Today is Sunday, August 7, 2011.
Would have been 325 months.
I’ve got to stop.
I was listening to this song: “Life As We Know It” by Carolyn Dawn Johnson.
Its one of those sappy sentimental new country ditties that doesn’t have much redeeming value, except it captured a moment or a few moments in our life together, Anita’s and mine, like laying there together in bed in the comfortable quiet pretending to read our books meanwhile playing footsie under the covers the whole time, or later in the morning, rolling around, laughing, with the sunlight crawling across the wall. “Never been so happy, so content.” I despair that I will ever be so again. I know she won’t. And I’m asking myself why.
I know it will never be the same for me either, never unqualified, never pure, never whole, never without some tinge of guilt for leaving her and a part of myself behind, no matter whatever happens. And that’s a very powerful experience — its more than an emotion or a thought or a feeling. It’s the kind of thing that changes you. And then you’re someone else, and that person you were is gone, just like the love you used to share, and the person you shared it with.
Maybe I’m a little bit more easily moved at the moment, but anyway, I was took myself to make a list of songs that moved me the first time I heard them, like this one. And recall the times and the places and the reasons they moved me in the way they did. And I came up with a few surprises.
“I Cant Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt.
It was just one of those moments, although with a slightly different spin, as Anita and I were laying together in the Austin Hyatt Regency in 1984 just as we were anticipating moving down to Austin. And though we had many great times together, this wasn’t one of those. Let’s just say she wasn’t too happy about it. I was just trying provide as best I could. The details don’t matter I guess, but I remember laying there in bed with her, feeling somewhat distant from one another, and this song came on the radio, and it touched a nerve. She was sleeping right there next to me, literally in my arms, and I looked down at her, and I felt terribly alone.
“One Step Up” by Bruce Springsteen.
Kind of a similar situation in a way. In 1996 I took an assignment in the Seattle area for about a year. I got to go home for a long weekend every couple of weeks, and I was able to manage bringing Anita and the kids up for a good part of the summer. Julia and even my mom joined us for part of the time. It was pretty cool. I really enjoyed it mostly. But the early spring was harsh. Long periods without the sun just wore me down, working and basically living alone. I imagined what it would be like to be single. I came to the conclusion it would be horrible. But Anita and I were having difficulties then too. Not serious in the scheme of things, and not anything that even rose to the surface when we were together. I now know she was sick, and exhibiting signs of an out-of-whack thryoid, that’s the only way I can describe it, because it wasn’t completely non-functional, it was just going haywire. And you couldn’t predict how she would be. She was cool a lot of the time, and the joyful, sprited, jolly soul I loved. But some of the time, she was kind of harsh, at least the way I remember it, and I was lonely once again, but she wasn’t feeling me. And that seemed so strange, because she was the emotional one, she was the “feeler” yet here I was, feelings all over the place, and no one picking up on the other side. This song is about a breakup, but I was kind of going through one in my mind, in some kind of alternate universe.
“Is This America?” by Pat Metheny
After she was gone, I would spend many nights trying to shake off these feelings. Not being haunted so much, as haunting myself, torturing myself with the memories, the good times, and bad, of everything I had done for her, so much so that I forgot what part of my life was really mine, and what part was me becoming the man she needed. That’s why I said she was my compass. As long as I focused on her needs, and to the extent I made her happy, then I knew that I was on the right track. Then she was gone, and I lost my driving wheel. I was careening all over the decks. This song is about New Orleans after Katrina. And that’s a pretty good image of my interior world when I first heard this, I guess in August of 2011.
“Hard Times in Babylon” by Eliza Gylkison
This is kind of an oldie, and didn’t move me the first time I heard it, but one time it crossed my ears when I was in this vulnerable state. Now in the near rear view, it feels like I was on fire then. I can imagine people being capable of the most radical things when they’re in a state like that: “in the hour of the wolf, just before the dawn.” Burning down the house, shredding the documents, all kinds of terrible, irreversible things. That’s why I purposely put myself in a kind of suspended animation. “Nothing you can’t undo for a year. And baby steps after that” is what I told myself. I didn’t trust my own judgment. This song is about a suicide, I think. And so is not really applicable. But a few lyrics in there, “an incident so greivous. twenty years ago who’d have thought this would be the way that you’d leave us?” Just knocked me down. I don’t know why.