Mixtape and Woodgrain

I woke up one morning after hearing the news that Cracker Barrel was changing its logo and removing Uncle Herschel, along with a number of other changes that, to me, seemed to threaten the soul of the whole experience.

It struck a nerve.

Not because a logo is terribly important in the grand scheme of things. It was because it represented something familiar. Something that had been sitting in the landscape of my life for so long. And suddenly, even that was changing.

Then I started thinking about all the other things that had quietly slipped away.

The things I remember so fondly.

Sights. Smells. Sounds. Places. Objects. Little routines that were so ordinary at the time that I never imagined I’d someday miss them.

I didn’t even make it out of bed.

I lay there in the easy morning sunlight, staring at the ceiling, and started collecting those memories in my head. Craftsman wrenches hanging on the back wall at Sears. Leaving the couch to change the television channel. Stretching the telephone cord as far as it would reach while trying to do something else with the other hand. Streamers flying from the handlebars of a Western Flyer bicycle.

Things that were never supposed to be important.

But somehow they became important because they belonged to our time.

And underneath all those memories was something much deeper.

The people.

Dad’s work boots on the floor.

The sound of a house that was full of people who, at the time, I assumed would always be there.

That’s where the song eventually took me.

I know the song leans hard into campy nostalgia. There are brand names and old images and things that may seem almost silly when you put them all together. But I think that’s part of the point. Memory doesn’t preserve our lives in neat historical categories. It preserves fragments.

A lable.

A bicycle.

A telephone cord.

A smell coming from the kitchen.

A voice from another room.

A pair of boots on the floor.

And sometimes those fragments are all we have left.

We have no choice but to carry on. That’s what time demands of us. We grow older. The places change. The things disappear. The people we love eventually become memories themselves.

But every once in a while, I find myself wondering what I might pay for a trip in a time machine.

Not to stay there.

Just to go back for a few minutes.

To see it.

To hear it.

To feel it.

To stand in an ordinary room on an ordinary morning and experience something I didn’t know was precious until it was “a long time gone”.

Maybe I’d even crawl down beside the couch and find a few pennies under the cushion.

Because back then, I didn’t know they were pennies from another lifetime.

I just knew they were there.

And sometimes I think I’d give just about anything to find them there again.

One more time.