Part of the magic of art is that we stitch meaning into everything we see and hear, whether artists leave us a needle and thread or not.
Robin Hilton NPR All Songs Considered
I know there’s some science involved, that a song can make us cry because of the way it was composed. In an interview with NPR, John Sloboda, professor of music psychology at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, said hat the very notes within songs can make us weep. He attributes our tears to a kind of grace note, a musical ornament – the “appoggiatura,” from the Italian word “to lean.” As an example, Adele’s ‘Someone Like You” is full of them. Sloboda explains “Generally music is consonant rather than dissonant, so we expect a nice chord. So when that chord is not quite what we expect, it gives you a little bit of an emotional frisson, because it’s strange and unexpected. The music taps into this very primitive system that we have which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy. It’s like a little upset which then gets resolved or made better in the chord that follows.” A more famous version is the opening word of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” an appoggiatura of G3 to F3 over the chord of F major.
Musical theory aside, when I started singing with my partner here in Mexico, it was as a duo. This was a convenient arrangement during that time when COVID social distancing measures were in place—no dancing, couples sitting with a chair between them at tables 6ft apart, waiters in face masks offering a bottle of hand sanitizer. Remember that time? We were different, weren’t we? Introspective. Quiet. Uncertain.
Because we were unable to make the music we used to make with a full band behind us – and also because we were cloistered at home for months, we sang together. Unplugged. No backing tracks. Just the two of us, we carefully selected songs that told stories and touched our hearts and, as it turned out, included those appoggiaturas, those little upsets that might make us cry . We made each song ours, finding our blend of harmonies on deep cuts from the likes of Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Guy Clarke, Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, and Townes van Zandt.
Lyrics first. For us, it’s about the lyrics. Always.
As restaurants and venues slowly reopened, we ventured out— just the two of us—with our voices and an acoustic guitar, sometimes providing little more than musical wallpaper in restaurants trying their best to stay solvent, but sometimes connecting with people through lyrics crafted by master story-tellers. Every once in a while during a set—and this is still true— I’d spot a stranger singing along with their eyes closed, the lyrics transporting them to a place only they know. I’d realize we were singing ‘their’ song. This requires a reverence.
In those duo days, we always ended our set with my song. I didn’t write it, but it is mine. I remember one night a bartender asked me why we perform it, Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” the sad song that more than once made her cry. There’s a deeply personal reason that I kept to myself at that moment, because I didn’t want to break open my own heart. And, there’s also what Emmylou Harris said in an interview she gave about her love for Gram Parsons, her partner in song, and with whom she recorded “Love Hurts,” a pivotal song for her:
There is something about the uniqueness of two voices creating a sound that does not come when they are singing solo. That song, and our harmony, is a kind of a pinnacle of our duet-singing together.
Emmylou Harris
Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” is the song that has been pivotal for me. Appropriately enough, it was Steve Earl on acoustic guitar when Emmylou covered it on her “Wrecking Ball” record. It was ‘my song,’ before I met my partner in song and in life.
I’d been a Steve Earle fan since the 1980s when I had a vinyl record collection that I miss today. The last album I bought before leaving Northern Ireland in 1987 was “Guitar Town.” Until then, I had lied to myself that I didn’t like country music, dismissing it as the music of my parent’s generation, but when somebody in Rolling Stone or Q magazine said Steve Earle was somebody to pay attention to – along with Dwight Yoakam – I did. For a while, his “Fearless Heart” was my touchstone, Steve Earle introducing it at performances with his characteristic take-no-prisoners wisdom:
You can either get through life or you can live it. If you’re gonna live it, there’s only two things you need … an inquisitive mind and a fearless heart.
Steve Earle
But this is not just about my fearless heart. It’s about a “Goodbye” that I never got to say. One day I’ll tell that story too.
Over our first few years of singing together in Arizona, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
On night, shortly after we met Scott finally picked up a harmonica and began to lay. It was on this song, the first song we sang together, finding harmonies as if we had never not sang together. It’s in the key of C. Naturally. If you were to ask anyone who’s ever played with us, they will tell you that C is my key. Scott knows that’s not really true, but to see me panic for just a second before he begins his signature picking, he’ll call it up in A minor.
I don’t have to remind him anymore not to sing—not even harmonies— on my verse, the quiet one about Novembers and why they always make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C.”
