Ian McMillan: The year we all went to look for America

After the football and the TV, we're sitting at the table about to dip the soldiers. Thomas looks up at the shelf full of CDs and asks: "Who's Garfunkel?"

Ah, Simon and Garfunkel, one of the soundtracks of my teenage years, songs like The Boxer and The Sound of Silence being the kinds of music my wife and I listened to all those decades ago when we were first courting.

I got the Greatest Hits out and pointed out that Garfunkel was the tall curly-haired one and Simon was the small one. Thomas asked to hear a song and I put on my favourite one, America, with its haunting line about "We've all gone to look for America..."

Thomas was enjoying the song and I pointed out my favourite line; I did a bit of close reading, a bit of literary criticism, a bit of musical analysis. Well, he's nearly six. And he's a bright lad. My favourite line is "the Moon rose over an open field..." It paints a picture of America as seen from the window of a Greyhound Bus and I've always thought that, in a very clever lyrical way, the "o"s in the song mirror the Moon rising over the field. I sang the song along with them and pointed out the Moon rising. Thomas seemed impressed.

That song always takes me back, in the way that music always can, to a much younger version of me sitting on a Greyhound Bus in 1977, gazing out at a full moon rising over a field somewhere in the Mid-West. I'm wearing a cowboy hat and a blue denim shirt.

I'd seen a double bill of Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider at the cinema in Goldthorpe in the mid-1970s and that had ignited in me a desire to visit the New World. My mate Bob from school and my mate Dave from college were fellow enthusiasts of American music and TV and writing, and we travelled across the country together for three deliriously wonderful weeks that summer.

The memories tumble back like photos in an album. In New Orleans, a man with a green eyepatch said: "Are you English? Do you know Frank?" At three o'clock in the morning in the bus station in Phoenix, Arizona, a postman told me how he was escaping from New York because "enemies of mine are out to get me".

As we crossed the border in California, my mate Dave whooped and hollered and the driver had to tell him to calm down. It's more than 30 years since I made that trip and I think about it often, at least once a week; the colours, the sounds, the people; the times of boredom, the times of fear, the times of exasperation, the times when I thought the trip would never end, the times when it seemed to be over before it had begun.

And now, as often happens, the generations turn and it all happens again. My lad Andrew, freshly out of university, has gone to America for a month on his own. I had Bob and Dave to keep me company; Andy's got his rucksack.

As I write this, he's in the air, flying towards San Francisco. I went out early this morning for my stroll and I looked up at the sky, like my mother used to do when she knew I was flying anywhere.

A plane flew low overhead towards Leeds Bradford and I waved to it, also like my mother used to do; I waved to it even though I knew it couldn't have been his plane and it was going the wrong way, several hours early.

I came back home and paced like an expectant dad in a waiting room. I went down Darfield to get my hair cut, all the time looking at the clock in Mad Geoff's the barber's, until the hour came for the plane to fly.

I didn't want him to ring up and say he'd changed his mind. I didn't want him to be one of those names at the airport that they call out when the flight has boarded. I almost didn't go, way back in 1977. I almost couldn't walk down that tunnel to the plane because I knew a continent was waiting for me and it might be too much for me to take in.

In the end, though, I did, and I'm so glad I did. So enjoy the trip, Andy. I'll be thinking about you. And watch for that Moon; the one that rises over an open field...