Who knew the future arrived in 1973? Possibly some fat kid from Des Plaines, Illinois. At ten years old I was experiencing a lot of changes. For the first time in my life, we were moving. We were moving from my beloved home in Des Plaines, IL to an older home three miles away in Des Plaines, Illinois. I was leaving the only friends and school I had ever known.

Before I was to leave the Fourth Grade at Devonshire Elementary, I had a report due. Specifically for this morning, we were to turn in our first paragraph and I still had not decided on a topic. I wasn’t too worried yet since I still had at least two hours before I had to turn it in.  There was plenty of time to write it on the bus, but I still had not decided what to write my current event on.

“Why don’t you do it on the 17 Year Locust?” my mom suggested. Hmm – bugs. I knew all about mammals, reptiles, a little about birds and fish. I was also the family expert on dinosaurs and monsters. And I was catching up to my mom on plants but I was specializing in cacti and carnivorous plants. Only Lee had entered the insect world with his butterfly collection. Maybe it was now my turn.

Luckily Mom had seen an article on these locusts in the paper. Grabbing between the scissor blades as Mom cut the article out for me, I made the bus and ignored my friends on our trip to school as I wrote out my opening paragraph for my paper.

It turned out the 17 Year Locust were not locusts at all but cicadas. They lived underground feeding off of tree roots, crawled to the surface, changed from a nymph to an adult just to mate and die in a few weeks. These particular cicadas lived underground for 17 years – this was going to be awesome!

After reading the article, I was a little confused. It said there would be millions of these cicadas and we should be ‘prepared’. But I hadn’t seen any outside. During recess, I checked the playground and the field didn’t see any. I checked bushes as we waited for the bus to take us home but nothing.

As Dave, Dawn and I ran in from the bus that afternoon, Mom called me into the kitchen. Unexpected gifts are always the best. And any gift outside of Christmas or your birthday was even better.  As I entered the kitchen Mom presented me with a glass jar of dirt.

“I was talking to Mrs. Johnson from church and she was talking about all the locusts that were coming out…”

“They’re cicadas, mom,” I interrupted.

Being used to my interruptions she continued without missing a beat, “and she said she kept digging up the grubs…”

“They’re called ‘nymphs'”, I said, interrupting again.

This interruption caused Mom’s eyebrows to lower in the middle of her face and her speech to slow, but she continued, “so she put one in the jar for me.”

My eyes widened and I grabbed the jar and shook it over my mom’s protests. Out of the jumping dirt popped the coolest bug I’d ever seen. It was a copper brown and you could tell it was built for digging. Its front two legs were like Popeye-legs that could just tear through the dirt. It moved slowing trying to right itself.

I spent an hour just staring at the nymph that eventually righted itself but it didn’t seem to want to do anything more. When Dad arrived home Mom reminded us we were going to go to the new house. I showed Dad the nymph Mrs. Johnson had given Mom to give to me and he picked up the jar. Shaking the jar the nymph moved to tell my dad he was still alive.

“Are they any cicadas at the new house?” I asked.

“Ton’s,”  Dad said. “They’re all over the place – and they are loud.”

Oh — My — God!

In those days we could sit in the back of a station wagon – seatbelts be damned. Dave, Dawn and I sat in the ‘way back’ with our arms dangling over the gate. As we drove into the new neighborhood, you could hear them – even over the car noise. I could tell Lee was just fascinated as much as I was. At a stoplight, their chorus was incredibly loud. Occasionally I would see something fly from tree to tree, or a bush or the ground but we were too far really see anything.

How many were there? I wondered. As we pulled down Rose Avenue where our new house was and Dad drove slower, it was like we were in a cave of sound and their chirping was echoing off invisible walls. I continued to look at the trees and bushes and while I would see the occasional flight of something I still could not tell what they looked like – but they were here, they were most certainly everywhere.

Dad pulled into the driveway and Dave, Dawn and I jumped out the back. They were here and they were loud. I walked over to the white picketed fence and something flew past me. It was big and it startled me. I saw it land on the other side of the fence. I walked over letting my hand bounce off the individual pickets looking for other cicadas but they didn’t swarm like flies or mosquitoes.