I wrote it when I was still in treatment, before I even got to that step, the first time I got my hands on a guitar. It wasn’t a very good guitar, but I hadn’t written anything in a very long time, so it was kind of reassuring to write something and to write something that good.
Steve Earle
He also said Emmy Lou is possessive about it too, telling a Scottsdale audience before performing it with Shawn Colvin at the MIM a few years ago, that Emmylou gets mad when he performs it with someone else. He might have been joking … but I know I wished it had been Emmylou on stage with him that night.
There was a ‘meet and greet’ after the show, and I made my way towards a very warm and approachable Steve Earle. I told him that there were days when “Fearless Heart” had helped me put one foot in front of the other, that it had become a kind of mantra that I whispered before jumping into the deep end, which I realize might actually be where I belong.
I know I’m not the first fangirl he’s encountered, so he indulged me and didn’t seem to mind that I was holding up the line of people waiting for him to sign their posters and ticket stubs and album covers. I also wanted to talk to him about the lovely Belfast singer, Bap Kennedy, whose record he had produced and about Belfast and about the late Seamus Heaney. Thus one of my favorite moments with a famous person: “Did you study at Queens?” he asked me. “Were you a literature major?” Yes. Yes. I was. A Music major too. “Damn! Was Seamus Heaney there when you were there? I fucking love Seamus Heaney. I’ve read everything he ever wrote. And Michael Longley. I fucking love him too. Do you know him? Damn. Goddamn.”
In the way things go around and come around, years later, when I had an essay published in a literary magazine with none other than Michael Longley, my first thought was that there was the teeniest possibility that Steve Earle might read it.
I wanted to ask him more about Emmylou and “Goodbye,” but Shawn Colvin was clearly weary of me. To be fair, there were people waiting. So off I went without telling him how grateful I am for “Goodbye,” the sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – and for everyone who’s sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it.
It’s a song for the work of a November in my life.
I’m grateful for the sound and the harmonies it pulls so naturally from Scott and me, even when we haven’t sung it for months, even when we’re not talking to each other over a mountain we’ve made out of a molehill, a storm in a teacup.
I can hear it in my head right now. Quiet, steady, and familiar—it lives in that realm reserved for country songs and Psalms from the hymnal I recall from the church of my childhood. I can hear that sound that only comes when I’m singing with my partner.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and that he likes Bob Dylan and that he will open doors for me? Why not?
Between the time I met my late husband and the time he died – the day before our anniversary 24 years later – the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online. Online was made for me, all my friends said. It would be fun, they said, a place where I could easily reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I’d been once upon a time in that time before smart phones and texts and instant gratification. Online, they said, I could be equal parts brainy and breezy. I could hide behind pictures that only showed my good side, dodge questions with cryptic clues about my job or the kind of man who might be the right kind of man for me. In a flurry of box-checking, I could filter out the men whose online versions of themselves disapproved of my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who couldn’t care less if I was as comfortable in blue jeans as I was in a little black dress, but they cared about the Oxford comma and when to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re’ and ‘your.’ I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having possibly evolved from her famous Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I arrived in the United States. My next chapter could be the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.
Fictional Sally, I subsequently learned, was an extension of the real Nora Ephron – single-minded with a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. I can relate to this, knowing that there are committed to the memories of more than a handful of waiters, “Yvonne specials,” dishes not on menus across Arizona and here in Mexico – avocado toast without the toast kind of thing. “On the side” is as big a thing for me as it was for Sally.
While Sally is probably best remembered for that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, I liked her best in one scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who still shows up to remind me how little time I have to become whoever it is I’m supposed to be. Life, she tells me, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right.
When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday,” Sally is barely thirty, sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. It gives me no pride, dear reader, to tell you that I carried in my wallet for perhaps a decade, a page ripped from a glossy magazine featuring the many hairdos of Meg Ryan. It was the mother lode For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the shroud of Turin and coaxed them into giving me one – any one – of those Meg Ryan hairdos. Not until I turned 50-ish, did any one of them ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless of course the late Nora Ephron is writing it.
Remember when 40 was an impossible eternity away from 20? It was the deadline for letting yourself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question – definitely not a “new 50.”
