Back to the Yard
About This Song
A few months before my 25th college reunion in 2016, I received The Red Book in the mail, a dictionary-sized hardcover filled with personal updates from my classmates. Inside were stories of professional success, loving families, creative achievement, international adventures, prize-winning books, and global tours. There were also stories of illness, divorce, loss, disappointment, midlife reckonings, and ordinary lives unfolding in quiet, meaningful ways.
In other words, it held the full range of what 25 years can bring to a group of people who once stood at the same starting line in their early twenties.
Reading it, I felt a wave of longing and nostalgia, not just for the past, but for the connections that seemed so much easier to make when we were young. Many of the names in that book belonged to people I barely knew in college. Yet suddenly their lives felt intimate and real.
I wrote “Back to the Yard” as an invitation to reopen old doors, to create new friendships, and to meet each other again as we are now.
So far, it seems to be doing exactly that.
Lyrics
We gathered that fall by the library steps
Hiked the White Mountains and camped in the rain
Time on our side, hopes in the sky
Sometimes I wish I was back there again
I'm goin' back, I long to be there
I'm goin' back to the yard for a day
I'm going back, the future behind me
Wondrin' how twenty-five years slipped away
I searched through the red book, found an old flame
Laughed at her musings on life in L.A.
A job and a family, carpools and cancer
The girl I once knew just so far away
I'm goin' back hoping to see her
I'm goin' back to the yard for a day
I'm going back, the future behind me
Wondrin' how twenty five years slipped away
Our folks they might see the sun going down
Some may have trouble rememberin' our names
So we call the doctors and pay all the bills
I can't recall when everything changed
I'm goin' back for a look at the past
I'm going back for day
I'm goin' back, the future behind me
Wondrin' how twenty-five years slipped away
We can go back reminisce and pretend
We can go back to the yard for a time
See the same faces, tread the worn walkways
Talk to old friends about hopes in the sky