As I walked to a tree, I saw one. It sat on the fence and it was about the coolest thing I had ever seen. Its black body was accented with red eyes, their translucent wings were framed in orange. I reached for it grabbing it around the middle. The article said they didn’t bite but it was so big. As soon as I picked it up and tried to fly but it wasn’t going anywhere.

Picking it up, I stared into its red eyes. This was something from another planet, or so it seemed. Its legs flailed as it tried to escape my grip. When that didn’t work it ‘buzzed’ – or that is the only word I can think of to describe the sound it started making. But it wasn’t a buzz from its wings (I had those clamped against its body), I was a buzz that caused its whole body to vibrate. I was weird and fascinating.

I cupped my hands around afraid I was hurting it. If it was going to bite it was going to do it now; but it didn’t. I opened my hands when the buzzing stopped and it settled down. It sat on my hand looking at me – or so I thought. I was thinking I was bonding with this alien entity. This creature from 17 years ago freshly mottled encountering its first human. Instead, its wings lifted and flew to the other yard. The wings carrying the oversized body. It flew level at first then angled up and then I lost sight of it. My first encounter with the 17 cicada was surreal.

I continued to a tree that bordered our new yard and our new neighbors. Immediately I saw four or five nymph shells stuck to the tree. I pulled the shell off breaking its dying(?) grip.

“I found a shell!” I yelled back to everyone who was waiting for Dad to open the backdoor.

Lee was coming over to look as well as Dave. Hope and Dawn were already going inside with Mom and Dad. They didn’t seem as interested in this whole cicada discovery. I proudly held the shell out to Lee who looked at it briefly and then walked to the tree to pull off his own shell. Above us, the cicadas droned on and on like a rolling wave of sound cheering summer in.

“Don’t you guys what to check out the new house?” Dad yelled.

Dave looked at the shells on left on the tree and ran to the open door. Lee took his nymph shell and and started hunt for his own cicada. I yelled to Dad that I would be there soon and plucked another shell off the tree. I told Lee I caught one. Well, not really, more like just picking it up off the picket fence.

I held the shell on my finger and imagined the night before as it dug its way out of the ground for the first time in seventeen years. It looked like it had eyes, but did it? I could picture it slowly crawl through the grass to the trunk of the tree as it began its arduously journey over the rough bark until they were ready to molt their old skin for their new winged life, although it was a much briefer life.

Seventeen years. I wasn’t even as old as this shell. (ok, forget the fact that the nymph would have molted a number of time to get this size but at ten years old I wasn’t thinking like that.) This nymph was hatched in 1956. Wow. The next time these cicadas would come, I would 27 years old, in the year 1990. The year rolled around in my head – 1990, The Nineties. I didn’t sound as cool as The Seventies. Even the Eighties sounds ok. The Nineties.

I did some quick math – I would graduate high school in 1981. Where would I go to High School here? West Main? I think I heard that’s where Hope and Lee were going. Nineteen Ninety – would my parents still be in this house? Where would I be still live here? I would be done with school, so would I be a botanist? Would I finally move to the desert so I could be with my cacti? Or maybe I would live in North Carolina where Venus Flytraps are.

And I could drive a car. What kind of cars would they have then? What kind would I have? Flying cars would be so cool. How would they fly? Would I be married? So I would have a girlfriend? Sex? Kids? When would that happen? Would that happen?

So in 1990, would we have a colony on the moon? Would there even be a future? Would the world still be around? Will the Russians blown us by then? Will I have to fight in a war?

Honestly, I didn’t worry about the future back then, I wasn’t the worrying type. I think like most kids, I was more concerned with ‘here and now’. THE FUTURE was Star Trek. I remember watching the original series with Dad in the basement and thinking how cool space travel would be. Star Trek made THE FUTURE very clean and very fantastic. I didn’t really dream about THE FUTURE, my dreams were more about dinosaurs and giant monsters like Godzilla. And as I got more into plants, about finding carnivorous plants in the wild or cactus in the desert.

I loved numbers and I lately I had been obsessing over Roman Numerals. I would fill pages counting in Roman Numerals, which I would hid from my siblings and friends in case they teased me about it – because it was weird.

So – the cicadas would come back in MCMXC and I would be XXVII. After they would come again in MMVII and then I would be XLIV. Forty Four – I didn’t even think my parents were that old. In MM, I would be XXXVII. This was all very interesting…

The Future – was very interesting.

