Oldies

Most mornings I wake up with the phrase of a song in my head; it usually dawns on me somewhere between peeing and preparing the coffee. This morning the phrase is “I hear you knockin’/But you can’t come in/I hear you knockin’/Go back where you been.” I try to remember my last dream before waking in the dark but that fails me, so I just try to make sense of it. I think, One’s mind might slip into that phrase in sleep when one’s body has got to pee. Or maybe it was a grim reaper dream, a fragment of an old movie in which death is at the door. Some songs, of course, return you to a young age; you close your eyes and allow yourself to become younger, like looking at one of those erratic patterns in those books with the right side of your brain and suddenly seeing a unicorn. The part of your mind that remembers, it’s an out of body experience, and you’re seven years old and it’s summer on Agatha Drive and Jeffrey Handel and you are on the curb flipping baseball cards and the pot has grown to over 500 cards and you know you’re going to win and take all of Jeffrey’s cards, right off the sidewalk and his red face is trying not to be sad, or you’re ten years old on the beach at Center Island on the Sound with your sister and her friend Cheryl with the Italian nose and the brown freckles wearing the pink bikini that rises above the bump where her backside starts, and there’s a song playing on the transistor radio, “See You in September," or maybe it’s “The Duke of Earl,’ and you can feel the sand scratch inside your bathing suit. “I Hear Your Knockin’” is not resonating with aching thoughts of yearning, so what?, there's got to be something, a meaningless old song that was in your dreaming head, is God finally talking to you in your sleep, doesn’t it scare you, are you safe, can you start your day with more than a hope that maybe only good will happen to you today?