They're Singing our Song

That's a street in the city where I grew up. Thinking I need a trip back there in the next year--it's been a while, my husband has never seen it, and I don't know--maybe it's the play I'm doing which has so much in it about making choices in life and in love---I feel like I want to be back where I was a kid and had no idea what the life ahead was going to deliver---all its miracles and all its mudslides.

I've been listening to music I loved when I was 11, 12, 13, 14.....digging out old CDs, downloading stuff I only have on cassettes from itunes. When a song comes on, it's like I'm launched back to listening to it then----remember the room I was in, or the friends' car, remember the weather. You know. We all do this. Can't help it. I don't remember exactly what I'd think about when I listened, but I know exactly how I felt, and that age there was a lot of longing and a lot of dreaming. I don't know exactly what I was longing for, and I don't remember all the dreams. I know I thought I'd have an Oscar by now:) And simultaneously there's the 2 decades of life layered onto whatever memory is there. So it almost feels like there are 2 of me listening and 2 of me going on the trip of the song.

I hadn't told my sister any of this, but in good sibling telepathy she sent me in the mail a CD of the first Indigo Girls album from 1989. 21 freaking years ago! So how old are they now....? Anyway.

She sent it to me and I listened--it's been a long time. I knew every lyric and I was that little kid and me now all at once and it's that bizarre existential feeling you all know: how was that 21 years ago? And somehow I got from there to here and it's been beautiful and it's been long....but 21 years long? No. I can't quantify the time but it's not 21 years. Couldn't be.

I think it's a good thing to be bittersweet sometimes. To half smile and half tear up about life going by. Makes us appreciate it, no? It's a half-sunny, half-cloudy day here and I'm listening to Willie Nelson singing sad songs so maybe that's what this mood is.....

Back to the Indigos. They wrote some pretty amazing lyrics. I am a sucker for a good lyric. I can sit down and just read Leonard Cohen's no music needed that guy is so good. This song I really love. I'm not putting all the words here---just a couple verses that got me then and get me now. This is so the world of the play I've been living in for weeks; YES it's influencing my life. How could it not. What would be the point of doing art if it didn't get under the skin? So take a gander and maybe stroll on over to itunes on your next cloudy day to dig through those songs you've forgotten you love so much.

pieces of "Love's Recovery" by the Indigo Girls

There I am in younger days, star gazing,
Painting picture perfect maps of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love's perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
Left each other one by one in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love's recovery.

Oh how I wish I were a trinity, so if I lost a part of me
I'd still have two of the same to live
But nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal, as specks of dust we're universal
To let this love survive would be the greatest gift we could give
Tell all the friends who think they're so together
That these are ghosts and mirages, these thoughts of fairer weather
Though it's storming out I feel safe within the arms of love's discovery

Sigh.