There is a radio station out there at the crossroads of nowhere and everywhere. Out in the outlands beyond all lands, where the night wind blows in off the desert and the highways stretch out into forever.
Where the Sun never rises to bring the mundane morning, but the Moon is always full and bigger than she should be and she shines down a silver day as the stars gleam bright in the vast black of the big sky and form unfamiliar constellations.
The radio station is an outpost of light in an endless summer night, its walls gleaming chrome, its neon signs showing call letters that no one can read, its broadcast tower shining steel lit by flickers of lightning and St. Elmo’s Fire.
That radio station plays rock and roll endlessly, the essence of rock and roll, and if you ever hear it, you’ll know the endless summer night that it’s playing from, because that night is yours.
In that endless summer night where the radio plays, it’s always the summer when you were young and strong and beautiful and free, and love was new and passion was wild and your heart was unscarred.
It’s the summer when you read the bus schedules over and over, when you walked to the edge of town and looked out over the highway, over the hills, over the shining horizon, and you knew your destiny was there, and adventure called to you from every song.
And that endless summer night is the night when you danced around the fire and made love in the tall grass and the music played on and on and on.
You hear the echo of that summer still, in the best part of your heart.
And maybe some night if you heard that music over the radio, coming in pure and true from that radio station on the borderlands of forever, the circle would close between youth and age and the wheel would turn and the stone would roll away and you could step out again into that endless summer night, where the world was new and you stood straight and strong.
Maybe. If you could be brave. If you could be true. If your heart isn’t too old to hear.
But whether or not you can hear, the radio station still plays.
And there are still those who tune their transistor radios to the AM bands in the deep part of the night, and they hide under the covers and they listen for the sounds from the far-off cities of dreams where hope hasn’t yet run dry.
And they hear something from much further away, coming in pure and true.
They hear that radio station, playing rock and roll in the endless summer night.
And they get ready for their turn to dance.