I’m gonna be 70 . . . one day. Soon enough. I’m not counting the years. Not really. But maybe it’s time to take stock of the things I have almost accepted about myself. I’ll call them ‘alternative facts.” I know you know what I mean. Most of them are trivial. In no particular order: I still don’t have sensible hair, and until six years ago, spent a fortune coloring and highlighting and trying to tame it. I’m mildly preoccupied with fonts and signage. If I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I think twice before entering. Comic Sans on letters from school and worksheets forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. Even though I didn’t find out until after forty years of driving that it’s bad for the car, I only buy gas after the “E” light comes on. I don’t like Les Miserables – I don’t. I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version. I prefer Elvis to The Beatles. That’s the 1968 sitting-down Comeback Special Elvis in black leather. Google it. Although it subjects me to lots of criticism from some Facebook friends every Christmas, I love Love Actually. I actually do. I don’t like opera. I prefer Bach and Handel to Beethoven and Mozart; and, a harpsichord to a piano. I don’t like ballet, although I once took my daughter to see “The Nutcracker” for Christmas, because all the other mothers were doing it. To give Mozart his due, I do love that one scene from Shawshank Redemption. You know the one. Andy Dufresne walks into the Warden’s office and plays a recording of Duettino “Sull’aria” across the main speakers to the entire prison, and Morgan Freeman’s Red says:
To this day, I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are left best unsaid. I would like to think they were singing about something was so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and make your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away. For the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free.
Rock me Amadeus.
I resent the aging process and the way it keeps sneaking up on me at the most inopportune times. I remember reading without any assistance the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle as well as whatever’s crawling along the bottom of the screen on CNN. I now have a dozen pairs of cheap reading glasses, none of which are at hand when I need them. My hearing’s good. I think. If it isn’t, I’ll attribute that to 50 odd years of concert-going rather than aging. My memory is unreliable too – thank you breast cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1987, but not where I’m supposed to be tomorrow evening. If Mr. Right cares about punctuality, he should probably know I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and almost always an app for that, I’m more confident about going places today. If I have been somewhere at least eight times – like the mall in Guadalajara – I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I still lean on Google maps or Siri and friends who unfailingly “bring me in” by phone from my destination – where they’re already waiting.
Other truths are more difficult to accept. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be more trusting and more patient, to accept that some things are out of my control, to go with the flow, blah, blah, blah. But just as I was wrapping my head around those notions, my husband died. He took with him the way life used to be, the certainty of it. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door.
But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? I’m sure even Nora Ephron wouldn’t have described herself the way she was characterized in her son’s documentary – “with a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.”
It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your resume – except you have to be cuter, avoiding clichés and divulging your home address. You also have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.
So it was with some awkwardness and reluctance that I built my online dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status, while taking some liberties with other details like natural hair color and frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. My best friend was right. This was Resume Writing 101. She reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. I’m also good at the long game.
Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.
About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone or in a nunnery, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Reluctantly, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not?
I took a chance.
I. Took. A. Chance.
#ITookAChance
Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who deemed his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. I broke all the protocols. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, a non-smoker, and a music-loving musician who was divorced and had a young daughter. I dismissed the interest in football – the American kind, for God’s sake – and golf (eye-roll), hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color, and held on to his mention of integrity – and the picture of the Harley Davidson.
Box checked.
He said he worked out every day. Of course he did. Doesn’t everyone? And, no religion too.
No deal-breakers.
He had my attention.
Disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be about four feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he’d built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan – a bona fide deal-breaker – and maybe he went to the gym three times a day.
If I sound cynical, let me tell you that during my time in the land of online dating, I encountered more than a few men who claimed to live in the Arizona desert, where they also enjoyed moonlit walks every night. On the beach. Seriously. Given all of this and what I had gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would remember my name, and anticipated the possibility of being number five or six in what I had learned was ‘the dating rotation.’
It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at around 5 at a well-lit bar. Lighting is everything. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know I still have clothes from 1981 in my closet. It was also a good hair day, Topher having redeemed himself with fabulous beach-y highlights (in case a moonlit walk was in the cards). On the inside, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I know I was probably not allowed to discuss online or off, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes.
The Harley from the photograph was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it just for our first date, this was promising.
Onward.
He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies. Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.
Over beers and banter, we sized each other up, and we over-shared, validating the boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – he was a musician after all – I was also smitten.
That bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and joked that we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you a nice tip. And, this is important – Mr. Forward was a good tipper
Having read and memorized the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew the second bar was yet another red flag. First dates that are too long or that turn into second dates on the same night are deemed more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy. Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and hundreds of nights since.