I remember a song I picked up on last summer and in it, we saw the future of music, in a song called ‘Popcorn‘ by Hot Butter. Besides being a tasty snack, it turned out to a fun instrumental pop song. It had this strange new sound and it was just fun. With a ‘do do do do dadu do’ we knew what song it was (or the optional clucking with your tongue – if one was so talented). The unique sound was from a new invention called a moog synthesizer.

While we had no idea how much synthesizers would change music as we got to the 80’s, we recognized it was an instrument based on computers. Popcorn was actually written by Gershon Kingsley in 1969 on his album “Music to Moog By” highlighting the potential and capabilities of the moog synthesizer.

This version was by Stan Getz who programmed the synthesizer and was the main force behind Hot Butter. Hot Butter released their version in the summer of 1972 and it was an international hit. How he programmed the moog synthesizer we didn’t know but from how we were dancing and skipping to it the end of last summer, we sure had fun with it.

The funny thing about the future is you don’t know when it arrives. A month after we were dancing around to Popcorn, Dad brought home a microwave oven. With six pairs of eyes reflected on the microwave’s door, a hot dog cooked in less then two minutes. While Mom sighed in the kitchen about a $250 machine to cook hot dogs while boiling water worked just as well. Or the trash compactor Dad bought after we moved into the new house that would pound your trash into a two foot cube to save space in the land fills (forget the fact that only Lee and Dad could carry a garbage can fill of these ‘cubes’ to the street). Or a year later when Mom saved enough trading stamps and paid an additional $50 for our first calculator. It did everything – added, subtracted, multiplied AND divided. The future was AMAZING!

Looking back now at the ten year old me and seeing the future in a time perspective, I see the future is only one thing – the unknown. The parts we find amazing could be mere glimpses of things much more transcendent.  Some parts could be dead-ends or a fad that in retrospect appear ridiculous. Others may become common-placed, ordinary and mundane until reflected upon with more insight. And some, I would learn, could be downright terrifying. The true gift of the future is in the reveal and its discovery. The current me now understands that can happen with anything. It can happen wherever you are. And it can happen with who ever you are with at that time. Which means the future is now.

“John!” Dad yelled, “are you going to check out yours and Dave’s room? We can’t stay too long.”

“Coming,” I yelled back and started to the backdoor where Dad was standing. The drone and hum of the cicada continued everywhere. I carefully held the two nymph shells in my hand and lifted them to show my dad. He smiled, patted my back and guided me into the door. I climbed the five or six wooden steps that entered a crooked porch that led to the kitchen. Before could open the kitchen door and step into our future home, Dawn swung the door and skipped out. She was clucking the Popcorn song.

I don’t know if it was because I was leaving Devonshire but my fourth grade teacher let me eat one of my final lunches in the classroom. This was so a couple friends and I could play with the cicadas I had brought from the Gray House in the classroom. I was literally bring back paper garbage bags filled with cicadas back to the old house in the hopes of colonizing our old neighborhood.

We eventually moved to the ‘Gray House’, as we ended up referring to it as. We made a number of trips between the two houses. Hope never did get used to them. When Dad awarded her the privilege of pulling out the ‘For Sale’ sign in the frontyard the day we moved, she screamed as all the nymphs poured out of the hole left in the ground from the pole. Lee and I ran over to investigate. The nymphs disbursed as they crawled to a nearby tree. Lee walked the sign to our new garage. And I looked up to our new bedroom window to see Dave grinning and waving like an idiot. Surely this couldn’t be my future; but I waved back anyways.

I almost didn’t include this song on my list of ‘Songs of My Life’ – not because I didn’t think it belonged on the list, but because NO ONE will ever have heard of this song – except for Lee, who, again, found it originally. As far as music quests, this one was definitely my hardest. And my quest did not end until the internet came along; and even then, it wasn’t as simple as just a ‘googling’ it.

Once again Lee turned me on to another song. Although this time I don’t remember him actually listening to it. I remember going through the 45’s we had laying on the basement floor one day (today I would have been horrified to have vinyl just laying on a tiled floor and not carefully put in their correct album sleeves. We never noticed how bad these 45’s sounded. We were just amazed there was any sound at all). I remember recognized the title, “The Birdman of Alcatraz” so I put the 45 on our record player, hoping it was the song I remembered Lee had played – and it was.

