Throwback to 2000 #WalkMyWorld Trip, 2015 - Cambridge University, Amy, Driving the British Isles and The Last Hoorah

From a writer's notebook (2000)

A hypothesis: 
  We're just birds...
   fluttering about with bags, dreams, and style,
     in sights the elder poets loved for a while,
           shoving this scene or that,
           getting fatter on beer, wine, and 
                        intellectual chat - 
                        in the British smiles of loneliness
                        i find so hard to record,
                              yet horde away
                              to the younger days,
when i found the way to spark a life
      less lived
              back home.....

So, this summer,
      i roamed, my travelers and me,
         free to see,
            reality, 
               spontaneity,
                    curiosity,
                        karmic compatability...
                   in the view of an English landscape
                   that skips across my heart...

so, where do you think i should start?

I was 28 and I traveled with Amy. I woke up this morning singing Evan Dando's Frying Pan and remembered the summer she and I sojourned to Europe, through Denmark, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, until we ended up in our flats in Cambridge during a summer of Shakespeare scholarship.

I recorded everything in a poem from that summer, capturing a hoorah before we both stepped into adulthood and would leave some of our zestful youth behind (she, a singer with King Kong, the Louisville rock band formed in 1989 - me, a wanna-be writer obsessed with emptying the ocean with a fork).

This is the first time I've ever seen a video to go with Dando's song. Rather, Amy and I both made each other travel music for our journey (remember cassette tapes?) and we played them non-stop as we drove by sheep, oceans, rocks, landmarks, pubs, and history. Fifteen years later, I am having this flashback (I could spend the next year reflecting on this once-in-a-lifetime experience).

It was the first time I shaved my head, too. My international driving license says it all.

Another.

Dear Shakespeare,

i've been kissing the years, so long ago, goodbye,
    that have lied within me, in the heart,
       hoping to start all over again.

because my memories did not end at that time,
   but unraveled within me, like a primrose
        upon the that hill...
        ...and being here again
           gave me that chill not just from the English frost....

Simply. Whoa. Where does it all go?