According to author Thomas Wolfe, you can't go home again.  What he meant (if I remember my Lit. 101 class) is that home changes while we're away.  Our past is a moving target; one not necessarily moving in the same direction we are.

In short, things change.

I've always more or less accepted this as a truism, until recently.  When I attempted, for the first time ever, to "go home."

But maybe I'd better back up a ways, to 1973, when this tale really begins.

I was in high school, a sophomore, maybe, or a junior; I don't really remember and I'm too lazy to do the math.  High school was, for me, mostly an annoyance that took up time I would rather have spent on ... well, almost anything.  I skipped a lot, and on those rare occasions I was in class, I paid little attention to what was going on there.

I was not a model student.

My parents were worried about my future (mostly, that my future would involve me living with them well into my thirties).  For my part, I was not worried in the least.  I had a goal.  I had ambition.  I had my life planned out, baby!  With nothing left to chance.

I was going to be a rock star.

Yup.  A rock star.  I knew three chords, had a red electric guitar and long hair, and I was in a band.  I didn't know it at the time, of course, but I was in a terrible band.  Even our name was terrible: Batwipe and the Dead Fish (don't ask).  None of the other guys in the band knew we were terrible, either.  Amazingly, nobody had the heart to tell us!  Not our folks, not our friends ... nobody.  Where's that jerky guy from "American Idol" when you really need him?

So, not knowing we stank like week-old road kill, we got together every day after school and rehearsed.  And rehearsed some more.  Then some more.  The same 13 songs, over and over and over, up in my bedroom or out in the garage, weather permitting, for over two years!

And I wondered why my parents sometimes acted crazy.

We did manage to land a few gigs during the years we were together.  All but one of these were "non-paying" jobs, but we didn't mind; every public appearance brought us one step closer to rock stardom.

Eventually, the band dissolved and we all went our separate ways.  The years passed, as they have a way of doing, and I came to realize that I was not going to be a rock star after all.

The decades slipped by and those years of practice, of scrounging for gigs, arguing with band-mates about girls, lyrics and chord changes ... all those things shuffled like grains of sand through time's great sifter, burnishing to a golden-hued patina as they fell.

Until at last what once were experiences became nothing more than memories, images of another life captured in time's immutable amber. The middle-aged man who looks back at me each morning from the bathroom mirror and the 16-year-old hippie he once was could no longer talk to each other, not really.  The two were as disparate as Baby New Year and Father Time.

Then I got an e-mail from Dale, who in the long, long ago, had been the band's bass player.  I hadn't seen or talked with Dale in about 30 years, so there was plenty to catch up on.  Who got married, divorced, had kids, grandkids ... we got all that out of the way in the first three e-mails.  Then, we started talking about the "glory days," when the future still glimmered and glowed with promise and our lives were laid out in front of us like a virgin field before the plow.

About 50 e-mails later, we decided to track down Terry and Bob, the other two guys from the band.  A week after that, we'd made plans to meet up for the 34^th reunion of the band's first rehearsal (Jan. 9).

I was a little nervous, mostly because of Thomas Wolfe's admonition (Can't go home, remember?).   I mean, 30-odd years is a lot of blacktop under the tires.  I knew I wasn't the same goofy kid who had dreamed of opening for The Edgar Winter Group all those years ago; surely the other guys had changed at least as much as me.

I realized I had planned dinner with a bunch of strangers.

To make matters worse, we had agreed to bring our wives and/or significant others.  I had doomed not only myself to an uncomfortable evening with a bunch of strangers, but The Lovely Mrs. Taylor as well.

The date finally arrived and with some palpable trepidation on my part, Mrs. T and I drove to Applebee's, as planned.  She did her best to assure me it would be a fun evening, but I had my doubts.

The hostess showed us to our table, where Terry and Dale were already seated.  Or rather, two old guys who looked vaguely like Terry and Dale.  I'm guessing they were thinking the same thing about me.  Bob arrived a few minutes later, bereft of hair!

It was uncomfortable for about two minutes as we floundered around, trying to figure out whom these people - once upon a time our best friends - were now.  Then slowly, like a morning mist burning off the surface of a quiet lake, we began to realize, all of us, that we hadn't really changed so much after all.

We were older, fatter, wrinklier, balder ... sure ... but all that was the outside.  Inside, we weren't really much different from the four scruffy kids who had spent endless hours annoying the neighbors from the confines of my parents' garage.

Together, at least for that one evening, we occupied a space out of time, where summers don't end, hair never goes gray and good friends refuse to drop out of each others' lives.

We stayed at the restaurant much later than I had planned.  None of us wanted to see the evening end.  Nevertheless, it did.

Reluctantly, we shook hands, made promises to get together again soon, and drove our separate cars away from 1973 and back into the present, where waited mortgages, parent-teacher conferences, jobs, responsibilities, and the cold, hard truth that we are not, and never will be, rock stars.

But for that one night, at least, we did get to go home again.

Take that, Thomas Wolfe.

Addendum: In the weeks since our dinner, we've made good on our promise to get together again.  We're meeting for lunch in February and - may the gods have mercy on our listeners' ears - we're even playing one last, final gig together; not surprisingly a "non-paid" gig, late this month, for the guys at the Veteran's Facility in Grand Rapids.  Still, who knows, if it goes well we may yet wind up being rock stars!  We even have a Web site (www.gbrothers.com/bw_homepage.html) so we're halfway there.

You can e-mail Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or reasons why old guys shouldn't be playing rock and roll, to: mtaylor@midmich.net.  Or you can reach him via snail mail at Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429