(All images by The Drifter)

When he was five years old, his mother got down on his level, as she often did. But this time, she told him something different, something he’d never heard before.

She told him he was going to spend the summer with his Grandmother.

And that she herself, his mother, would come to visit him a lot, with his father; but they also wouldn’t be seeing him for a while.

And she immediately informed him, before he panicked, that this was a good thing – NOT a bad thing, and certainly not a punishment of any kind.

She reassured him about how much both she and his father loved him (and he already knew that very well, since they had showered him with love and attention since day one).

Then she told him that he was going to stay with his grandmother for the summer because his grandmother had things to teach him that only she, his grandmother, could teach him.

He couldn’t wait to get going.

…

He wasn’t scared or nervous at all as his mother drove him north from their very modest Detroit suburb to the thumb area of Michigan, where his grandmother lived in a trailer park on the edge of a small town.

It was a town that was made up mostly of German American and French American people who almost all claimed Indian blood of some kind, usually Chippewa or Iroquois. All the small merchants of the town were former farmers who served all the many farmers who lived spread way out all around the town. It was, and is, some of the most fertile land not just in the USA, but in the world. The town was (and is) fifteen miles away from Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes.

His grandmother was what can only be called a kind of German mystic, although no one called her that.

But they all came to her when they needed something.

Not when they needed money, because she didn’t have any of that.

But when they needed consolation, needed healing, needed advice, needed a friend, needed someone to listen to them without passing judgement, they came to her.

His mother dropped him off in front of his grandmother’s trailer with his little suitcase. She didn’t make sure he was safely inside or anything. She just picked him up, hugged him, kissed him, said goodbye, then gently put him down and shoved him toward the door of the trailer, where his grandmother was waiting inside.

And then she drove away.

…

At first he and his grandmother didn’t do anything special.

And he almost never got bored, because whenever he started getting too bored, he retreated, and entered a world that no one else around him could see. They thought he was in a trance, but he knew he was somewhere special.

It was a world of the imagination, filled with wild characters, wonderful animals, amazing adventures, the ability to literally fly wherever and whenever he wanted, and also to turn invisible and roam around, wherever and whenever he wanted to.

And they watched a lot of TV.

And she sometimes told him stories about the family, in her quiet voice, what it was like on the ship coming over from Germany, accidents or good things that had happened to people on the farm, wild and crazy things the farm animals had done, stories about weather and storms and harvests, stories about sickness and healing.

And sometimes she read to him, especially about Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh, and even more often than that, from the Bible, stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark and the animals and the rainbow, Moses, David and Goliath, Joseph and the coat of many colors, Job and the Whirlwind, Jeremiah and the well, Jonah and the whale, Jesus and his mother, Mary, and the adventures of Paul while he was spreading the Gospel, like Johnny Appleseed in America, who she also told him all about, many times. There was only one picture on the walls of the trailer, and it was a picture of Jesus’ face. He wasn’t being crucified in the picture. In the picture, he was quietly smiling upward with mysterious eyes and a weird kind of halo light falling down behind his head onto his shoulders out of the clear blue sky.

And then one day they started planting things.

Some of the things were flowers, and other things were other, small, green plants.

And she showed him how to plant, how to dig in the soil, how to treat the plants tenderly, how to place them where they now belonged, how to put the dirt back on top, how to pack it all down snugly, but not too snugly, how to water the earth.

And they planted things all in and around the trailer park on the edge of the town.

Then one day when he was sitting on the couch looking at a Bible picture book with all the grown men with their long hair and beards, and the beautiful women in their flowing robes with their flowing, long, beautiful hair, he smelled something wonderful. It was a loaf of bread she was baking.

A little later she showed him the loaf of bread under a kitchen towel. His mouth watered and it looked wonderful.

She told him they needed to go take the bread to a man she wanted him to meet.

…

She drove slowly, cautiously, patiently, calmly, and fearlessly.

She had strong, gnarled hands, a simple bracelet on one wrist, and her long, graying, pretty hair was pulled back with a simple blue ribbon around it.

They drove for a long time.

They didn’t talk, and they were completely comfortable around one another not talking.

They both enjoyed just going, the wheels flying over the road, the farm fields all around them always with trees in the distance.

The man they were going to meet was called Old Joe.

That wasn’t his name, but it was what they called him.

