Area 151

As promised.

I can still recall the smell of cooking in the hallway,

Laundry drying in the doorways
And report cards I was always afraid to show.
Mama’d come to school
And as I’d sit there softly crying, teacher’d say "He’s just not trying.
"He’d got a good head if he’d apply it, but you know yourself:
"He’s always somewhere else."

I built me a castle with dragons and kings.
I’d ride off with them as I stood by my window and looked out on those….Brooklyn roads.

As I was making the drive to CT, I had the next set of CDs for the listening sequence loaded onto Frankenpod. Neil Diamond, as it turns out, and in some odd inexplicable way,  ol’ Neil had me nigh unto tears periodically through the drive.

Neil Diamond was one of the musical staples of my childhood home. When I think of family car trips—heading to vacation, all bundled up in the wood-panelled station wagon (and, later, in the foor-door Oldsmobile), that music is what I hear in my mind’s ear. First it was 8-tracks recorded from the 33 1/3 RPMs, then it was cassettes recorded from the same originals.

And this weekend, so many years older and in my own little VW passat, as I heard the songs where Diamond sings (semi-autobiographically, as far as I understand) about feeling lonely, isolated, and out-of-place, I just could not stop the recollection of what an unhappy child I was. Wave after wave of relived sadness—-helped along, I’m sure by the monthly hormonal stew in which I live.

I still feel a wee bit lost in the fog of remembered emotion.