Beside You

To me this song is about time passing, human life. I find it very nostalgic. Perhaps a father looking upon his young son, seeing how time is fleeting, and mourns the loss of his own childhood. Probably more likely there is only one person - standing beside their younger self with compassion as they remember their young life. In any case, I shall call the older person the father, and the younger, the son.

Little Jimmy goes on his first adventure, just like any boy when they reach a certain age - that is, right on time. The falling rain give the sense of time passing in the present, slipping past.

I imagine Broken Arrow as an old American Indian mystic, pointing down the road of life. Time only goes in one direction, there is only one way to go, but its never easy.

Now the father (or the lone person) thinks back on another frozen moment, some peak experience from his own childhood, just before the Sunday church bells chime. But even in memory those bells must chime, nothing can stop time or hold it. The bells chime, the dogs bark, life goes on.

The father thinks of the boys future life, and sees that it is good, a 'diamond studded highway', alluding back to the road in Broken Arrow's prophecy. But unfortunately this means he must lose his innocence and the rapture of childhood.

The scrapbooks are I think both the literal scrapbooks which the son will throw away soon, but also the memories collected during a lifetime, which now pour from the father.

The loss of childhood, the passing of time, this visitation of the son, is painful to the father. He experiences nostalgia or sweet sadness as he consider passing time, it confounds him. He advises the son better to live in the ecstatic present a not worry about such matters.

Then the father imagines himself visiting, and actually interacting with the son (the younger version of himself). Can memories reach back in time, like a time machine? As if the father visits the child during their sleep, with a lantern, caresses them, leaves an imprint on the child. Then he's the child again, 'remembering' the same event from a different perspective 'You held it in the doorway and you cast against the pointed island breeze' - the father with a ghostly lantern in the doorway.

'Said your time was open, go well on your merry way' - This is the now, remembering what the father said - you have a life in front of you, live it well.

Now he has really recaptured the ecstasy of his childhood, breathing in, breathing out, high on the high-flying cloud etc.

The 'never wonder why' reminds me of Wordsworth's 'Above Tintern Abbey': "Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures."