My brother brought this album back home in 1993; I was in third grade. It didn't mean much to me then, except that I felt a kind of superiority over my elementary school friends for being able to sing along to pop-y songs on the radio. Learning them wasn't difficult - all of them told perfectly mundane stories, things that could have happened to me the day before and yes, love and friendship that I looked forward to once I was that age.

Listening to them now I feel nostalgia for a life that back then seemed to be the natural order of things which now seem impossible. There was something comfortably parochial about life in my "city" which has all but disappeared - a curiosity and interest with affection in the lives of neighbors, the possibility of shared futures with people who just happen to live near you. All that seems gone (and I think it is the heart of our national crisis.)

I realize it's unfair to romanticize the past with its future that probably never was to be but it's interesting that all this time I've never quite managed to recreate even a semblance of that dream. Living from city to city among a world of strangers is about as far as I can get from the occasional chance meetings with old acquaintances. Further, with the impermanence of it all there's now an all or nothing approach - be a stranger or a close friend. I am content. I do feel connected - not in the way that is rooted in every sense of the word, that which refers to land and physical space shared with loved ones and strangers. I do not fear that I will lose the ones I have loved. I do fear that I will lose sight of the world is like, made up of loved and unloved.

I think I am yet to break out of the comfort of my psycho-social space.