There are two songs that have always vied to be my favorite song of all time. But I always come back to this one and know it will kick the other one’s ass because a tough little Jersey guy can do that. I taught this song as poetry to my college classes for its “carpe diem” theme. This version makes me smile because the audience is a very cool audience. Plus: harmonica. I’ll love you always, Boss, since 1973 when you made a believer out of me and not one friend of mine got it. They got it a few years later.
Unrelated, I think, maybe not, maybe there’s some thread I haven’t picked up yet, sometimes reading what other writers say about writing makes me want to give up because I will always be breaking someone’s damn rule about what it’s okay and not okay to write. Ultimately I just have to shut that shit down and write what I write. It’s all I can do.
ETA 2022: Unfortunately, the video link was jumbled by a website attack. I’m assuming from comments it was a Bruce Springsteen song, but I don’t remember which one. Several of them make me feel better…
I’ll just put “I’m On Fire” here, because why not.
You looked like a princess the night we met
With your hair piled up high
I will never forget
I’m drunk right now baby
But I’ve got to be
Or I never could tell you
What you mean to me
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
You’re the song
That the trees sing when the wind blows
You’re a flower, you’re a river, you’re a rainbow
Sometimes I’m crazy
But I guess you know
And I’m weak and I’m lazy
And I hurt you so
And I don’t listen to a word you say
When you’re in trouble I turn away
But I love you, I loved you, the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
Sometimes I just need to have a little fun. And really, there’s nothing like a Randy Newman song.
You can tell by all the exclamation marks that I don’t get out much. But it was fun to see them along with several other authors who were with me in the crowd.
This is Rocky with his foster mom Susan. Susan has been an amazing fundraiser for the rescue’s Fund the Shelter Challenge. Rocky just knows she’s a great foster mom.
The challenge goes until Thursday, May 9 at 1:59:59pm ET…and I just happen to be part of it if you’d like to donate. NO AMOUNT IS TOO SMALL, and please don’t pay the fee if you make a donation to my team (linked info redacted because campaign has ended). Thank you!
Once again, sorry to my Instagram followers for being repetitive, but let’s talk for a few minutes about Somewhere in Time. I mentioned on Instagram how surprising it was that I’d never seen this 1980 movie because who’s more beautiful on film than Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve and they are together! And it’s romance. And it has love that transcends time and separation. But mostly, it was surprising because I have listened to the score of the movie for decades and love it.
Oh, everyone said, YOU MUST SEE IT. (Except Puterbaugh, such a film geek, but he hadn’t seen it either.) So I ordered it. It came on Valentine’s Day, and from the moment Tom started the DVD, I wanted to cry. Okay, maybe I did cry. I didn’t even know how things would play out or what would or wouldn’t happen, but it’s that MUSIC.
SORT OF SPOILERS AHEAD (because you won’t see the actual end of the movie and I won’t provide it):
Near the end, when anybody’s heart would be breaking, and I definitely was crying… well, here. Here’s a four minute and something clip. Go ahead. Watch some heartbreak.
Now as I was watching that, there was no way I couldn’t think of another scene from another movie and how many times my friends who’ve been forced to watch it with me complained and carried on about how LONG it was, how torturous to see, oh, she should snap out of it. Let’s view the scene that makes them squirm and carry on.
It’s not that long! Christopher Reeve’s adult Richard Collier is grieving a love of like two days that he thinks is lost forever. Kristen Stewart’s teenaged Bella Swan is grieving a love of what, a year’s duration?, she thinks is lost forever. And though three months may pass in Bella’s scene, it’s just a little over TWO MINUTES on the screen.
If we can cry through four minutes of Richard’s agonizing sense of loss, Bella should get at least two.
I do wonder if Chris Weitz the director of New Moon thought of Christopher Reeve/Richard Collier at the window. It IS a truth internetly acknowledged that author Stephenie Meyer cites Somewhere in Time as one of her influences.
Also, I have imagined with some amusement Superman time traveling to Forks and making Vampire Girl forget Mr. Sparkles.
When I was a little girl, people began giving me charms. The first was silver (a car); the second, gold (a round disk engraved with the date of my baptism). My parents gave me two charm bracelets to start homes for my collections, one for silver, and one for gold, and as I grew up, went to high school, then to college, there were many more gifts of charms from my father, mother, boyfriends, and also there were school-related charms.
