A soundtrack for childhood memories

I was going on 13 when I started listening to “Tea for the Tillerman.” It was 1971. We’d recently escaped the rat race, as my parents called it, and moved to the sticks in North Idaho, only 8 miles from the Canadian border, our nearest neighbor over 2 miles away.

Can’t say who got the album for us. My older brother and I couldn’t have since we didn’t have any money and zero knowledge of what to buy. May have been one of my hippie-ish older cousins who got it for us out of pity, what with no TV to watch in those narrow confines of the Moyie River Valley. But maybe my parents were actually more with it than I gave them credit for.

What I do remember is that we wore the vinyl grooves down pretty deep, using our old record player endlessly, especially on those long winter days when we were snowed in and there was nothing else to do but tend the fire, read and listen to music. We had one of those cheap plastic models that allowed you to stack four or five records at a time so you could listen uninterrupted for hours at a time. Or, you could set it so the same record played over and over. Did that quite a bit with this album.

We had some other albums. My Dad’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Henry Mancini, and for the times we were feeling more majestic, Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” A couple others kinda fit the budding teenagers we were: John Denver’s “Poems, Prayers, and Promises” and Carole King’s “Tapestry.” We weren’t allowed any rock yet, or maybe we were just oblivious, what with us hiding deep in the woods and all.

Cat Stevens’ album would be the one that stuck with me, the one that I’d listen to later in life and play for my kids. “Tea for the Tillerman” evokes memories of time spent playing in the Moyie, of shoveling snow and of sweetness and of innocence and of purity.

Of our own “Stand By Me” story – my brother and I, trailed by our dogs, walking down the paired silver rails that glistened out into the distance before us under the hot summer sun, on our way to adventure. “On the Road to Find Out” we were “Miles from Nowhere,” when we discovered an abandoned hippie commune. Maybe they’d just gone into town for supplies – it was so torn up, messy and wild, yet at the same time it still looked lived in. It felt really weird being there, but we did discover a Playboy. Our first. That was something.

I remember listening to “Father and Son” in those days and wondering if I would leave home. Later, I listened to the same song and wondered how it was going to go with my teenage boys. It’s strange, looking back, to see how quickly I’d gone from being the son to being the father.

I can put the album on now, not vinyl anymore, and I know every sound and song in order, completely memorized.

I can put on any of the album’s 11 tracks, and I’m in my youth, with my brother, in the wilderness. It feels now as though we had lived that album, and that I was one of those kids playing in the tree on the cover, back in the days when the words and music were imprinting themselves upon my brain, and I was sure to have my way.