I remember the first time I heard, really heard, John Lennon singing, “Oo ohoh, darling, if you leave me, I’ll never make it alo-ho-ho-hone.” I was in middle school and we were vacationing in Gulf Shores, Alabama. I was little more than arms and legs and big pink glasses and a yearning to have grace, purpose. I’d like both but would prefer either.
I found the record, Abbey Road, at a used books and record store we somehow managed to stop in. I bought it for a dollar The pain in that plea exactly matched my own, though I didn’t dare allow myself a crush. Mine was not directed to a person, which perhaps made it more bittersweet.
Years later, in high school, unable to endure the pop music of the early ‘80’s on the radio, I found Janis Joplin, some guy taking her heart piece by piece, and she, strangely strong and broken at the same time, calling him out on it. “Didn’t I make you feel…”
When I finally saw a picture of her, she was even better than I imagined: her long hair, her round wire sunglasses, a smile that said she was either just coming from or just about to go to a whole mess of trouble. I was no Janice, but I could imagine myself as her, after all, we were both from Texas. We loved poetry. We felt deeply.
I sang along with all of them--Melissa Etheridge, Tracy Chapman, Natalie Merchant--as we waited outside windows, drove down highways, begged our brothers not to go to war. Whatever the cause, whatever the desire, I was in it, trying to button something in my life to those pleas for love.
As I write this, I can hear the music coming out from under the closed door of my son’s room. When we are gone, he plays the music as loud as it will go and it shakes the windows. The dogs hide. The pleas in the songs he listens to are angrier, the bass stronger, the need greater than those I used to play. I try to let it sink into me, a foreign language, strange. Familiar.
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