Once again my search suffered from mis-heard lyrics – or rather – having the wrong title.  However, I don’t feel bad messing up the title after 40 years. I could hardly be blamed for thinking the song was “Birdman of Alcatraz” and not “Birdman of Alkatrash”.

This quest began at the Deerfield Record Shop in 1976, after Dave and I had moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack. The owner was a nice older man named Lenny who seemed to put up pretty well with four young boys in sixth and seventh grade.

The Deerfield Record Shop was not just a little store, it was a tiny store dating back to the 50’s. It had only 20 feet of aisle to walk down, covering record bins and a single glass case of 8-Tracks; and the beginnings of a cassette collection. The record bins began when you entered the store against the wall and leave only the two aisles for customers to avoid being blocked in. Lucky for us (but I’m sure unlucky for Lenny) it was never busy when we were dropped off.

In one of our first visits, he explained he used to have the listening booths in the back of the tiny store but he had to close them because he would catch the kids making out in them. Four young heads peered down the aisle to the back room of past transgressions.

After each of our bedrooms received stereos from Grandma, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack supplied gift certificates for the Deerfield Record store. Four boys could almost fill the store as we looked for ways to redeem what was remaining on our gift certificates. Lenny had this giant book that you could look up any song in the world – it was called the Phonolog. He kept it to the side of the counter and would explain it didn’t have EVERY song, it did have every song that was currently available.

In the beginning, there were three songs I would be looking for. I imagine when I asked Lenny about them it went something like this:

“I’m looking for a song”

“What’s the name of it?” Lenny asked.

“I don’t know”

“OK, can you sing some of it?”

“No!” it was all I could do to ask him that I was looking for a song in the first place.

“OK,” peering at me from behind the counter and made his way to the Phonelog. “Do you know any of the lyrics?”

“Actually, I know the name of one song – ‘Those Were the Days my friend’,” I proudly announced. I knew he would soon be digging in a box behind the counter and pulling out the requested 45 and asking me about the next song.

“OK, well let’s see what we find” and Lenny would flip through the Phonolog running his finger down the page and adjust is glasses as he zeroed in on his target.

“There it is, now who sang it?”

“I don’t know”

Lenny peered over his glasses at me, “There are over a dozen versions of this song.” His finger ran down the possibilities. “Ah-ha,” he exclaimed, “I bet it was Engelbert Humperdinck.”

“No!” I said a bit too quickly. Engelbert Humperdinck – I was sure he was just making that up. “It was a girl singing.”

Lenny went back to his tome. “Was it Mary Hopkins? or Maria Schell? Maybe Sandie Shaw”

“I don’t know,” I said hanging my head.

“OK, what else are you looking for?”

“Well, there’s one song that the singer sings really fast and then he sings regularly.”

Lenny just stared at me as his glasses clung to the tip of his nose. “Do you know the name or any parts of the lyrics?”

“No, I mean yes, well, I only remember one line – ‘Doris Day and Jack the Ripper'”

Again ‘The Stare’. “Sorry, I’ll need more than ‘Doris Day and Jack the Ripper.’ Is the ‘regular part’ the chorus?”

“Yea, it kinda went like a-huh, ah huh, bump ah huh” I was getting desperate enough I was even humming a melody that sounded more like Crash Test Dummies’ ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ song. Had I only known then…

“Sorry kid, try thinking of some more lyrics and we’ll try again. You said you had three songs?”

“Yea, this one I know the title, ‘Birdman of Alcatraz'”

Lenny peered back to the tome of tunes and flipping pages and chasing his fingers. “Here we go he announced, ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ by Elmer Bernstein. It’s from the Birdman of Alcatraz movie. Is it an instrumental?”

“Yea,” I said, “It’s got guitars and drums, just like a regular song.”

“No no, kid, this is an instrumental, there’s no singing in it. It has violins and cellos. Elmer Bernstein is a famous conductor.”

Elmer Bernstein didn’t do ‘Birdman of Alcatraz,’ and that book doesn’t have all the current songs in. And Lenny didn’t know that much about music. And I was getting very frustrated. “No, that’s not it then,” I said.

