A Ticket to Anywhere

Aretha Franklin knew what she was talking about. “Music does a lot of things for a lot of people,” the Queen of Soul once said. “It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life.” I did some emotional time traveling last week while listening to Eighties songs on YouTube. I was barely attention to the hits as they went rolling by until Tracy Chapman’s “ Fast Car ” came on. And then I was flying, bouncing through the years until I reached 1988, when I had just moved to Stroudsburg, PA to work as a reporter at the Pocono Record. This was more than a typical memory or recollection. It really seemed like I was back at my old apartment on Scott Street, feeling so lost and unsure of myself, convinced I had made a terrible mistake by moving here from Brooklyn, but too terrified to do anything but keep going forward. At the time there was an agent looking my novel, while a buddy of mine and his partner were tr...