I wrote this song while I was sitting under my favorite tree in Salem—a tree we used to call “The Love Tree” when we were kids. This enormous, fat oak lives in the Salem Willows right near the water and can be easily climbed. Even to this day kids will carve their initials on its long, sturdy branches— usually with a heart and arrow surrounding the letters.

The mighty tree didn’t seem to care. It would slowly grow a new layer of skin over the love mark and bide its time for the next young lovers to immortalize their hearts upon the tree.

Such a beautiful tree. Every time I visit the Willows I tend to visit this tree. It’s like an old friend. Each line of this song corresponds to a motif of memories from my childhood. From coloring outside the lines, navigating the maze of pylons under of the Salem Willow’s pier to sneak a puff of a cigarette, watching the sunset rise, shivering before my first confession, detecting aspects of ecumenical peace from a certain Dore etching in a school Catechism in Earth angel Sister Josephine Teresa’s class, finding the majesty of silence skating on a lonesome pond across from my mom and dad’s grocery store, loving my childhood and gradually rejecting death and the Church, staying back in the sixth grade and retreating to a comic book flip art world, carving the names of Karen & Jenny & Caroline & Patty on the loving arms of the Love Tree, making scrapbooks and collages, digging deeper into myths, digging music, really digging water torching surf music and Duane Eddy and the Ventures, getting intimate with knowledge, reading Golding and Steinbeck and Orwell, unraveling the lies of dictators and history, distancing myself from the rituals of teenage despair, finding hope in the skipping stones of the Beatles and Brian Wilson, finding love in the wondrous jest of my father dying, but waiting for my mom to be present for his last breath—from all these things and more—the comfort and calm and transcendent serenity afforded to me by the presence of the tree reveals life’s longevity, its beauty, and its impermanence.

Time and remembrance educate us about the here and now, why and when, how and who. These are enough for me to see that what it is, it is; what we are, we are. And to make it more than it is and more than we are is to fight over what it is and what we are. XTC’s Andy Partridge once said, “Do what you want, but hurt no one.” What a clear prescription. I quote my mother: “Don’t fight.”