“That’s your third strike, sorry kid.”

My brother and cousins were already waiting at the counter with their records and Deerfield Record Store Gift Certificates in hand. I think I grabbed The Beach Boys’ ’15 Big Ones’ and checked out with the others.

It was a lesson for me that things are not as simple as they seem. ‘Those Were The Days’ was covered by over 30 artists around the world. A single phrase from a song isn’t enough to find a song – unless you have Google or a Vanilla Ice wanna-be from the eighties. And even if you know the title of the song you could be wrong.

I talked to Lee about the ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’. He knew it was from the band Strawberry Alarm Clock and the flipside of their first hit ‘Incense and Peppermint‘. What he didn’t know, and what Goggle corrected, is that it is actually ‘The Birdman of Alkatrash‘. Those crazy Alarm Clock boys!

I was thrilled to finally find this song. Yes, it’s quirky. In fact, you could say it borders on being a novelty song – with its ‘quacking’ throughout the song. Ironically, this was the original A side but the radio stations responded to ‘Incense and Peppermint’, the original B side, they reissued the single flipping the songs. So ‘The Birdman of Alkatrash’ all but disappeared behind ‘Incense and Peppermint’ – except for two men who have fond childhood memories of this strange sixties song.

Probably my biggest flaw with my family was my father – he was a Country music fan. But he was a Johnny Cash fan, so that helps. I grew up NOT being a Country music fan, this fate fell to my brother Dave. And he will tell you he has a broad range of musical tastes – he likes both Country AND Western music.

Growing up my parents listened to country music stations in the car. Even as a child my immunity system was already kicking in because I have no recollection any any country songs growing up – with one exception. In fact, I don’t remember any of my parents albums except this Johnny Cash album. No other songs, just this song – “A Thing Called Love.”

The Hi-Fi was a regular piece of furniture for many families that were into music or gadgets. We were a gadget family. We have a automatic card shuffle machine, a hand-held cigarette rolling machine, a digital clock when they first came out (not an LED display, the kind that flipped to a new number every minute) and a microwave – all in the early seventies! I’m pretty sure all that ‘high tech’ stuff came from my dad. I’m also pretty sure he wasn’t an audiophile, most audiophile’s aren’t Country music fans, yet we had a hi-fi like this one:

Just seeing these old pictures brought back memories of being a kid, laying on the floor next to the hi-fi listening to records, mostly little kid records or Christmas albums.

I remember pressing my finger on the orange glowing power light and watching how it lit up my finger.  I often wondered if I see my bones as the light shown through my finger, but all I could see the small red glowing fingernail.

So I would lie on the floor listening to this Johnny Cash album called ‘A Thing Called Love’. Looking at a red glowing finger and singing along to this song. As I searched for this song I could only remember fragments of lyric’s from the song – phrases like “he was six foot six”, “like a cream puff” and “brought down by a thing called love. Those were powerful images to me.

As a kid, all adults are huge. And if you ask most kids, their dad’s were all between six to seven feet tall. Some dad’s could actually grow to nine feet when two boys are bragging about them. And if you asked a kids about a ‘tall man, one that wasn’t a dad, they would say he was about eight feet tall – you know – like Frankenstein. Kids tend to like whole numbers. My dad was six feet, so six foot six with shoes would make sense – to me as a kid. In reality I think he wasn’t quite six feet, more like five feet ten or so.

Later I would find out “Like a cream puff” is not part of the lyrics and “brought down by a thing called love” is a paraphrase of the correct lyrics. This is probably why I had such a hard time finding the song. I often thought the line was something like “crying like a big cream puff” but the image of a grown man crying was what I really held in my memory.

To me, the image of a grown man crying is one of the most tragic. This is because in our culture men are not supposed to cry. We expect men to face adversity and hardship being stoic and emotionless. ‘No crying in Baseball’? For men there’s no crying period. 10cc said “Big boys don’t cry.” We do not get overwhelmed, we don’t cry out of frustration, we don’t cry because we’re ‘so happy’ (that’s when we usually yell things, like “fuck ya!”, “now that’s what I’m talking about!” or we strut around – whether we actually did something or not). Society looks to men to be the rock during chaos, the calm during the storm. The stereo type goes so far as we are seen as unemotional, uncaring and cold. Which make spoofs like Kevin Wu’s “Shed A Tear” so funny.