Old Joe was a local legend.

He was such a local legend that stories about him had appeared in the local newspaper a few times, and even on the local TV news station one time.

He lived way out in the middle of nowhere, alone, in a shack, in the middle of a huge, vast field with trees and a river in the distance, and a few huge trees that loomed over and sheltered his shack with their leaf-filled arms.

Except he didn’t live alone.

As the boy’s grandmother pulled the car over to the side of the road by the field where the shack was way over there, she pointed, and he saw that there was a whole, huge pack of gigantic dogs lounging around on the ground around the shack.

She told him that there were at least twelve dogs.

And then he saw the goats.

The little goats were all leaping and jumping and playing and shivering with joy in the tall grass of the field. They were bumping into each other and munching and chomping on grass and little scrub trees in the field. A goat shot away from the rest of them and one of the dogs leapt up and shot after the goat and circled around it, bringing it back, and they looked like they were playing a game on the way back.

His grandmother and himself got out of the car, and started walking across the field toward the shack and the dogs and the goats on a little trail. They held hands as they went and his grandmother held the loaf of bread under her other arm, wrapped in the towel.

The dogs all came over in a pack wagging their huge tails and greeting them. The goats kept to themselves but seemed to start jumping around even more, almost like they were excited by the visitors.

But Old Joe was nowhere around.

They sat down in a couple of old, broken-down chairs that were sitting outside the shack and they waited for him in the warm sunlight as they petted the shaggy dogs and talked to the shaggy, friendly, wagging-tail dogs, and laughed and waved at the goats, some of whom started approaching them and looking at them with curious eyes before bounding away again.

And before very long they saw a man approaching them across the field from the direction of the river.

He walked slowly and steadily and when he was about half way toward where they were he raised his hand and waved at them one simple time.

When the man got to where they were, the boy was shocked, and almost terrified for a few seconds, but then just fascinated.

Old Joe wore a beat-up old black hat that came down very low almost covering his eyes. His eyes beneath the brim of the hat were the darkest, most intense eyes the boy had ever seen. The man’s nose was large and he had a gigantic mustache covering his mouth and a huge, dark, graying, tangled beard that came down to the middle of his chest. He wore a suit of old, black, tattered clothes that was dusty and filled with patches. He had old, battered boots on his feet.

And he never said a word, not even hello.

He just came over to the boy’s grandmother who handed him the loaf of bread. As Old Joe went over to take the bread into the shack, a bird swooped down out of one of the trees over the shack and landed on his shoulder. It rode his shoulder into the shack, and when Old Joe came back out of the shack, the bird flew back up into the tree again and landed in the leafy green branches.

Old Joe pulled over another old, broken-down chair from over behind the shack, and then he sat down right next to the boy. Old Joe leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and just sat there, very close to the boy, while his grandmother continued to pet the dogs and talk to them. Old Joe never said a word. Not one word.

Pretty soon the boy’s grandmother and Old Joe just looked at each other. They both had tiny, small smiles in and around their eyes. No one ever said a word.

Then the boy’s grandmother said it was time to get going. Old Joe just sat there, elbows on knees. The dogs surrounded him, like they were protecting him.

The boy and his grandmother held hands again as they walked back to the car on the little trail through the beautiful, glowing green field that was now popping with harmless grasshoppers hopping all around them.

As they drove away, she told him that Old Joe was her brother; his great-uncle.

…

There was one more thing from that summer that the boy would never forget.

He didn’t remember his grandfather, who’d died right before (right before) he was born.

She told him that his grandfather visited her almost every night (but not every night), just for a few moments.

She would know when he was about to appear because she could suddenly feel it; and then he would sit gently on the other side of her bed, the bed they had shared together, only for a few, dreamlike moments that only seemed half-real.

And he came to tell her that, though it was hard to believe, everything was (even when it wasn’t) okay: now, yesterday, tomorrow, forever, and always.

There were no fences anywhere.

The Drifter

“Soul is a feeling, a feeling deep within. /

Soul is not the color of your skin.”

– Van Morrison, “Soul”

In the good old days, this street had been rowdy, ragged, loud, edgy, marginal. For at least two miles in length, one bar and liquor store and cheap restaurant after another on both sides of the street had sat beside each other inviting in any intrepid soul with a few bucks in their pocket and the desire to get partially drunk or completely drunk. The music here had been raw, Chicago blues bands or punk duos or some combination of blues and punk or imitation-grunge or garage rock moved on over from the garage into the bar. It wasn’t always the greatest music (by far), but it was usually heartfelt and it had soul.

