I remember blackberry bushes growing wild everywhere. The drive between San Francisco and San Jose was lined with endless pastures, rolling hills, half collapsed barns, and railroad tracks. Nothing but golden hills.

Little towns appeared at the intersections of divided highways and county roads, three shops and a gas station. Music playing on the radio, little girls smiling over Archie comics at the check stand. Digging through lost issues of comic books which were still only twenty cents. The drive took forever, and the sky went on without end.

Stopping at a road side stand to buy strawberries, and we ended up eating so many we had to pull into a Dairy Queen to use the bathroom. As a curious reward we would get a vanilla softie dipped into that chocolate which hardened and contained the quickly melting desert just long enough to eat every bite. My mother would always get a small coke, sipping it slowly and then making the empty sound with the bottom of the straw against the wax covered cup.

And from the luggage compartment, laying on our backs, looking up at the sky, it seemed like the long day was captured in the dust which danced in the beams of light shining in through the read window. It seemed like we would never arrive. But when we arrived, it felt like we were a million miles away. Sitting in our short pants on the bump of a front lawn of my Grand mother’s house, tossing firecrackers into the street, watching the neighbor girls walk around and around the block. Looking at us. Thinking about them. Positive that we would never grow up.

Now in our forties, my brother and I look at each other with a similar blank gaze. There is much less connection, and almost no association. We haven’t got much to talk about, even though we are both bright, and very busy men. We no longer struggle for the front seat of the Volks Wagon, and there are no more bruises on my arm from his attention. We have broken families of our own. Histories which do not intersect at all.

But somewhere in his eyes, somewhere in the distance of his face I can smell the fields of highway 101, the putrid flare of Milpetas, the sweet chocolate shell of desert, and the promise of the world rolled out in front of us. A road which has not lead us where either one of us expected it to go. I did not turn out to be a world famous rock star, hair flowing over my shoulders. He did not become a dare devil pilot, searing the canopy of his secret test plane against the topmost layer of our atmosphere. Neither of us went on to write comic books, or draw them. And we never met Donny Osmond, or Sid Vicious.

The California we grew up in, the wide open spaces, the hot sticker bushes, the quiet faced people from a different time and place, the key parties, the quaaludes, the babysitter willing to show you her breasts, the 8th grade french teacher who invited me back to her house to make love, the father of my best friend asking me if it was ok to do it again, my long, thick, beautiful hair, tight pants, bell bottoms, huge combs, and Led Zeppelin playing all night, every night on KFRC.

Unique damage from a unique place. A time lost — gone forever.