There were three times I remember my dad crying. The first time was when he lost his job and my parents were fighting about it. I don’t know, but my memory was that he had been drinking earlier that day. The third time was during dinner prayer when he skipped over our normal ‘God is good, God is great…’ and launch into a prayer to save his marriage and even that was more sniffles then anything. The second time was the worst.

I believe it was the Fall and later in the evening because it was dark outside. I was playing at the top of the stairs in the hallway outside the bathroom overlooking the living room into the kitchen. That’s where I would normally have my plastic dinosaurs commit suicide on the basement stairs or kamikaze onto one of my passing siblings. The phone rang and it was for my dad. I don’t remember any of the conversation from my dad except remembering he was crying – huge heavy sobs, the kind that hurt your back. I remember peeking from the upstairs and not being able to see him because he had moved into the darkness of the dining room. He had just found out his brother had died, my Uncle Ron, in a plane crash.

I had never seen my dad struck down like that before. The pain was evident, transferable. I heart physically hurt to hear my dad in some much emotional pain.  I couldn’t see him as I peered down from my upstairs perch but I imagined my own red eyes on his tears streaked face. I heard his hitched breath and his agonizing sobs. Later in life I would learn my dad wasn’t always the most stable of individuals. But at that moment, he was my dad – The Enforcer, the Rule-Maker, the Judge, the Fixer, the Bread-winner, the Head of the Family, the Man of the House. And he had been struck down with a broken heart, with in a loss I could only imagine but learn sooner then any of us knew. Dad was brought down by this thing called love.

I think my mom told us what happened and I couldn’t help thinking about my cousins and what they must be going through. Uncle Ron was Dad’s older brother and, in my recollection, I’m pretty sure that Dad and Uncle Ron got along pretty well, like brothers – brothers that enjoyed each others company.

In a God-like twist of fate, in what was a lifetime later, we learned of a huge coincident. After my grandmother’s funeral, I believe in the late 90’s, my father side of the family gathered at my Uncle Dale’s house. I met my cousins Mike and Jerry, Uncle Ron’s sons. Uncle Dale had the newspaper articles about the plane crash that killed his brother Ron in a scrapbook.

I was shocked to find the plane crash was in Watertown, WI. This was Desi’s mom’s hometown. Desi’s grandparents had a farm outside of Watertown. The pilot had a heart attack and someone was trying to land the plane in a farm field. If you know the area, you’ll know Highway 26, and the other roads in the area, are raised above the fields. A plane landing in the field would slam into the road’s embankment. Mike and Jerry said they driven up the next morning, Mike was 16 at the time, they confirmed that is what happened. We checked with Desi’s mom if they remembered a plane crash in the early seventies and they did not.

In the first verses of “A Thing Called Love” has the lyrics “but I saw that giant of a man brought down, to his knees by love” and that summarizes what I saw that night. In our walk from childhood to adulthood it is these realizations, these moments of awareness that spur us along to becoming adults ourselves. I attached my male duty within the face of tragedy to this song.

But that’s not what this song is about. The song is about the power of love, even in the face of the strongest man. And this is the beauty and tragedy of art. The artist intends and the viewer interprets. And within that Walk of Life a child can grow, and a man can remember.

You can’t see it with your eyes, hold it in your hands
But like the wind it covers our land
Strong enough to rule the heart of any man
This thing called love

Do you remember the first song you ever heard? I mean the first song you recognized as a commercial entity on the radio. Mine was “Those Were The Days” by Mary Hopkins.

I’ve always been morning person. As a child, I would wake up, crawl into my parents’ bed with my dad. My mom would already be up getting ready in the bathroom. When she was done, she would go downstairs to make my dad’s breakfast – which consisted of coffee and oatmeal.

While Mom was getting ready, Dad would lay in bed having his morning cigarette with the clock radio playing. Most of the time, I would crawl in on Mom’s side while Dad faced the western window, which was usually dark or beginning to gray with the morning light.

