Don't Fear the Reaper

So the commute in to work at 3 in the morning can be a peaceful time.  It can also be a frustrating time, but that's for another day.  Today, I want to talk about the odd moment recently when, hurtling down the interstate in the predawn darkness, my radio scanned to an FM station playing the old Blue Oyster Cult song, "Don't Fear the Reaper."

It was one of those moments, like when you catch a special, familiar aroma, when memories suddenly flood back.  You are totally in a moment, that moment so long ago, that it takes an effort to return to the present.  Slowly, you rise back from a waking dream.

I was in my family's Datsun B-210 hatchback again, returning from a dozen parties in the 1970s, plunging through the Washington, DC, post-midnight darkness.  "Don't Fear the Reaper," along with Boston's first album and any amount of other music, was new then.

My mind wandered to how often I have found myself driving alone through the dark at odd hours.  After those parties, traveling to and from college, heading out to assignments for wire services.  The last time I remember being so conscious of that moment, that circumstance, was some 25 years ago, rushing out into Northern Virginia from DC to photograph a train derailment.  As I headed off the main highway and into the countryside beyond Leesburg, I remember thinking how oddly alone I was, sweeping down the two-lane highway as the trees that bordered it flashed by, making an even whooshing sound.  Nothing but the blackness of unlit farmland around me, my headlights lighting the road lines and those trees.

At the time, I thought it would make a good transitional element for a movie, opening with that metronomic sound, like breathing, the undercurrent of the car motor beneath, the lit trunks sliding past, in and out of the headlights.  Whoosh ... Whoosh ... Whoosh.  Whenever the film came to a turning point, we could return to that moment, as the protagonist moved further down his memories of the story, back to long childhood trips and forward to angry departures from lovers.

But this day, on my commute, I reveled in the simple experience of having all this come back, bathing in the memory like a hot tub, and honestly clinging a bit to the feeling of being young again, in high school with the world full of possibilities and nothing denied you by time or bad decisions yet.  How strange it is to be at the other end of the timeline; I don't think I ever really expected to be here ...