He lived further out this time, a few hundred miles past Columbia in a place that steadfastly refused to stay in the present and remained true to its past with all the authenticity that seemed to be absent in most hokey recreations.

He said he was fed up with the city and (he later told me how he was almost forced to leave.) His wife, but at the time of the dream she was still his girlfriend, lived in the closest large city, corrupted by drink and the occasional traffic jam.

He’d quit most of the bands he’d been in and focused all his attention on gardening.
He’d play for me out in the fields where he toiled during the day after a meal of chocolate malteds and large farm burgers served from the local pharmacy where we slid into the red velvet velour booths with gleeful ease.

We had a lot of catching up to do. I’d been away for many nears now in the pacific northwest, a beautiful part of the country no doubt, but missed certain people down south with such a fervor, that I would often dream of these places and people to fill in the gaps.

And I created this place, somewhere between the Norman Rockwell paintings and the raw lived in farms mixed with a west coast sense of airiness to it. She was never discussed, she hung in the back of our minds, remaining at the library gig, smoking cigarettes years after we’d quit.