the zone

    The drive back to the small town where I grew up was lengthy and foreboding coping with the illness that had taken over choking the life out of me.

    Sadness loomed while the hum of New York City and the buildings that scraped the sky no longer did.

   What would I do here, would I ever get well?

    Living out of an open suitcase, daily therapy sessions, looking old, feeling worn, finding myself on Main Street driving through a town no taller then three stories high, my life had vanished. 

   The Jeep radio playing Billy Joel’s Captain Jack and 35 years just disappeared in a matter of seconds. The memory of a shoe box with an ounce of uncleaned pot, a spool table top covered with an answer to the munchies, always the piano man playing, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell, my life was unsettled in those days, now it was completely unstable.

    I suppose I knew what everyone else did that someone had to die, of course I never thought it might be me. One hand on the steering wheel I felt the rush of the lyrics: 

“Captain Jack will get you high tonight

And take you to your special island

Captain Jack will get you by tonight

Just a little push and you'll be smilin' ”

    I wondered years ago what it would take to get me in the zone.....

                  .......and now I wonder every day what it will take to get me out.