A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time. Although, deciding to start a new life together in Mexico at the same time as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health emergency was not on our 2020 Bingo card.
As for the rest of the story? Well, the rest of the story is for me. And for him, as Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:
‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.
P.S. I once asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He said he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I told him there’s a song in there. And even though we don’t always hit the right notes, we’re still singing it.
Part of the magic of art is that we stitch meaning into everything we see and hear, whether artists leave us a needle and thread or not.
Robin Hilton NPR All Songs Considered
I know there’s some science involved, that a song can make us cry because of the way it was composed. John Sloboda, professor of music psychology at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, once told NPR that the very notes within songs can make us weep. He attributes our tears to a kind of grace note, a musical ornament – the “appoggiatura,” from the Italian word “to lean.” As an example, Adele’s ‘Someone Like You” is full of them. Sloboda explains “Generally music is consonant rather than dissonant, so we expect a nice chord. So when that chord is not quite what we expect, it gives you a little bit of an emotional frisson, because it’s strange and unexpected. The music taps into this very primitive system that we have which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy. It’s like a little upset which then gets resolved or made better in the chord that follows.” A more famous version is the opening word of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” an appoggiatura of G3 to F3 over the chord of F major.
Musical theory aside, when I first started singing with my partner here in Mexico, it was as a duo. This was a convenient arrangement during that time when COVID social distancing measures were in place -no dancing, couples sitting with a chair between them at tables 6ft apart, in face masks with a bottle of hand sanitizer at the ready. You remember that time. Introspective. Quiet. Uncertain.
Because we were unable to make the music we would have made with a full band behind us – and also because we were cloistered at home for months, we sang together. Unplugged. No band. No backing tracks. Just the two of us, carefully selecting songs that told stories and touched our hearts and included those appoggiaturas, those little upsets that might make us cry . We’d make each song our own, finding our own harmonies on deep cuts from the likes of Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Guy Clarke, Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, and Townes van Zandt. Lyrics first. For us, it’s about the lyrics. Always.
As restaurants and venues slowly reopened, we ventured out – just the two of us – with our voices and an acoustic guitar, sometimes providing little more than musical wallpaper in restaurants trying their best to stay solvent, but sometimes connecting with people through lyrics crafted by master story-tellers. Every once in a while during a set – and this is still true – I’d notice someone singing along with their eyes closed, the lyrics transporting them to a place only they know. And, I’d realize we were singing ‘their’ song. That requires a reverence.
In those duo days, we always ended our set with my song. No, I didn’t write it, but it is mine. I remember one night someone asked me why we perform it, Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” the sad song that more than once made the bartender cry. There’s a deeply personal reason that I kept to myself at that moment, because I didn’t want to break open my own heart. There’s also what Emmylou Harris said in an interview she gave about her love for Gram Parsons, her partner in song, and with whom she recorded “Love Hurts,” a pivotal song for her:
There is something about the uniqueness of two voices creating a sound that does not come when they are singing solo. That song, and our harmony, is a kind of a pinnacle of our duet-singing together.
Emmylou Harris
Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” is the song that has been pivotal for me – and, appropriately enough, he played acoustic guitar when Emmylou covered it on her “Wrecking Ball” record. It was ‘my song,’ before I met my own partner in song and in life.
I’d been a Steve Earle fan since the 1980s when I had a vinyl record collection that I miss today. The last vinyl record I bought before coming to to American in 1987 was “Guitar Town.” I had lied to myself that I didn’t like country music, dismissing it as the music of my parent’s generation, but when somebody in Rolling Stone or Q magazine said Steve Earle was somebody to pay attention to – along with Dwight Yoakam – I did. For a while, his “Fearless Heart” was my touchstone, Steve Earle introducing it at performances with his characteristic take-no-prisoners wisdom:
You can either get through life or you can live it. If you’re gonna live it, there’s only two things you need … an inquisitive mind and a fearless heart.
Steve Earle
But this isn’t just about my fearless heart. It’s about a “Goodbye” that I never got to say, and one day I’ll tell that story too.
Over our first few years of singing together, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which our listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
The first time Scott ever picked up a harmonica to play it, was shortly after we met – and it was on this song, the first song we sang together, finding harmonies as if we had never not sang together. It’s in the key of C. Naturally. If you were to ask anyone who’s ever played with us, they will tell you that C is my key. Scott knows that’s not really true, but to see me panic for just a second before he begins the signature picking, he’ll call it up in A minor.
