They were the lazy days of summer,
In Nineteen Seventy Four.
We were high in the mountains, and happy,
At the end of the Viet Nam war.

Life was very different then,
Everything seemed brand new.
It was before Crack and Aids and Ecstasy,
Were headlines on the evening news.

I was looking happily at life,
No matter where I might finally go.
I decided I’d stay in Colorado
And cavort in the winter snow.

Whatever happened, to the free spirits,
That we all had way back then?
When we’d freely talk to strangers,
And immediately call them friends?

And politics,
Was our bailiwick,
And we’d talk for hours and hours.
We thought that we might
Just change the world,
With songs of peace,
And boughs of flowers.
  

I saw that a child was killed,
Last night on the evening news.
She was eating dinner with her family;
Laughing and following the rules.

The shots rang out in the neighborhood,
And they weren’t even aiming at her,
But she’s dead as dead
Down at the funeral home,
That’s all that we know for sure.
 

 And now I long for simpler days,
When we were connected by a telephone call.
There was certainly lunacy 
In our tragedies,
But you never heard about them all.

Now the Internet and satellites will take us,
To places where we never should be,
And we’ve all become a part of the madness,
Both at home and across the sea.
 

The fall of Saigon was coming,
In 1974.
At last the war would be ending,
That was something that we knew for sure.

The boldness of the Watergate Plumbers,
Really caused quite a stir.
Because some of them looked  to us
Like heroes;
The lines between right and wrong
Had become blurred.

We all enjoyed Samuel Ervin,
And the graciousness of his Southern ways,
But by the early days of summer,
We knew that Nixon had numbered days.
 

 Since that time, nothing more has ever been as simple,
And it is likely to get worse from here,
For now it seems our greatest enemies,
Are the guys who cultivate fear.

And now I long for effortless days,
Tossing a line into a mountain stream,
Snuggling deep within my sleeping bag,
And enjoying a night of peaceful dreams.

I would once again like to live a life,
Of serenity at my core,
And it’s odd, but my memories
Seem to always drift back,
To 1974.