“The good old days” in this context meant the late 1980s, the 1990s, and shading into the very early 2000s. After that a shift started to occur that happened gradually, then suddenly.

Now this street was too clean. The restaurants were too expensive. The dive bars had been replaced by workout centers, hair salons, specialty shops, and boutique stores. The music was utterly perfect and utterly soulless. The people here now were the kind of people who walk at the same pace always, never speeding up and never slowing down. Lots of them were nice enough on the surface but as a group, as a race of humans, they were miserable to be around. And “race of humans” here meant people with enough money to hang around and enjoy this atmosphere. It didn’t matter what color you were any more. All that mattered was whether you had the money.

He didn’t hang out on this street any more, and he even avoided driving down it for the most part, except when he wanted to relive old memories by taking a journey back into the past where he could imagine it the way it used to be and remember. A few of the bars still had the same names, even though they weren’t the same kind of places any more, at all.

It was the Fourth of July weekend in the Year of Our Lord 2018. He was here to visit some old friends, and he’d come over here because he’d been becoming so isolated from “the world” lately that it was starting to scare him a little bit, sometimes, perhaps (or deeply). He hadn’t seen most of these people he was about to see in fifteen or twenty years.

And he couldn’t believe, which literally meant that he could not believe, just what it was he saw.

They all looked so old! Even though they were, most of them, no older than he was!

He quickly realized it wasn’t so much in the gray (or graying) hair, the wrinkles, the extra pounds. After all, he himself had all of those things as well. No, not at all, it wasn’t in the surface details where their age sat. It was more in their eyes, in their postures, in their attitudes. People who’d once seemed like lively carefree souls to him now seemed like closed-off, uptight, unimaginative bores.

And as he sat in the bar with them (there were about seven or eight of them) trying to be social at some level, he quickly realized that these folks, who now had become truly strangers to him, were all dominated and dwarfed by a quadruple threat, which was made up of: the large screen, the small screen, the dollar bill, and the beer mug.

There were five or so men and two or three women, and they were all doing the same things in sequences and orders, almost like metronomes: staring at the baseball game on the large screens that dominated all walls of the squeaky-clean establishment, scrolling on their phones, discussing the low stakes gambling they were all involved in, women too, and slowly, steadily consuming their alcohol.

He wasn’t drinking because he was an alcoholic who couldn’t drink. After a single sip of alcohol in any form, all bets would literally have been off. He would’ve followed that up with two or three more beers in quick succession, then gone straight to the hard liquor. He would’ve drank for days and days until he passed out and later woke up not knowing where he was and with the most frightening hangover that it literally would’ve made him consider putting a bullet in his brain just to end the pain, not because he really wanted to leave here. He’d quit drinking because of the suicidal tendencies it had started to create in him; and other reasons. His brain chemistry had been so warped by the constant alcohol at that point that he couldn’t even write any more. He hadn’t had a drink in seventeen years.

So he wasn’t drinking. And he realized now how drugged they all were. It wasn’t even difficult to be in their presence and not socialize with them, since they were all so obsessed with the double screens, the baseball betting, and the slow, steady consumption of their soul-killing alcohol that you could sit there in their midst and quite easily not even be noticed (almost).

He was just about to bail out, call it good, shake off the depression this had all caused, say, “See you in another twenty years!” (once he’d gotten away from them, that is) and go do something else when he saw HER.

He didn’t know who she was and he knew he’d never met her before because he would’ve remembered for sure.

She didn’t look old like the rest of them.

She had the same wrinkles and the same extra pounds (except quite a bit less so of both perhaps).

She was a blonde, what used to be called a bleach blonde. She looked, almost, like Marilyn M. if Marilyn M. had grown up to be fifty or so years old. She smiled like M.M.

She had a lively walk like M.M.

Her eyes were ALIVE like M.M.’s.

They sparkled with HUMOR like M.M.’s.

She looked around her like she knew what was going on but also didn’t care – like M.M. She had a rebel soul like M.M. (or so he imagined).

And she was lost and vulnerable like M.M., too (again, or so he was imagining).

