Blinded by Faith
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When you're younger, and naive, life experiences mean more, people and friends are more genuine, the sun shines a little brighter, and we're always a lot happier.Gettin out of school, first summer with a driver's license, first music loves, great discoveries, balanced with youth slipping slowly away. Being at the quarry, swimming, jumping off the edge fifty feet into the clearest water ever. Riding home, windows down, no shoes, hair and clothes wet, peach flavored Clearly Canadian. Van Morrison. _Moondance_.There is ever more. In the town I grew up in nothing changes. People who were young and partying in the Seventies, were getting old and partying in the exact same spots in the early Nineties. Always present to greet the Summer and the new batch of kids coming up the mountain. Bong hits for breakfast, Boone's Farm and Jim Beam for dinner and sunsets. And music, always music, Mostly what was then called AOR, or Album Oriented Rock. One reason everyone partied on top of the Mountain was you could pick up the stations in Charleston and Roanoke from up there. The older ones, sitting in their trucks, watchin the sun dip and hide behind the next mountain, didn't associate too much with many of the kids. We were different, they knew us, liked us, my uncle partied with a lo of them in those long agp seventies, at least some people got out. For better or worse, they helped us, looked out for us, scored us dope.This song, and album was always around, sometimes they played music so loud you could hear it while you drove up the mountain, the road twisting and turning as the sound bounced off the rocks and made it's way downward. Yes, when you're young things mean more. Music means more.It was the perfect balance. Winwood's voice so young and on the verge of that journey into age, Clapton's guitar like raindrops bouncing in and out of sunlight in late dead summer afternoons. It stays with you, you never forget. Fifteen years gone and you never forget. Almost forty gone for them. That songs a pure snapshot in time, preserving an age very brief and gone so quickly at Jagger's feet in the desert. Just for a minute, it _was_ Aquarius, children naked in the garden, knelt down before God in hopeful purity, eager to be led away. Some people never stopped looking, never came down off the mountain. For all I know, they're still there, burning and wasting. For better or worse, each summer welcoming the new children, to garden not nearly as pure as the ones they started in all those summer's ago.
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