Dad and birthday #59. A bootleg CD documents a Rolling Thunder Review performance at the New Haven Coliseum in 1975 - a concert he attended as a young man. 2002 finds him sitting with beer in living room browsing the sonic photo album, listening to same sounds heard when age 32. Mom recalls violin player and Hurricane and best concert ever seen(besides Rolling Stones '65). I remember Leslie, the sitter, the high school girl from Windmill Hill - clogs, long & straightest black hair, scent of perfume and bubblegum - who'd let us stay up late (10?) to watch Burt Reynolds movies on our snowy black & white television. Chips and soda. Mom claims her name was Lisa.

There is a party in Short Beach with so many faces from the past, faces all changed and now foreign in ways one could not have predicted. All dumbfounded. At first fail to recognize even SC, until, studying her large brown eyes and their fixed gaze, all that was familiar and forgotten is experienced once again. She introduces me to her very much older boyfriend. We reminisce and speak of specific events in terms most general and censored. Constant eyes silently fill in the spaces and details. JD is also there. Shot 12 times by 9mm automatic gunfire. Bullets pass through car door, into flesh, and ricochet off bones. Two bullets remain in his body. Doesn't even drink now. Sells insurance. TL rounds the bend and we stand face to face, at first speechless, then erupting in simultaneous laughter. New best friend shipped off by parents to attend school in Spain after sophomore year. Upon college, lost touch completely. In descriptions of present life in NYC offices, he often uses word grim. Hears of band name and nearly collapses with laughter, shouting "It's all negated!"

On private beach, stand beneath a heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. Midnight ebb tide. Ancient glacial deposits. Huge boulders that sit unchanged. Time stretched, stopped. They are exactly as they were. Their shapes are at once familiar. At night, hands know exactly where to grasp - to climb. Sit and look out across the inky plane, cut by a glowing a path - dazzling flashes of gold that spill out from the moon and skip across the wave tops.