I don’t have to remind him anymore not to sing – not even harmonies – on my verse – the quiet one about Novembers and why they always make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C.”
I wrote it when I was still in treatment, before I even got to that step, the first time I got my hands on a guitar. It wasn’t a very good guitar, but I hadn’t written anything in a very long time, so it was kind of reassuring to write something and to write something that good.
Steve Earle
He also said Emmy Lou is possessive about it too, telling a Scottsdale audience before performing it with Shawn Colvin at the MIM a few years ago, that Emmylou gets mad when he performs it with someone else. He might have been joking … but I know I wished it had been Emmylou on stage with him that night.
There was a ‘meet and greet’ after the show, and I made my way towards a very warm and approachable Steve Earle. I told him that there were days when “Fearless Heart” had helped me put one foot in front of the other, that it had become a kind of mantra that I whispered before jumping into the deep end, which I realize might actually be where I belong. I know I’m not the first fangirl he’s encountered, so he indulged me and didn’t seem to mind that I was holding up the line of people waiting for him to sign their posters and ticket stubs and album covers. I also wanted to talk to him about the lovely Belfast singer, Bap Kennedy, whose record he had produced and about Belfast and about the late Seamus Heaney. Thus one of my favorite moments with a famous person: “Did you study at Queens?” he asked me. “Were you a literature major?” Yes. Yes. I was. A Music major too. “Damn! Was Seamus Heaney there when you were there? I fucking love Seamus Heaney. I’ve read everything he ever wrote. And Michael Longley. I fucking love him too. Do you know him? Damn. Goddamn.”
Years later, I must tell you that when I had an essay published in a literary magazine with none other than Michael Longley, my first thought was that there was the teeniest possibility that Steve Earle might read it.
I wanted to ask him more about Emmylou and “Goodbye,” but Shawn Colvin was clearly weary of me. To be fair, there were people waiting. So off I went without telling him how grateful I am for “Goodbye,” the sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – and for everyone who’s sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it. It’s a song for the work of a November in my life.
I’m grateful for the sound and the harmonies it pulls so naturally from Scott and me, even when we haven’t sung it for months, even when we’re not talking to each other over a mountain we’ve made out of a molehill, a storm in a teacup.
I can hear it in my head right now – quiet, steady, familiar – in that realm reserved for country songs and Psalms from the hymnal I recall from the church pf my childhood. I can hear that sound that only comes when I’m singing with my partner. Breath by breath … finding home in a song.
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
The best year of my life was the one I spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. With her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I held her in my arms as I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. In the afternoons, I spent interminable hours just looking at her.
Just. Looking. At. Her.
I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, marveling that two imperfect people had created this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, these were the days before she had a cache of words or discovered the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.
Mostly, our darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was right there in front of us. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to let her ‘cry it out’ at night. When I heard the tiniest whimper, I bolted to her bedroom to pick her up and comfort her. My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only an Irish mammy could, that there would be plenty of nights further on down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. She was right – of course she was right, and it has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.
When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – mostly mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at the Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and – in the era pre-Starbucks – sipping coffee in mugs brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot. I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and a hairdo on the verge of sensible. A school principal at the time, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – mostly me – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job, I failed to impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would placate me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be absolutely fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to tell me more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie to spend hours staring, like the Madonna – mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes – at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something – anything – for the first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the child writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave, but I remained in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to children crying. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could we mothers pluck out the sound of even the tiniest whimper from our own children?
Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and the final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had wept off, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no hint of guilt-stricken working mother, off I went to work for other people’s children.
Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Appelt knew this anguish of leaving a child to go back to work and relived it when her 12 year old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would find one Saturday afternoon on the discard table at a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.
Every night, I read aloud the story of Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love – a little red heart – would still be with him. Magically, this love would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
Every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. Why didn’t they understand I was sending them the very best child I have? By the time she was in the third grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, while I kept searching for the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. Regrets? Yes.
On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – now a high school Senior, a young woman – and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do when she was in grade school. Watching her stride to the car her dad used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.
But I pulled myself together the way we do and gave into the day, knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, it would unfold with delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.
Some days still, in an unguarded moment between emails and zoom meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she’s doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.
And I will remind myself – as I will again today – that the love is all around.
Over beers and banter, we 
