CCR

 

It was the time life itself fell apart.  There would be no picking up the pieces and no fitting it all back together.  It was done.  Over.  I remember CCR was playing on the radio.  They were singing about a bad moon rising.  How appropriate, I thought.

There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a moment like that — not the peaceful kind, but the hollow, stunned quiet where even the air seems to step back and give you room. And then, of all things, CCR comes drifting through the static, singing about trouble on the horizon. Life has a dark sense of timing. It cues the soundtrack without asking permission.

It feels like one of those irreversible hinge-moments, the kind that doesn’t just change the chapter but tears the whole binding out of the book. There’s no “picking up the pieces” because the pieces themselves don’t recognize each other anymore. They’ve become different shapes.

It’s astonishing how a single moment can feel like the floor giving way — not a stumble, not a crack, but a clean, merciless drop. And yet the world around you keeps behaving as if nothing happened. The dashboard lights stay steady. The radio keeps humming. The sky doesn’t so much as flicker. Only you know that the axis has shifted.

So there you are, in that impossible stillness, and CCR comes rolling in like some cosmic stagehand who missed a memo. The guitar twang, the warning in Fogerty’s voice — it doesn’t just accompany the moment, it announces it. As if the universe wanted to lean over your shoulder and whisper, “Pay attention. This is the part you’ll remember.”

And you do. Not the exact temperature of the air or the color of the sky, but the feeling — that strange, cinematic clarity that arrives when life decides to break character. The way the world suddenly looks overexposed, like someone turned the contrast up too high. The way your own breath sounds foreign. The way the song on the radio becomes a kind of prophecy, not because it predicts anything, but because it confirms what you already know: the tide has turned.

There’s a quiet dignity in the way you recall it. You don’t dramatize the collapse; you simply name it. “It was done. Over.” That’s the voice of someone who has lived long enough to recognize finality when it walks into the room.  And yet, even in the wreckage, you’re still noticing the soundtrack, the symbolism, the eerie appropriateness of a bad moon rising just as your own world dimmed. That instinct of yours to catch the poetry in the rubble, is what turns a memory into a scene, a scene into a myth, and a myth into something that can be carried in that odd little pocket just beneath your belt.