So I’m gassing up at the Shell station and after checking the oil I drop the hood pick up the squeegee and as I clean my windshield I feel the sun at my back. It might be nice to be young again, but then you wouldn’t have your memories, your frame of reference. I was taken right back to September 1974, having graduated from college, driving cross-country to firm up a job in Alta, Utah.<\/p>\n
It was just me, my brand new BMW 2002 and twenty six tapes. It’s a long way from Denver to Salt Lake and following the TripTik I was driving across southern Wyoming, which might sound glamorous, but is really flat and desolate. Every two hundred odd miles I’d stop at a gas station, filling up with the newly-found self-service pumps, go inside and buy a Coke and set out on the road again. I’d place the can on the counter of that legendary car, shift through the four gears and accelerate back onto I-80, with just that big sky in front of me. Finally leaving the east coast behind for good. Where I was a known quantity, where houses were on top of each other, where everybody was in everybody else’s business. I was starting over. Remaking my life in my image.<\/p>\n
I landed in Salt Lake on September 14th, for my assignation with the owners of the Goldminer’s Daughter, the lodge closest to the Alta lifts, a mere fifty feet away. In Little Cottonwood Canyon Middlebury had cachet, I was offered the job of waiter immediately. And went off to kill two months before my gig began.<\/p>\n
It was during that fateful journey that I heard "Maggie May". After exiting a snowed-in campsite with the heat on full blast just over the Wyoming\/Idaho border on my way from Jackson Hole to Sun Valley. When I heard the words telling me it was late September and I really should be back in school I felt a resonance the song had not previously elicited.<\/p>\n
It took me two years to get back to school.<\/p>\n
If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have. I had my first real relationship. I’m a member of the California Bar. But the law is not for me. I believe in the road and the sky.<\/p>\n
And as I pulled away from the station and scuttled up Overland to the freeway the country stations were playing too many songs I was already familiar with so I pushed the button to listen to Sirius’ Bridge, the soft rock station. And in classic Sirius fashion, they were playing what was familiar. But today, "Doctor My Eyes", with the sunroof open and the sun staring in my face, felt just perfect. I recalled buying that debut album after seeing Jackson open for Laura Nyro at the Fillmore East.<\/p>\n
And when "Doctor My Eyes" was done, there was that classic beat of the equally familiar "Rikki Don’t Lose That Number". A constant companion on an earlier drive from Connecticut to Cape Cod. What a crazy fucked up world it was where a song like this could be a big hit. Then again, at first I didn’t take Steely Dan seriously because they were only on the Top Forty stations, with "Do It Again". Sometimes you’re wrong.<\/p>\n
And as I pull into my garage I see a thunderhead of clouds off on the horizon. It’s supposed to rain in L.A. tomorrow.<\/p>\n
I’ll believe it when it happens.<\/p>\n
And when I entered the house I was confronted with the new "Skiing" magazine. Encased therein were all my hopes and dreams.<\/p>\n
Getting older is scary. But you get to steer. I love to steer. I wish I was on a long drive right now, cranking the satellite, feeling how fucking great it is to be alive.<\/p>\n
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