The Music of My Years

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The musical soundtrack

of my parents' love story haunts my years:

I'll Get By, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Skylark,

plaintive, lovelorn notes taking me back

down all those country roads.

Just fifteen, hopping into a two-tone Chevy

with boys who smelled like talcum powder,

pack of cigarettes rolled in their t-shirt sleeves,

and all was love and dreams in the 60's, 

as the 8-track played

Blue Velvet, My Girl, Where the Boys Are, I'm Sorry,

and I dancing up a storm to Sherry Baby 

while  people fell back and I grooved 
in the glow of their circle,

as they laughed and clapped.

Gastown in the 70's, in my fringed suede jacket,

as Your Song played in the gallery,

and I finally was cool, like I never was in school,

Bridge Over Troubled Waters spinning on the stereo,

so much I still didn't know,

but I was learning.

Folk tunes and soft guitars in a coffeehouse

in the 80's, Suzanne, Fire and Rain,

and we just knew we would be Forever Young.

In Tofino, in the 90's, it was all Jane and Enya:

Bound by the Beauty, and listening to Watermark, 

as I drove that highway home 

through the old growth in the rain,

heading towards all that I loved, my soul lifting off

with the joy and wonder of having

realized a dream.

A little boy fell from a window back then,

and his dad wrote Tears in Heaven.

Tears on earth, too, in the listening

to that heartbreak, little boy home from the circus

on the best day of his life, and his father's worst.

The night they closed the Peace Camp down,

Dana Lyons, singing Magic as hippies danced

in a clearcut under a full, round Grandmother Moon,

and behind and around and through all of the tunes,

the unending song of the waves,

ebbing and flowing, forever, in my sea-spun heart.

Now it's the old tunes I play, full circle.

From vinyl to cd's, the tunes in my heart stay the same,

down all of those music-filled years,

the love songs of my parents' lives, and mine,

captured, forever enraptured,

memories shining golden

against the soundtrack of our lives.

For Kerry's prompt at Real Toads: Bye Bye Miss American Pie, about how iconic people shape our lives........definitely it was music that shaped and serenaded me, all the way along.