Reflecting Through The Windshield

I've lived in the Bay Area, with one or two very brief exceptions, since I was in 6th grade. Our home was less then a 1/2 mile from the current headquarters of Apple in Cupertino, when it was a vacant lot used by the Mariani dried fruit company to air dry apricots. Uh.... right next to the freeway, come to think of it. But I digress. Back then, my high school girlfriend lived off Bolinger Road, on Johnson Avenue. And that was all so many year ago. Yet I work at Apple today, and for the last 1+ years, since we moved into a home in the Saratoga area, my drive home is almost exactly the same drive I'd take several days a week when I was dating Holly, during my latter years of high school and beyond.



Recently, en route home, the random selection of music on my mp3 player started playing "Heaven Tonight" by Cheap Trick. Just the opening guitar licks and the route I was driving, directly towards Johnson Avenue, transported me back to that period where I'd make a left, drive about 1.75 blocks and pull in front of 10460.



It's amazing how often this drive takes me back to that time, and when the music happens to so magically align with the era, it's almost like climbing through a fine mist of reminiscence and into Doc Brown's Delorian, tapping the flux capacitor and accelerating to 88 miles per hour.



This drive... this drive was my youth. My late teens, my innocence, and my coming of age are framed by these sidewalks, like sprocket holes along the sides of a tattered and aging 8mm reel of home movies from decades past. Whether it was with friends, alone, with her in the car... this was a routine route, travelled to and from some of the most memorable experiences of my early years. It was a second nature effort to drive there, the kind that you never remember making, you just remember arriving. It was a path so ingrained that even when it was not my destination, I'd find myself heading there out of habit. If home is where the heart is, then during those years, this was my true home.



The memories are tied tightly to the location and it's association to all of those events that make or break one's maturation. The rebelious years of driving fast with music blaring out the windows. The friends piled into the car, laughing and driving mindlessly about with nothing to do and nowhere to go, always opting for that destination over returning home. It represents starting and stopping points for the many concert trips, tower runs, drives to San Francisco, clam chowder runs to Monterey, and the times when I'd carpool to work with her when that 1972 Green Pinto, the one I helped her buy for $600 from Quement Electronics when I worked there, had decided not to start for the umpteenth time that week.



I'm twice as old as I was when they occured in real time, yet the scenes from my youth replay sporatically on my evening commute, at random intervals, along side music that invokes them, as I drive down streets frozen in time... frozen in my time. And for a moment, I'm back again in that Chrysler Newport, that Ford Maverick, that Toyota Celica or that god-awful bubble-topped Dodge Van. I'm listening again to "Rumors", "Infinity", "Boston", and "Van Halen II", only now on cassette tapes in a Jensen in-dash radio, playing through celophane speakers that sound like overdriven kazoo's. My hair is longer, my concerns are fewer, and my future is filled with far more potential then it is with regrets over missed opportunities and wasted youth.



My relationship with Holly lasted some 7+ years, with high points and low points. It remains a precious memory, as I'm sure everybody's first love does. And the fact that I seldom drive this route without being flooded with memories from those years is treasured. It wakes me up. It makes me reflect on and appreciate my youth, my experiences, my opportunities and even my mistakes. It also helps put into perspective who and where I am now, how I got here, and who I want to focus on becoming with the time that stlll lies ahead.



All this... all this from a brief drive down a familier street to a familier song.

This photo below was taken of us by a friend at a Fleetwood Mac concert at the Cow Palace. I believe it was 1979.