I want to tell you what I am. I'm a young man whose next birthday will be his fortieth. My parents will be in their sixties soon and yet they left The Sixties a long time ago. I remember riding on the back of my father's motorcycle and long trips through the woods. I remember the peace signs on our VW Bug and my mother telling me that it ran on gasoline but that people run on love. All those memories are fading and I don't have any photographs so they're all I've got left. My father is now a God-fearing conservative in the worst sense of those words and my mother simply shrugs their past off of as something they both "grew out of" after joining the Real World. And the people I meet now, the friends and the loved ones, they don't understand. They don't speak that language and as time goes by I'm getting less fluent myself; the words don't come out right anymore. A few years ago I took a trip out to California and visited San Francisco for the first and only time. I didn't wear a flower in my hair but that's just as well -- on a larger scale it was just the same as visiting my folks. To get where I wanted to be would have taken more than gasoline or love, it would have taken a time machine. I don't think I like the Real World. Nobody told me about it, nobody prepared me for what it was going to be like when we got here. And now when I look around for the parents who brought me, the ones who taught me to sing and laugh and to care... well I can't find them and I don't know where I am anymore. I am an immigrant who wants to go home.
My life started at 39! I`ve had the best time as now i have the age wisdom and confidence to do what i want, and wont suffer fools gladly...and i`m not afraid to say it!! You go boy and be the best you can be!!! Have super fun!!!
I didn't grow up with hippy parents, but I felt this feeling at a very early age. I remember church and hearing about loving your neighbors but there was always war and racial tensions and and and... Your immigrant analogy is very elegant.. I think a lot of people here feel this way.. so welcome home.