And she walked right up to him, asked him what his name was, and sat down right next to him! And when he found out that her name was Marilee, his belief that there are no coincidences was reinforced again for the trillionth time (he was a trillionaire in his belief that there are no coincidences).

It turned out that she was the cousin of one of the beer-guzzling sports drones.

And he discovered rather quickly that it was difficult to strike up an interesting conversation with a stranger in this stultifying atmosphere: this clean, safe, comforting (to them), conforming atmosphere. (He realized that these were the kind of peeps who would’ve been hanging out in the Roman Colosseum back in the day.)

But she kept glancing at him from the corners of her long, lovely, long-lashed, sleepy-wide-awake, dark green eyes with blue eye shadow on.

She smelled like a beautiful dream and looked like a beauty queen.

He hadn’t “been with anyone” in years, both on purpose and not on purpose.

Just sitting next to her basically lifted him up into the clouds – in a very good way.

It made him not care at all about the lives of all these soulless bores. Let them rot in their own open coffins for all he cared. What did he care? He didn’t care!

There was still someone like this, like her, in the world!

He looked at her again.

She was already looking straight back at him.

…

But there were some things he needed to go take care of. He was, after all, the kind of person who frequently had “things he needed to go take care of.” Even the few people who knew him best didn’t know what those things were most of the time. They laughed at him a lot, and thought he was an enigma even more so. He frequently said to them, “I have some things I need to go take care of.”

“What things do you need to go take care of!?” they would shout at him.

But he didn’t like explaining himself.

He understood why Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards so no one could read his writings; and why Vincent Van Gogh ended up spending most of his time alone in the fields, sometimes even sleeping there. (VVG was a much happier man than they portray him as in all the movies; although he definitely had his down days as well.)

And today, alas, he really did have some things he needed to go take care of.

The first thing was his sixteen-year-old twin daughters, who’d suddenly phoned him out of the blue with a minor emergency while he was sitting there next to his new Marilyn Monroe friend wondering how to strike up a conversation with her in this stultifying environment.

His kids’ friends’ baby was sick (both of the parents were eighteen) and nobody had any money and they needed him to give them a ride to Urgent Care.

He’d also decided that he couldn’t go through this totally “sober.” It turned out that she was drinking quite a bit faster and quite a bit more than the rest of the party, not to mention stepping outside to have a quick ciggie pretty frequently. She wasn’t drinking like a full-blown alkie (like him), at least so far, but definitely like an expert boozer. He would need some “medications” if he were going to pull this off right.

That fact meant that he needed to make a little trip to go see a friend he had.

He’d already heard them all saying that they would be here for a while, that they would maybe move to another bar, but they were definitely planning on staying on this street tonight for the duration, because it was a holiday weekend, because it was summer, and because some of them hadn’t seen each other in a while, etc.

He even asked her if she was planning on hanging out for a while.

He told her that he had a couple of things he needed to go take care of.

She stared at him with her bright, lively, intelligent, knowing, a-little-buzzed, green eyes and he could tell she was almost about to ask him what things he needed to go take care of. Next, he could also tell that she wouldn’t ask him, since they’d just met. A good sign!

He figured he could go take care of both the things he needed to take care of within ninety minutes or so and get right back here.

And he told her so.

She looked straight at him and said, “Never fear. I’ll be here when you get back, sir.”

…

He was not a person who always walked at the exact same pace, never slowing down, and never speeding up. Instead, he was a person who changed his pace all the time, sometimes walking super-slowly and stopping to smell every single figurative rose he happened upon, other times walking so fast he looked like he was in a joyful hurry to get somewhere even though he wasn’t going anywhere special, he was just going.

He walked super-fast to his small car, unlocked her, hopped in, called his friend with the “medications” to make sure he’d be there in about an hour, and took off to pick up his kids, their friends, and the baby.

Just as he was rounding his first corner off the street that he had hated before and was now planning on returning to soon (as soon as he finished the two crucial missions he was on) because maybe after all it wasn’t so bad if she was here, a woman who was doing something on her phone pulled her car out in front of a woman who was driving her car down the street like a maniac. The maniac driver slammed on the brakes, and leapt out of her car with her purse, as the woman who’d pulled out in front of her stuck her hand out the window and gave her antagonist the middle finger. The woman flipping the bird was unable to move her car forward because of the traffic, and the woman with the purse now pulled a pistol out of the purse, ran up to the other woman’s car window, and stuck the pistol in her face. The terrified driver turned her face away then ducked down into the car, and the woman with the pistol screamed, “Stay out of my way you stupid fucking Mexican bitch!” Then she hit the top of the car with her pistol butt and got back into her own vehicle, traffic started moving again and everybody drove away.

