The mind and our memory is a wondrous place. A certain scent or taste can transport you back to exact time and place and to whom you were with in that very moment.

I listened to the Woodstock album (CD) last week while bored between show dates on the other side of the world. I sat back and closed my eyes and within a moment, there they were, Matthew, Kevin, Mark and cousin John better known as the Sea Cliff street gang. We were blasting the side of the double album that begins with “give me an F, give me a U ” and so on.

 

It was, or should I say, IS a beautiful late spring day on Long Island and the lilacs and lilies of the valley have just bloomed. Mom went shopping and we waited for hours until she left so we could naughty up my Victrola… yes you read that right, Victrola. What once blasted chipmunks and nursery rhyme records was now spelling out a generations disdain for what was happening in Vietnam.

 

It is 1970...  It was 1970. John and the boys have long since learned how to spell the rest of the “F” word as I am sure that many of their sons have mastered the art as well by now. Are we the same people I wonder? Is that place the same? Can we ever go back?

I have visited with my cousin many times while in NY or when he and his wife were good enough to come see me perform in Atlantic City. Same guy, but different, not as silly, more serious but a substantial glimpse of the original still exists.

The house we lived in is frighteningly the same nearly 40 years later. When the new owners bought it in ’75, they changed nothing even till today. The deck, the landscape even the burnt orange kitchen wallpaper still hangs in the kitchen as it did the day it went up 1 month before mankind made it’s giant step in the heavens .

 

The place is hard for me to look at as most of my fondest memories are still trapped within those walls, those lighting fixtures, those curtains. It is a surreal Smithsonian look into my boyhood.

 

In its way it is home, but no longer one that is my own.

I can go home….but only in my mind, my dreams and my imagination.

 

Each moment in time is stored within me and emerge in every poem, story, character, song or piece of music that I create. They are the fuel that has driven my creative spirit.

 

I believe that home is the convergence of time, geographical location, mental state, emotional state and what you are within that moment.

For that moment IS home and can truly never be visited again. We wake daily in our beds and see our rooms, our clothes, our coffee maker but each day somehow is different.

Though as I close my eyes and listen to the music of Woodstock, I am 10 again, my mother is alive and healthy, my Grandmother and Grandfather are waiting just next door for me to stop in for a pre-dinner hello, my aunt and uncle are across the street and cousins are up and down Sea Cliff Street. It is a safe place.

I look out the back window to see our horses strangely still and staring dazed at my fantastically creative and talented “hippy” cousin George. He is serenading them with his guitar. Wasted music and effort on dumb animals?

 

Not on your life!

How cool is that I think to myself. Most people don’t stop to listen to music for more than a minute while the horses give George hours.

Dad is coming home from work early tonight. We are having dinner next door and then across the street to Uncle Sal’s for a game of family volleyball, all of us, together ……, I am home.

 

The music is over. I open my eyes and I am alone in a hotel room in some town that seems just a little further from home than when I first closed my eyes. The war is over and many since have been started, some won, some fought without really knowing who the enemy is or was. Most of the people are gone now and my grandmother has passed at the ripe old age of 95 only last year. I haven’t the nerve to go back to Sea Cliff Street. Maybe because deep inside I am hoping that we can somehow go back, back to that one moment in time where everything was right and perfect and all the pieces fit into a neat and beautiful puzzle that reflects harmony and love.

  

Though it paints a sad picture, it opens my eyes to the simple fact that home is now and is what we make of it every day and at every moment.

It is how we share ourselves with the people and things around us that creates a beautiful place.

 

We wake with the pieces of the puzzle in our hands every day and it is how we choose to piece it together that defines the beauty or ugliness of the picture that the puzzle depicts.

 

We can never truly go home again but we can make the place where we are now a beautiful place.

 

It is our new home.