When the room was darkest, it would always be lit by a crack of light coming from under bathroom door. With that I could see the smoke dance softly between Dad and the western window. The lit tip of Dad’s cigarette would magically dance up to the darkness of the ceiling. I would nestle under the sheets and blankets and squeeze up against Dad. Sometimes he would reach around and pat my leg but most of the time we laid together listening to the clock radio.

Dad would lay in bed propped up on his right elbow smoking. Occasionally knocking his ashes in one of those old beanbag ashtrays that he kept in the bedroom. The clock radio sat in the headboard of their bed with its analog face and its glow-in-the dark painted hands staring back at us. I would watch the second hand tick around its face from the bathroom light, while I was laying in mom’s pillows under the sheets and blankets. And cigarette smoke continue to rise and slowly curl around Dad and I.

When this song would come on, I remember wondering what ‘days’ she was singing about. The song was released in August of 1968. That would have made me 5 years old. The mandolin gave the song it’s ‘old country’ sound. I hadn’t learned about Europe yet, but I knew about the dreaded gypsies from my monster movies and they always played this kind of music – the music from the ‘old country’. Of course, that depended if that particular monster movie had enough budget to waste on gypsy music from the ‘old country – most didn’t.

I thought the woman in the song sounded sad. Obviously things were not going well for her. As a kid, it seemed adults always thought things were so much better in the past. Yet when I saw them, they seemed pretty happy – to me, a five year kid. This woman seem to be thinking of the recent past – because she was still young, or so she said she was.

There were lots things I didn’t know about this song. For example, that it was the first single from the newly formed Apple label that started by The Beatles. That Paul McCartney produced the single. And that Mary Hopkins covered the Byrds’ “Turn Turn Turn” for the flip side.

As I kid, I was learning that music existed outside of our church. That it was more than just commercial jingles, or interludes on our favorite sitcoms and morning cartoons. I learned that I could come back tomorrow morning and the clock radio could play this song again. And I would think about the sad girl and the old days.

And in this realization, as the song played and I would follow the smoke trail from my dad, to the window, to the clock radio and through the darkness of the room. And I would watched the little red tip dance from my dad’s face to his extended arm. My dad must have been very tired in the morning because occasionally he would miss the ash tray. When it was his turn to get into the bathroom, he would leave the bed and I would take his place. Next to me would be burn holes in the sheets where he had missed the ashtray with his red tip. And I would finger the burn holes, despite my mom constantly telling me not to.

Eventually I would traipse downstairs into the kitchen where Mom would be making his oatmeal. I would sit on the bench that dad had made for all us kids to sit around the kitchen table. I would talk to my mom and our days would begin. I don’t remember hearing that song any other time but those mornings, or maybe it was the fact that those memories were just so strong.

One of music’s strongest features is how it can capture memories. So when we hear that song that memory is released. And in the release a desire to relive it is passed through to the song. Most music people, which I consider myself, will seek out that song so they can relive that memory. Thus begins a music expedition, a quest. Back then you were only given hints – some times a brief melody or a few lyrics. mere clues to what the song is called. Some music expeditions will last for years. Some as short as talking to a friend at a party. Nowadays, these expeditions are solved with a google search or app. The enjoyment of this expedition has been lost in this internet age.

For me this particular expedition lasted 17 years. While I eventually found out is was a song by Mary Hopkins, it was not easy to get a copy of the single. My expedition ended when I explained to my friend Ralf that I was on this expedition for this song. And as we were discussing our first musical memories at his house one evening and I told him about “Those Were The Days.”

He knew the song very well.  He said “My parents used to play that song all the time all the time. My dad’s old tailor buddies would come over and they would all be singing it, especially my mom. Hold on.” And he left the room and reappeared minutes later holding the original 45 in his hand – “Here ya go.”

I had not heard the complete song since I was child. We played in Ralf’s room that night and I was transported back to those early mornings as a little boy. The fact that Ralf and I would smoke while we listened to music just completed the transformation. Turning his den to a bedroom of seventeen years ago, with smoke curling in the dark.

And it opened a new perspective to me on this song. I could picture Ralf’s parents and their friends all gathered in a room, in an apartment somewhere on the East Coast, singing their hearts out, as the evening wore on and the drinks loosen their voices. And the next morning, in a little tri-level home in Des Plaines, Illinois a little boy and his dad laid quietly listening to that same song.

Those were the days, my friend.