Photo by Hayden Scott on Unsplash

Oklahoma’s gravel road’s take me back to yesterday in the dusty corners of my mind

Where do you live?

For such a simple, straightforward question that everyone has heard and answered countless times, it can be nonetheless intimidating. I worry that an honest answer will provoke raised eyebrows with rolling eyes just south of them and an accusatory little smirk that I infer is aimed at the crazy place I choose to spend my days and nights.

That’s because . . . I live in my head.

It is the same place that the late, great John Prine claimed to live in his 2019 song “The Lonesome Friends of Science.” I had thought I understood why Prine had taken up residence there from the way he began the song:

The lonesome friends of science say

The world will end most any day

Well, if it does, then that’s okay

’Cause I don’t live here anyway

I live down deep inside my head

Well, long ago, I made my bed

I get my mail in Tennessee

My wife, my dog and my family

It sounded to me like such a safe, idyllic life, and just the place to lead it. Especially in these conflicted times. And that was before a pandemic swallowed up the world and left us with something less.

Prine, who chronicled the human condition with his sharply quirky mind and music, had had enough difficult conditions before the coronavirus came along and ended his life in April 2020. He had been compromised by surgery in 1998 to remove a cancerous tumor from his neck and in the process  his vocal cords were damaged. Then, in 2013, more cancer cost him a lung. Still John Prine sang on, because it was never his voice or lung capacity that made him uniquely powerful. It was his ideas and words.

Living in my own lesser head, as I do, I couldn’t fully appreciate that Prine’s inspiration came more from his interest in the Vulcan, the largest cast-iron statue in the world, and in Pluto’s demotion to lesser planet. I found an explanation on Songfacts®: “I’ve always been kind of fascinated by the Vulcan in Birmingham, Alabama, and have tried to write a song about it for years,” Prine once explained. “When I heard how Pluto was demoted from a planet to a star”—actually, the International Astronomical Union in 2006 created a new definition for planets that left Pluto out in the cold like other “icy objects” similar to Pluto—“I wanted to write about it. I think the two stories complement each other.”

Whether with my down-home, nostalgic take on “The Lonesome Friends of Science” or Prine’s more inventive interpretations of Pluto being “uninvited to the interplanetary dance” and Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and smithery, being dumped by Venus “long ago for a guy named Mars from Idaho,” the song is endearing and witty. “Incredibly endearing and witty” were the exact words that Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Bonnie Raitt used to describe the former mailman “whose stuff,” Bob Dylan has concurred, “is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.”

It is easier to take mind trips if your head is the place where you live, the place from which you both embark and always seem to return. Elvis may have left the building but some of us never really leave our heads. And that is not so bad if your head is on right. I’ve never been sure that mine is but that can be the fate of writers of all stripes. I consider Prine a writer whose medium allowed for, even required, taking small-but-important facts of life and mixing them with imagination to create a unique amalgam.

Garrison Keillor, a Midwestern guy like Prine, invented Lake Wobegone, a fictional Minnesota town that could feel so real a person might think they lived there and knew all the characters who were as real as their neighbors. These days he writes Garrison Keillor and Friends on Substack newsletter and one of those friends asked whether his line “We live in a city of memories” was original. Keillor replied: “Though I did once say ‘We live in a city of memories’ it doesn’t sound brilliant or profound, so I imagine it is original.” Self-deprecation is, I think, a symptom of living in the mind and not wanting anyone to believe you think that it is a more profound place than their actual worlds.

Author Reggie Nadelson this week took readers of T, The New York Times Style Magazine on trip to Coney Island, a “child’s dreamscape” of which he began to partake with his father when he was a boy in the late 1950s, a childhood time period that I share. Only in little Nowata, Oklahoma, we didn’t have Nathan’s Famous Hot-Dog Stand (that is a city block), the boardwalk, amusement parks with rides that made throwing up afterward “a rite of passage” and Dreamland, “with its million electric lights and iconic central tower, which famously appears on the jacket of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1958 poetry collection, “A Coney Island of the Mind.” If Ferlinghetti’s poetry is food for thought, a Nathan’s Famous was, Nadelson remembers, “something to be savored.”

“It’s about nostalgia,” Nadelson wrote, and although Coney Island is “smaller now, less glamorous than it once was . . . there are few better places to take a subway for a day out. And when I’m there, in my head, I’m always 9 and it’s always summer.”

In small-town Oklahoma, we rode bikes not subways and we didn’t have an ocean. We didn’t even have a town swimming pool during my early childhood. We had dusty gravel roads on which we could safely ride to swimming holes and fishing cricks. We had a soda fountain at the drug store over which we danced the nights away at Teen Town. We had a pool hall. It was a simpler time of ballfields and buddies, football games and girls. The danger now is losing those memories, of getting lost in a mind that has become my only real home, of misremembering and imagining it to be different, better, from what it really was. You aren’t always young. . . . It isn’t always summer. . . . And, the girl won’t always love you.