What a different thread!
Right now?
Listening to schmaltzy country music through my tiny laptop speakers. It's old stuff... Really old stuff...
The music - any music - takes me back in time more easily than anything else. The recording playing right now is a sad old thing called "Hello Walls" by Faron Young.
The tune takes me back to a drive through the Great Dividing Range in Victoria, Australia. The year is 1962. President Kennedy is all in the news, and the Australian Prime Minister has been reiterating his undying love for the British sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. He said of her, "I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her 'til I die..." He wasn't kidding!
This record was playing on 3UZ a popular station back in the sixties, and before anyone ever heard of FM. The car was a white 1960 FB Holden sedan that belonged to my aging great aunt. She thought she was being "hip" because she was playing this new, nonsensical music with words that were impossible to understand. That was 48 years ago, and "Hello Walls" was an "Oldie" even then.
The road, known as the Acheron Way, wove its way across the Range for eighty odd miles through fern forests similar to those you would see in The Hobbit. There were fords through shallow streams that ventured across the gravel highway, and the road alternated across the ridge across the top of the low mountains. As we crested the mountains and started a long, very slow descent, a valley appeared. It was as green as I imagined Kentucky Blue Grass would be. Old cabins dotted the valley, and a few sat precariously on the steep sides of the mountains on the far side of the valley. There, at that point, the song "Wolverton Mountain" came on. We were on our way to Warburton, and I thought the song might be about one of those cabins. My aging aunt didn't put a pin in my bubble, she encouraged the thought. In my child's young mind I imagined someone setting out right there, in that valley, to rescue his fair mountain maiden from her tyrant father.
The songs kept playing, and my mind kept wandering. I remember being sad when the gravel road ended and a sealed road with white lines and traffic replaced it. It ended my idyllic reverie...
I visited there again twice more. Once in 1980, and again in 1986. The road then was much as I had remembered, but the cabins were gone, replaced by huge homes with expensive outbuildings and landscaped gardens. They all seemed to have sweeping driveways where before they were little more than tracks cut by the wheels of wagons and narrow-tracked cars.
The last time I was there, in '86, as we neared the main highway, and I knew the gravel was about to end, an old man driving a horse-drawn dray blocked the road. He had hand-sawn timber on the dray, and he had a cat riding with him. A huge ginger tabby cat. It just sat there with its tail flicking from side to side and staring ahead. They were a pair to behold. On that trip I played cassettes of those old songs. It was nice...