The incident would come back on him later in a nightmare, but right now he was in too much of a hurry to sit for long with the witnessing of this minor trauma. His two kids and their two friends and their baby were waiting for him. The parents of the baby were also sick and within three or four days both himself and his two kids would all come down with the same brutal, wicked, nasty, ten-or-eleven-day-long summertime cold, but for now he drove the kids to Urgent Care, made sure everything was OK as they signed in at the clinic, made sure a nurse looked at the baby before he left to make sure nothing was an emergency, handed the kids half the money he had in his pocket, and darted out the door back into his car.

As he was driving across town to go meet the man he planned on getting the “medications” from, he played the song “Soul” by Van Morrison over and over again, from Van’s great album Keep It Simple (Van’s thirty-third album released in 2008), and he (the main character of this story), quite literally, calmly wept behind his sunglasses as he was driving. He wept because the song was so beautiful and for no other reason. He played the song LOUD over and over before he switched to the title track and calmly wept along with that too, behind his dark glasses. It was a happy weeping, a cathartic weeping, a joyful weeping, a crying for beauty, and a tear-stained face because beauty still existed, very much so, in the world, in this world.

Himself and his brother called the man he was going to meet Alley Man behind his back because the alley was where the man hung out, and they called him the name he called himself to his face, even though they knew his real name was Mohammed.

As the main character of this story approached Alley Man who was standing there in the alley he instantly knew something was wrong because he, Alley Man, had lost about fifty pounds since the last time the main character had seen him, which hadn’t been that long ago.

The two of them stepped into Alley Man’s garage to make the transaction and then the main character of this very true tale asked Alley Man how he was doing.

Alley Man, who was about the same age as the main character, raised his shirt and showed the main character a huge, massive, red, bulging, sore-looking, worm-like-looking bright scar across the middle of his chest in the shape of a cross.

After a heart attack recently, Alley Man had had triple bypass surgery to save his life, and while they were in there, they discovered the malignant tumor on his lung, which they also removed while they were in there (taking half a lung with it), so that the surgery lasted all day and on into the evening.

Alley Man removed the lit cigarette from his mouth and said nothing could kill him, praise God.

They high-fived and fist-bumped each other and the main character told Alley Man to take care of himself.

As he was almost about to get back into his car, the main character ran into Alley Man’s brother-in-law, who was a man who was four and a half feet tall and had one eye.

This man’s wife was always hiding his shoes so he wouldn’t go roaming around the alleys all day and all night, but it never stopped him.

The man with one eye was wearing ragged pants, a ragged shirt, and nothing but ragged socks on his feet because his wife had hidden his shoes again. He came up to the main character, holding a beer can in one hand and an unlit cigarette stub in the other. He had another cig’ behind his ear.

He asked the main character if he had any spare change. The main character handed him a dollar. The man with one eye asked him did he have any more, brother. The main character shook his head no, gently, and told the man whose name he didn’t remember to take care of himself. The one-eyed man looked at him closely, looked at him some more, then wandered away in his ragged socks sipping from his beer can.

Alley Man had said they often found his brother-in-law sleeping in the alley. He was a street person with a place to lay his head if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to (except sometimes). God knows what had made him that way and maybe it was God himself; or herself; or itself.

In the car, the main character took about a third of the “medications” he’d purchased from Alley Man. As he sat there in a traffic jam listening to Van Morrison (the song “Behind the Ritual,” from Keep It Simple, over and over again) he felt the warm, mild, steady, liquid, consoling, BUZZING, humming, reassuring glow from the medicine seeping into his brain, his heart, and his whole system, changing everything for the better, at least for now.

He knew the “medications” would last for at least a few hours and he knew the afterglow from the “medications” would last for at least a few hours more beyond that and he knew he had more when that ran out. It was good enough for now, and now, he reminded himself, is what matters.

