to head out into the mountains somewhere, alone, where being alone is not lonely.

Old memories float like a mirage as I walk, distorting the present.  I can hear voices of those long dead, and remember the songs, sights and smells of those times.  Happy times, sad times.  Bad times and good.  Some make me smile, others cut like knives to the bone.  Warmth is here in the now-past, but so is grief.  I long to walk away from all this and vanish onto an anonymous path where none know me and I know none……   then a squirrel chases another across the lawn and up and around and around the tree trunk and the sun brightens.

Am visiting old friends here, and I catch up on a decade of news…….  and I hear in my way, more loudly, the who have died pieces. I visit men and women who were children when I last saw them, playing in my house on the living room floor.  They have existed forever on this floor, here in my memory, until I see them now, this way, and I am happy to see them again as they are now, and I am sad to have missed their growing up.   I am saddened even more because some of those children of memory, who played on my living room floor with my daughter Lydia, are dead now,  and I will never see them again.  And their mothers are my friends, and they are forever shadowed with now, years old, now finally, bittersweet grief.  Healed but forever wounded.  

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." - Heraclitus

"You can't go home again." - Thomas Wolfe

"No ignorance or end of it, nor all that comes of ignorance: 
no withering, no death, no end of them.


Nor is there pain or cause of pain or cease in pain or noble path 
to lead from pain, not even wisdom to attain, attainment too is emptiness."

- Prajna Paramita

Strange day indeed  -  I am both here and there, now and then, …… melancholy, wistful, tender.    

(J.J. Cale died July 26, 2013)