Alex DeGrassi and the future

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGNIUZWFUSQ

When I was 22 I moved into my first solo apartment.  It was a one-bedroom, ground floor apartment in a big complex, on a gritty, busy, treeless street in the smoggy San Fernando Valley area of Southern California.  I remember I used to sit inside on Saturday or Sunday mornings, drink coffee and open the windows (if there weren't too many children screaming up and down the stairs or teenagers blasting their boomboxes by the swimming pool) and listen to this album.

It made me think about places far away from any city, places with clear, blue skies, lots of open space and precious little concrete.  

It took me many years after that to finally leave the city and go and live someplace where the skies were actually clear and there was more to see out the window than a concrete deck and swimming pool, surrounded by towers of other apartment buildings just like mine where people would live, spend their free hours, grow old, and eventually die in.

I'd like to think I always knew I would make it out, but in truth, those Saturday mornings in my crappy little apartment were more about dreaming than about practical planning.  

Well, at least I thought I was just dreaming.  Now I look out over our land and wonder if perhaps I knew that somehow, I belonged out in those open spaces, and that one day I'd be there.  I wish I could go back in time and tell my 22 year-old self to hang in there, keep listening to music like this, and imagine the possibilities that would one day become reality.