(Way, Way) Back There The Story Starts

The song ends.

A weary hand slips out from beneath the heaps of quilts, feels for the Panasonic on the plain wood floor, and turns the cassette tape to Side 2. Quickly, the hand rejoins its owner in the warmth of the bed.

Happy, syncopated rhythms in mono sound from the cassette recorder compete with winter winds howling outside the farmhouse’s upstairs bedroom. Then exhaustion from the day’s cold and work outside sets in. The four boys doze off as Santana's guitar plays on.

It was Christmas 1970 and my older brothers' new cassette recorder introduced a new phase of life, new rhythms, a new musician and a new language. (Our school only offered German as a foreign language. The one family in town with a hint of Hispanic roots, the Duarte brothers’ surname we thoroughly anglicized. Nobody said Duarte, we all said Dwoordee.) Carlos Santana’s name got similar treatment, even as his Abraxus album got played over and over on those nights in the unheated bedroom until we fell asleep.

Lying dormant for decades, this childhood memory revived for me as our own kids began passing from childhood to adolescence. Just as my brothers and I had left behind homemade toboggans and go-carts and sparrow shooting with the BB gun in the barn’s hay mow, our own boys were moving on.

The memory surfaced on Christmas a couple years back. That year's batch of presents had brought into our home a bass guitar. The drum kit was getting some new accessories - a ride cymbal and stand. The kids' Duplos had already been stored years before; even the little Lego lilliputians were seeing fewer visits from the Gullivers who assembled their world.

I wrote down the reality of time never waiting for any mortal; the paper got shoved in a drawer. Months later at the school's spring concert, a new Santana stimulus when the band played Oye Como Va. The boy in me remembered the rhythm and late night 70's radio in the car.

One day in March, Santana came to town. He brought his guitars, his band and a whole lot of songs.