When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the 1950’s. Maybe it was because of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, or eventually reading The Outsiders and seeing the film as well, I thought the 50’s was the coolest decade ever. Even as a little kid I wanted to be Elvis. I know it’s weird but it’s who I was. My love of Elvis came from my Dad and from our neighbor Mrs. Patsy across the street. Dad introduced me to his music. Mrs. Patsy introduced me to the wonder of his mystique. She had an Elvis shrine in her living room complete with albums, dolls, and all sorts of Elvis paraphernalia. I remember going across the street to look at all the cool stuff and talk to her about the man. I loved his music and even his early movies, especially King Creole for some reason. They used to show his movies all the time on WTBS and I loved all of them.
But by the time I turned 15, my cultural interests moved up a decade. I still loved Elvis, but I also began to become fascinated with the late 1960’s. I know exactly when it happened too. My brother Andrew took me to see The Lost Boys in the summer of 1987. I wanted to be the cool older brother character in it but that was Drew. Alas, I was destined to be the dorky little brother reading comic books. I got the soundtrack and loved the songs “Good Times” by INXS and Jimmy Barnes, “Lost in the Shadows” by Lou Gramm, and “Cry Little Sister” by Gerard McMann, but the one that really impacted me was “People are Strange” by Echo & The Bunnymen. I absolutely loved it. One day I was in my room listening to it and Drew walked by and said “I liked it better when The Doors did it.” I had zero idea it was a cover but eventually got The Doors Greatest Hits on cassette tape and that was it. I became obsessed with Jim Morrison and the late 1960’s. I read his biography No One Here Gets Out Alive and explored all other kinds of related artists from that time period. Plus, it was a relief. You have no idea how disheartening it was to dream of being a rock singer in the 80’s with all of the hair bands and the singers hitting notes so high they seemed physically impossible. But here was this amazing baritone voice, almost a crooner in the realm of an Elvis, that changed my life.
When the film 1969 was released in November of 1988 staring Kiefer Sutherland, Robert Downey, Jr., and Winona Ryder, I was so into the 1960’s there was zero question if I would love the movie and its soundtrack. While honestly the movie was forgettable, the soundtrack was unbelievable. Hendrix, Cream, The Animals, CCR, Canned Heat, The Zombies, The Youngbloods, The Moody Blues, Crosby Stills & Nash and The 5th Dimension…wow. It’s still an amazing soundtrack to this day and a snapshot of that moment in time. But like other soundtracks for me before this one, there was a song that truly stood out for me: Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” and I know exactly why. I was about to turn 17 years old and all of my siblings had moved out. Looking back, it was like my Mom and Dad had a full house one day and then the next, it was almost empty save me. It affected the three of us. They went through their own mid life experience and for the first time in my life I honestly felt alone. It was no one’s fault…it’s just life and how we all are forced to grow up one day. But I do remember that hollow feeling that only the words of that song could capture: “Well I’m near the end, and I just ain’t got the time, That I’ve wasted , and I can’t find my way home.”
There’s a powerful scene from the 2004 film Garden State that perfectly sums up that feeling I had until I was well into my twenties. I never had the talent to express it the way Zach Braff’s (Andrew) character did to Natalie Portman’s (Sam) character, but the first time I heard it I was blown away.
Andrew: You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Andrew: You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.
Sam: [cuddles up to Andrew] Maybe.
Honestly, we all go through it and the joy of it is that it comes right back around when you have your own kids. It happened to me and my wife in the summer of 2019. Years and years of kids in the house and then suddenly, nothing. It was jarring and probably the thing that sent us to South Carolina six months later. And after all these years, that song still resonates.
I first met Mr. Johnson in May of 2020. He taught me the importance of caregiving and the need for Hospice to be there for the caregivers, even if it was just in a small way. I started going over to his house once a week so the family could get a break. In the chapter, I talk about how the two of us bonded over his love for John Wayne movies but it was a comment of his that has stuck with me all these years:
“Every once in a while he would ask about my shoes and say he needed a pair like them, or he would ask for a bottle of water. Sometimes he would start asking questions about where he was and wondering why he wasn’t in his old home. I would just say “You’re living here with your daughter, Mr. Johnson. She’s taking care of you now.” He would look around at the unfamiliarity of that house and then go back to the movie” (25).
I knew that feeling. I had lived it years before and there I was watching an older gentleman with dementia have that same feeling race back briefly through his mind and then disappear. Honestly, it broke my heart. I knew what he was feeling because I had felt it twice before in my own life. Here he was at the end of his, struggling with those same feelings if only for a brief moment.
But here’s the thing that makes it ok with me and the one way I differ with Zach Braff’s character in that scene: there is nothing imaginary about those places for me. That house I grew up in is a real and defining place for me. Even if it didn’t exist today that wouldn’t change that wonderful moment in time that my parents gave me. And it’s the same with the house where I raised my children. No, I don’t live there anymore but those moments still exist in my memory and I visit them often. I still see my wife, my little girl, and my little boy there around that table, sitting in that basement watching movies, and opening Christmas presents there in that living room. Those are the memories that give my life meaning. Yes, those times are over, but Mr. Johnson taught me something important that day. We may always miss those moments even as our own minds start to slip away, but I am truly blessed to have lived those days and to be able to carry those memories until the day I die.
I guess that’s the curse of this life but I’ll take it no matter how much it hurts.
Matthew M Cornett 