saeculum

the second day of Woodstock
was the day I arrived in this world—
half a million people
in a borrowed field
still believing
the mud and the music
might be enough
to hold the world together.

Nixon was president.
the radio didn’t know that yet.
it was still playing as if nothing else mattered.

I learned to read
during Watergate,
sounded out the syllables
of words I wasn’t even supposed to be aware of—
resign, impeach, betrayal —
while the eight-track in the living room
cycled through to the next song
without asking permission,
the way we listened to music then:
out loud,
in the shared air,
belonging to everyone in the room.

Ford told us it was over.
that we could go back to normal now.

there was no normal to go back to.
there never is.

Carter asked us to be patient.
I was ten.
I played Atari.
I watched too much television.
patience felt like
we were waiting for something
that was never arriving—

and then someone put a Walkman
in my hands
and music
went somewhere it had never been before:

inside.

just me.
just the headphones.
just the cassette
I had chosen
for myself.

Reagan arrived the same year.
big shoulders, good hair,
a voice like a country song
that didn’t ask too much of you.
I was twelve.
I wanted to believe him
the way you believe a song
when it finds you alone —

and I did,
for a while —
because I was twelve,
and when you’re twelve
the world is still
a thing that happens to other people.

I became a man
under the elder Bush—
or I thought I did.
MTV was teaching me
what desire was supposed to look like.
the Gulf War played
on the same channel,
clean and distant,
like a video game
nobody won.

Clinton convinced us we were all exhaling.
I was twenty-two.
grunge had just screamed itself
into something quieter,
and we were buying CDs
at the mall
of albums we already owned on tape,
paying twice
for the same songs,
convinced somehow
this version would last forever…

and the future felt like a place
I was actually going to get to visit.

then little Bush
and a Tuesday in September
that rearranged everything —
the before and after of it
still sitting in my chest
like a stone
that never finished falling.

two wars.
a whole decade
of learning to live
with the sound of something
we couldn’t name yet.

I put ten thousand songs in my pocket.
I walked around
listening to all of them
and none of them
at the same time.

Obama felt like
a held breath releasing —
or maybe just
another kind of holding on.
I was almost forty.
I had a daughter by then.
I was trying to explain the world to her
and finding I couldn’t
quite remember
the instructions.

we streamed music by then.
we didn’t own it anymore.
we just
borrowed it
from a server somewhere
we’d never see.

Obama felt like
a held breath releasing —
or maybe just
another kind of holding on.
I was almost forty.
I had a daughter by then.
I was trying to explain the world to her
and finding I couldn’t
quite remember
the instructions.

we streamed music then.
we didn’t own it anymore.
we just
borrowed it
from a server somewhere
we’d never see.

nobody tells you
that longing for the past
is just longing —
that nostalgia is just grief
that hasn’t admitted
what it’s actually grieving —
that the past is just
where you left it.

then the bottom dropped out.

Trump.
Biden.
a virus that locked every door
and told us to sit
with ourselves
for as long as it took —

and the concert halls went dark.
every stage in the world
went dark.
musicians played to their phones,
to empty rooms,
to the idea of an audience
they couldn’t touch.

what Woodstock believed —
that if you put enough people
in a field
with the same song playing —

briefly,
impossible.

and what we found
sitting in the silence
of March 2020
was that the world
we thought we lived in
had been a courtesy,
a shared agreement
we didn’t know
we were all maintaining
until we stopped.

and the agreement ended.
nobody announced it.
it just…
ended.

I am fifty-six years old.

Trump’s back.

the field in Bethel, New York
is a museum now.
you can find it on Google Maps —
satellite view,
thirty-nine dollars admission,
gift shop,
parking.

Nixon was president
the day I was born
into a world
that thought the answer
was everyone
in the same place
at the same time
making the same noise.

I’m still not sure
they were wrong.