They listened to the radio for hours sprawled out in the meadow under the shade of the Buckeye tree, well out of range of the Amish homestead. An everlasting friendship forged.
Though you'll never admit it to anyone and always bemoan the fact that the song is being played in your club, you somehow enjoyed it.
The planets all aligned for a mighty fine show at the 2018 Williamstown Literary Festival on Saturday evening 16 June. Photos by Eric Algra.
J. Rohr Lincoln Park, Chicago, Illinois Circa 2005 Though the place is crowded there's an absence in here. Shoulder to shoulder patrons squeeze their way around. A laptop looped into the stereo spits a predictable playlist of pop, while bar banter buzzes like oblivious static; anything could be playing so long as the groove [...]
With a scowl that could scorch the tops of crème brûlée, I would stalk through the bar to the alleyway to glower outside until the song ended. Even the rotting potato peels and pools of stale beer were preferable to hearing it again.
Papa, I understood how you stood against the world when it came to the principles you protected. I understood your sense of space in that old pawnshop where you read books by Alexandre Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle.
I witnessed how song memory can be locked away, or partitioned, in a brain that is ravaged by deterioration and confusion.
I confess it was more than just clothes that drew me back to Hyper Hyper on those rainy afternoons. There was music. And The Boy. Perched behind the counter, nose in a book, he seemed to exist in some other world, one with particularly rarified air - it was all over him like a scent.
Then, one day, I am sitting in an okonomiyaki restaurant as a rare treat, when Bridge Over Troubled Water comes on the radio. A song so familiar that I had ceased experiencing it as a piece of music a long time ago. If anything, I was slightly dismissive of it: the glossy production, its mawkish grandiosity.
Red carnations mean the deepest of love. I would love it and care for it and it would be an eternal living symbol of my deep love for Adam and his love for his fans.