Have you ever waited almost fifty years to hear again a song you once loved?
I’ve started the last long edit of my journal in anticipation of turning that over to Katie someday, and that’s how I ran across a few lines from a song I loved in high school. It got a lot of play on the radio, but back then you couldn’t go online to learn more about the song or the artist. You couldn’t add it to a playlist on your phone. You just hoped you caught it the next time it came around in the rotation.
Now, almost fifty years later, it took fewer than four keystrokes to pull up the video.
One minute I’m getting ready for school in a bedroom in the house where my parents still live. I’m probably sweating a calc quiz or a chemistry unit, wondering what to pair with my jeans, and figuring out what to do with my life when most of my friends have charted their paths with such confidence I start what becomes a lifelong habit of bashing myself for not being able to choose. I’m probably applying a touch of makeup when this song comes on the radio. It snaps me out of my angst. Not forever. Only for those few minutes. But they’re enough to remind me the calc quiz or the college plan only matters to a point. What matters is how lucky I am to be here at all, to be healthy, to have interesting problems to solve.
The next minute I’m looking back at that young woman from an age I couldn’t imagine being. The song’s on repeat. I’m not surprised I loved it. It has, as my sweet daughter would say, “me” written into every verse. It’s filled with longing, for one thing. My best friends from high school are retiring now, but I’m still longing to be useful. I’m still trying to extract something from deep down inside that will strike a chord in you.
I have something I didn’t have all those many years ago, though. I have Katie. Someone once described a child as a love letter to a future we cannot see.
Maybe she will have been enough.