Last night, I was driving alone along a deserted stretch of a coastal highway, listening to a song from the seventies. Out across the Gulf, past the endless rows of mangroves, the full moon sparkled on the waves. It was soothing and mesmerizing - the music and the moon and the sea.

It was "Sunshine on my Shoulders," from 1971. Listening, I was pulled into a kind of swirl, a swirl of memory, a living black-light poster, like the kind we used to pin to our bedroom walls.

In that spin, I was moved to a tree-lined Chicago street, which smelled of dandelions and pine and fresh-cut grass.

It was the summer of 1971. My father had just moved our family into an old Victorian home, three stories tall and filled with leaves and ghosts, across the street from a city park. Our old brick house, silly and small, could have fit inside our new coach-house garage.

My memories of 1971 are jumbled. They're an odd collection of stuff, like piles of old Polaroids and candy wrappers and album covers spread out on my bedroom floor. Things that fell out of my pockets, like Bazooka bubble gum cartoons and real silver dimes and my pool pass. The key to my bike lock.

Some of these memories, these jumbled feelings, make me especially miss my father.

I remember my father then - it was a time of excitement and hope when we moved into that big old house. I can see my father in glimpses of images during those days. I can see his short hair and his buttoned blue oxford shirt. Coming through the green screen door on our old back porch after he came home from his gallery.

I can't explain why, but there's a heartache there. A sadness. It's a sense of loss - for the passing of young hope and endless possibilities into future days of reality. But it's so comforting that I know how the story ends. And it's a happy ending.

Hopeful. Happy. Sad. It was the 70's.

During that summer in 1971, there were several of us who would hang out in the park across the street. There was famous old pine tree in one corner of the place. It had huge, gnarled old branches that stretched out across the concrete city water fountain just below it. Three giant shoulder-high branches around the trunk. We'd take turns on them, smelling the sticky pine sap and listening to the gurgle of the water from the fountain below. Patches of the summer sun on our faces.

For us - at those moments - time stood still. We didn't think of existence outside that moment. Outside our world. Or beyond that afternoon. We knew what we knew. The park, the trees. The ice-cold water fountain. The summer sky and the pine sap and the dandelions.

We didn't know then, sitting on those branches, that the 173rd Airborne Brigade was being deployed to Southeast Asia, where they would fight under that same summer sun, collecting nearly 6,000 Purple Hearts in those summer days while we drank from our fountain of youth under the pine tree.

I was so young I didn't pay much attention to the radio. I didn't have a record player. But good heavens, 1971 was a magical year of music. It brought the world Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Joan Baez, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, the Who, Cat Stevens, Issac Hayes, Gladys Knight, and Aretha Franklin.

Among them, was a hippie country singer named John Denver. His was a sweet, soothing, and melodic voice.

In 1971, John Denver sang about a day. One day, with sunshine and perfection. A perfect day that he poetically sought ways to share with us.

I never thought much about the song until that night, driving along I-75.

But as I listened, I remembered the timelessness of that summer in 1971, with the speckled summer sun shining on us as we clung to our pine tree.

And, across the street in that old Victorian house, hope. The hope I see now, in the fullness of time, in the images of my young father. His hope for the future. In those memories, I feel happiness and a certain sadness.

And now, I better understand Denver's words. It is a moment of bliss and perfection - impossible to fulfill except in memory. The happiness that exists in the innocent hope of days past. Discovered in a time warp. Ageless and timeless. The time of a life, of youth, of childhood, of old age. But that perfect moment is there. That perfect day of sunshine is there.

And that day is a day like just like - a timeless today.

In 1971.

If I had a day that I could give you
I'd give you a day just like today
If I had a song that I could sing for you
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine, almost always, makes me high

If I had a tale that I could tell you
Id tell a tale sure to make you smile
If I had a wish that I could wish for you
I'd make a wish for sunshine all the while

#coastal highway

Summer 1971, a day just like today