The predawn chill passes through my flimsy night gown as I creep downstairs. I shiver -- hugging my small arms around my flat, as of yet breastless, chest. Curled up on the brown living room couch, I watch my mother get ready for work. It's very early; the sun isn't even up yet. Ethereal blue-grey light fills the dun colored living room. I tuck my cold bare feet under my small body. I'm six. It's 1978. And my mom's getting ready to leave for work. We've just moved here - to my mother's parents' house out on Long Island. After much turmoil and strife my mom went "home to mother", taking her three children with her. But she kept her job in a hair salon in Brooklyn, out of necessity and stability. It's a 50 mile drive every morning. And every night.

I lean my head on the back of the couch and watch my mother expertly apply her "face". A cheap, tinny radio plays softly in accompaniment to her careful movements. The song? "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty.

To this day that song brings up crystal clear emotions and feelings of that day, those times, so very long ago. Music is a very powerful memory trigger for me. I get almost hallucinogenic flashbacks from the music of my childhood. "Life's Been Good" by Joe Walsh will always evoke instant summer - sitting on the hot, sticky armrest in the back seat of my mom's '64 Corvair convertible; heat like a blast furnace searing through the seats as we wait dead stopped in traffic -- one car in a long river of cars stretching from here to the beach. Any song from the "Grease" soundtrack transports me to our powder blue velvet fold-out couch that my two older brothers and I shared when we first fled Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, when the couch was the center piece of our living room, we were loath to sit on it. Now it was our communal bed. But Baker Street, that will always be predawn -- blue haze -- shivers -- achy throat and tears of a mother gone away.