But the traffic jam was a bad one and it held him up for a long, long time. By the time he returned to the street that gives its generic name to the title of this story, all the beer-screen-sports-and-dollar drones were still in their usual positions, exactly as if they hadn’t moved one iota in all that time. But SHE (Marilee) was gone.

Instead of ninety minutes his little trip had taken him two and a half hours, probably even closer to three, because of weekend holiday traffic and because he’d pulled over at one point to sit and enjoy the buzz of the “medications” while meditating a little bit.

He asked some folks from the group if they knew where she’d gone and they told him she was still somewhere on this street probably – most likely somewhere in another bar. Then they quickly turned away, back to their screens and beer mugs, offering no more information.

He looked for her all up and down the street, peering into all the establishments, entering some, just glancing into others.

Just as he was about to give up and was thinking about going back to ask someone in the herd whether he could get her phone number perhaps (and he was stressing very much about that because of his intense social anxiety), he looked up and she was standing there on the formerly attractively ragged and now too-clean street corner staring at him.

She ran to him and almost collapsed into his arms.

By now, the sun was going down, and it threw a warm, beautiful, sunset glow over the whole summertime street. She smelled better than anything ever and her warm, soft, collapsing body (along with the “medications” he was on) literally transported him immediately unto another world – a better one.

She asked him if he had a car and they went to his car and she got into the back seat so he got into the back seat beside her, after rolling the windows down so they could feel the wonderful summer eve coming in.

She verbally unloaded on him then, as if they’d known each other since childhood.

She told him all about her accident last year when she’d shattered her ankle in a bicycle-riding accident, how long it had taken to heal, how she hadn’t been able to work during that time, etc. etc. etc.

She told him about her new life in Florida (his heart had sunk more than a little when she’d told him she lived in Orlando, 1,200 miles away from where they were right now in Chicago, but he filed that info away to deal with later and kept on listening) and how hard it had been, how things had not exactly gone as planned down there so far, and that was an understatement, etc. etc. etc.

She told him about her son, who was in his twenties and was addicted to opioids (no comment).

Her son lived in an apartment above a bar on “the street” and that was where she was staying while she was in town.

Then they started making out, out of the blue, there in the back seat of the car with the windows open.

They held hands, and kissed, and hugged (nothing else) in the back seat of the car as if they were teenagers. It was dreamy, beautiful, wonderful, warm, close, intimate, intimidating, great, awesome, amazing, totally unbelievably personal and proof that life was still okay despite the fact that this society itself had landed in the toilet a long time ago and would soon be flushing itself away into who knew what, for sure.

She said she had to go now and asked if he’d walk her over to her son’s apartment and asked if he’d meet for lunch tomorrow at one PM at a restaurant on the street. Yes! to both.

As he was walking alone back to his car after dropping her off, a guy from the sports-drone crowd called his name and hustled over to him on the sidewalk. He asked the main character to hold out his hand and when the main character did so to humor the man, the man placed a wad of cash in his palm. And he told the main character, grinning, that it was three hundred dollars. Someone had placed a bet in his name, and they were all honest after all, so congratulations!

He thanked the fellow heartily (the main character was on a very un-fixed income for a wide variety of reasons that shan’t be gone into now), drove over to where his kids lived with their mother, and gave them the money.

The next day, she didn’t show up at the restaurant for lunch.

He waited at the restaurant, and in the vicinity of the restaurant on the street, for at least three hours (and probably more). While waiting, he texted her exactly three times (they’d exchanged phone numbers the night before).

SILENCIO.

He texted her (very briefly) exactly once a day for the next three days in a row, then quit.

A week or so later, he couldn’t help himself, and he looked her up on the internet, just to make sure she wasn’t dead.

She’d very recently (within the last twenty-four hours) posted a picture of herself sitting on Daytona Beach snuggling arm-in-arm with another guy. They were both in their bathing suits and they both had huge, frozen smiles on their faces (almost like grimaces) and were showing plenty of perfectly whitened teeth for the camera.

He popped a few more pills (cold medications and Alley Man refills) and put on the Van Morrison song “And the Healing Has Begun” from the album Into the Music (1979); and turned it up LOUD:

“And we’ll walk down the avenue again.

And we’ll sing all the songs from way back when.

And we’ll walk down the avenue again.

When the healing has begun…”…

The Drifter (Images by The Drifter)