Remember the mornings I kissed you goodnight . . .
My friend J. B. White composed this song for a script I wrote in the early 1980s, about Soho, when that part of Manhattan was just coming into its own as a Bohemian enclave, and where I had so many magical adventures. Thirty years later, none of that Soho remains — it's a Yuppie shopping mall today — though the ghosts, the faces in the windows, are still there, I suppose, my own among them.
The places you
love that you can never return to are also places you can never
leave. They become part of your own small portion of eternity.
[Song © J. B. White]
I love that last line of the post so much. And it's very true. And it's funny enough that the post is about a song as I've found that music is one of the best time travelers. The other day I stumbled across “It Goes Like it Goes” by Jennifer Warnes which I hadn't heard in ages. And it wasn't just like a film reel of clips of going to visit my Grandmother in Georgia started playing. It was like I was there watching the cotton dotted red clay fields roll past the car windows, the warm breeze, gathering pecans from the huge tree, the whole bit.
This song does that for me in spades, because it was composed for a script I wrote based largely on my own life, thirty years ago, and a time and place I sensed would be fleeting. Now the time and place are gone, but the song remains, and summons it all back.