Alone with my friends.
Rufus Wainwright sings to me of “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” and then moves on to “Across the Universe”. Jai guru deva om…
Dar Williams sings my anthem “Spring Street”. She attempts to empower me with “I won’t be Your Yoko Ono” and then reminds me of humility in “Calling the Moon.” Christine Lavin gets me in touch with my Inner Bitch. She doesn’t call the moon, but she shines her flashlight on it.
Phil Ochs sings me the story of “The Highwayman”, and then Loreena McKennitt one-ups him by including the stanzas Phil left out. Loreena is the purist, but it’s Phil who captured the spirit of Alfred Noyes’ epic poem. Let that be a lesson to me. There’s more than one way to get it right.
I’m keeping good company tonight. Friends gliding the rainbows of disc-light. Friendship remembered in a bottle of Merlot, brought to this place as a gift, and sipped in comfort with a grey kitten purring in my lap as the bills sit in their formal To Be Paid pile to my left. Unpaid to the left, paid to the right, to be filed on the floor beneath the chair where Clueless Wonder bats half-heartedly at emptied envelopes and hopes that he’s miscalculated and dinner is imminent. Hope springs eternal.
Tonight is a good night to be alive. Clueless knows. So does the grey purr-ball on my lap. Dar knows.
Jai guru deva om…
Dar Williams
The Green World (2000)
Go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reigned my soul in tight
Well the whole truth
Is like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world
So I stopped the tide
Froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound
And when I chose to live
There was no joy – it’s just a line I crossed
It wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep
I knew my family had more truth to tell
And so I traveled down a whispering well
To know myself through them
Growing up, my Mom had a room full of books
And hid away in there
Her father raging down a spiral stair
‘Til he found someone
Most days his son
And sometimes I think
My father, too, was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain from me
They could not see what it was for
But now I’m sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war
Well the sun rose with so many colors
It nearly broke my heart
And worked me over like a work of art
And I was a part of all that
So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you’ve got to say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it’ll push right back
And there are worse things than that
‘Cause for every price
And every penance that I could think of
It’s better to have fallen in love
Than never to have fallen at all
‘Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets in to who you thought you’d be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all