This Old Town

The town is old and the air is old. It smells like worn wood and chimney dust mixed with grass and roses. I sniff it all in as I walk down the street in front of the old lamp posts and the old beautiful bank building; marbled, pink, cloudy evening skies above the marble carved buildings. Young people in the old town gather around the gazebo and dance the night away. The air is mixing now into a splendid concoction of youth and age. Voices of wise and unwise, loved and not yet loved, jaded and not yet bruised- sound out the crowd and make for an ambient pulsing energy. It is a luscious world we live in where the two sides of life can come together at any moment with the sound of music. That is why I tap my feet and bounce through life. I call out to the connection, to the fuse that is lit with a few notes and a beat. This old town has a beat like a heart, faster with activity and a slow calm pulse with the quiet. It is alive in a funny kind of way, and music makes it so.

(Uptown Whittier, CA)