My first year of graduate school, my apartment was broken into and most of my jewelry stolen, including the two charm bracelets. These are things you can never replace. I don’t think I was the buyer of a single one of the charms. All gifts. All gone. My heart was broken.
Lynne had a really nice charm bracelet, and I was looking at it a few years later and wondered, Why can’t I buy my own charms? I’ll get ones that mean something to me. Maybe I’ll even find replacements for some of those lost. So I began collecting again, and other people began giving them to me, too, and suddenly there were too many for a bracelet. So I moved them to a necklace, and the charms kept coming.
Recently I decided the necklace was too heavy. I rarely wore it. It was so cluttered with charms, SERIOUSLY cluttered, that they didn’t sparkle and tinkle as charms should. I decided to move the charms to bracelets, and each bracelet would have a theme.
In all, it has taken seven bracelets to divide the charms to full advantage. (And that is leaving another eleven charms to remain on the necklace.)
I have two bracelets that I call “character charms”; that is, they are based on the first two (unpublished) novels I wrote. The wishing well charm that began this post is not on either of those bracelets. However… here, will you listen to this song and then keep reading?
This was a song that taught me early in life that songwriters are storytellers. I’d listen to this over and over and create different stories from Gordon Lightfoot’s words. And though the song wasn’t literally translated into something I wrote, when I hear it now, I understand how all the sadness and emotion and yearning and regret it evoked became a central part of two of my most important characters. There are even details from this song woven into who they are to each other, which I only recently realized as I stared at the charm and tried to recall when and where I got it.
I don’t remember. But I remember them. They remain with me for all time and I’m grateful for Gordon Lightfoot’s beautiful song as a reminder and this charm as a memento of them.
This starts a new series in which I’ll occasionally use my charms as the focal point of what I write here. Hope you enjoy.
Something on Twitter took me to an older article about a cafe in Japan where various stuffed “Moomins” can sit with you if you’re dining solo (“nobody has to eat alone”) or if you just want a companion to join you and your family or friends at your table. Of course there was a chorus of, “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH EATING ALONE!” and “Sure, everybody wants to call attention to their loneliness.” I didn’t read it that way at all, I guess because I have never minded having a solitary meal, seeing a movie alone, etc. I just thought it was a fun and engaging thing, even though I didn’t know what the heck a Moomin was.
So I Googled (of course!) and found out Moomins are “the central characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Swedish-speaking Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson, originally published in Swedish by Schildts in Finland. They are a family of white, round fairy tale characters with large snouts that make them resemble hippopotamuses.”
When I was telling Tim about this, he knew immediately what I was talking about–he knows the books.
I’ve atoned for being the last to know by getting this little guy into my menagerie as soon as I could. Welcome to Houndstooth Hall, Moomin!
My brain’s jumble over the last week included in no particular order: D Day Normandy my father patriotism vs false patriotism veterans and the people who use and misuse them liars bullies Robert F Kennedy Mohammed Ali Martin Luther King Jr. civics the Constitution the Declaration of Independence surviving the madness of monarchs despots and dictators a new generation of doers and dreamers Puerto Rico depression as the thief of who and what we love Colin Kaepernick hurricanes heartbreak hope peacemakers dogs who are tortured and dogs who are saved stealing children from their parents keeping children safe truth-tellers seeing past the moment happy and decent young people and their children planting your feet on the right side of history even when it’s uncomfortable especially when it’s uncomfortable bad things/good people…
This week marked the 50th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. On my car radio, I heard a story about his speech the day he heard that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. He was scheduled to speak at a campaign rally in Indianapolis that night. He was urged not to speak. People were uneasy about the mood of crowds and his safety. Having himself lost his brother to an assassin less than five years earlier, it couldn’t have been easy for him to stand at the microphone that night. He scrapped his prepared remarks and gave what many historians say was one of the greatest speeches of the century. Unlike other cities, Indianapolis did not have riots that night, and many attribute it to Kennedy’s speech. I listened to it in its entirety, and there are too many reasons to count for why it left me sobbing in my car.
“I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black–considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible–you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization–black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love–a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”
