TImeshifting

It’s a rainy Friday night in this nondescript coffee shop, at a window table with a prime view of the strip mall parking lot facing. Stores I give not a whit about. Fast food grease palaces that give me a feeling of pride in not being part of that kingdom. It’s early May, but feels like late November outside. Feels like winter inside, too.

I was thinking today about time-relating cliches, its inexorable march and all. Yet there’s this duality of time, of certain things remaining timeless even as time moves forward. Music. Friendships. Family. Dynamics may shift in all, but in their essences they remain the same. I’m listening to the KOPN Deadpod podcast right now, a gem of a 1980 show from the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The show was nearly 28 years ago, Jerry’s been dead nearly 13. Yet in my headphones, it’s as fresh and vital as if they were playing right here, right now. Weir’s soulful “Lost Sailor/Saint of Circumstance” carrying me off to a distant ocean, alone and navigating only by the stars. Thinking about her, about what once was and what could have been...and thinking back to being there, to being at a Dead show. The scene in the parking lot. The marketplace, everything from grilled cheese sandwiches cooked on the radiator of a VW bus to dorm-made tie-dyes to the dreadlocked Trustafarians playing their roles to the hilt, blissfully unaware of their BMW-driven hypocrisy. All I ever wanted to do at those shows was dance, to just hear the music, let it pour over me and through me and let me feel a part of something, instead of apart from everything.

Those shows were a long time ago. As vivid as those memories are, that’s all they are. Memories. Memories with mementos, but still. They belong to the past.

Time is infinite; life is not.

It’s the future I worry about. The dancing days of youth are long past.