prematurely grey

Last Tuesday, the 29th of November, was the day of despair. All I could think was that SOTD was a sham. I was a sham. My writing was a sham.Anyone who could think that she was finding signs of intelligent life in the universe by listening to uplifting or calming or amusing songs on the radio and then interpreting their existence as some sort of proof of the existence of God was insane. Completely insane.

Why would a person spoil the perfectly good opportunity to write about music with talking about God? Why would she need to talk about God so much, or think about God so much, or always be on the lookout for some type of proof that there is some kind of God out there in the radio or God in there as the listener opens her ears or God in between as the process of sound takes place?

Why all this talk about violins on television?

I was really sad because I thought that the SOTD was fake. The thought that the device I had finally come up with to make me write was actually a complete figment of my imagination, no more worthwhile than Chicken Soup for the Woman Trapped in Her Car with Nothing But the Radio to Keep Her From Insanity. Maybe I was making up everything. Everything. Maybe there was no God but the one I make up.

So, as a life long seeker and lover of all things numinous, religious, ritualistic, spiritual, I was feeling a little down.

Plus, nothing on the radio could be trusted. The radio could not be trusted. It was just the instrument I was using to delude myself. There would be no Song of the Day, clearly.

I have a lot of friends who don’t believe in God at all. At all. They just don’t. And I don’t have a problem with it. The ones I have a problem with are the ones who aren’t really my friends who seem to believe, beyond a doubt, that Christianity is just plain right. I don’t have many friends who fall in this category. I have another bunch of friends who have said that Christianity is not for them and that they’ll follow alternative paths to learn about and become closer to God. I have a lot of these friends. And there are a few who are trying to hang with Christianity, to take the good and leave the rest. I’ve been trying to work that angle, or tell myself I’m working that angle, for a long time. But everybody knows that it’s pretty much a decoy.

I believe in the possiblity of everything. I am convinced that the experience of the numinous is real and true, not self delusion. I am pretty much at the point where I believe it’s all about experience rather than interpretation. I still go to church because I find the experience of being there with a bunch of other people moving. I am moved by their willingness to come together in the hope that being together is meaningful.

It was a beautiful sad day. Mazie and I went to pick up Emma at her friend Henri’s, up off 2222, on the way out of town to the lake, You can see downtown from the back of the house and Emma’s ready to move in. It takes 15 minutes to get there on the long and winding road.

It was a little past five and I didn’t know what to listen to. Listening seemed like a pathetic empty thing, like saying the Nicene Creed has become for me. I’d taken Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief to L.A. with me and had started to reread it after a year and a half of mulling it over. It was still as incredible. Everything I thought and felt about Christianity laid out in a short little book written by someone I’d known and trusted and pretty much revered since I was in high school.

Jodi Denberg was through the 501 Blues (maybe it was something I liked, so I stayed on the station) and doing his little patter. As we came down the hill from Henri’s, it was the beginning of “Give Me Love (Give Me Life).” We had to wait at the light to turn right onto 2222. I started to cry. I guess there’s been a lot of crying in the car these days, but that might be the price of looking for God on the car radio.

So here was the “spiritual” Beatle, the one I’d always loved because he gave me the sitar, who’d already been the SOTD, singing for me at sundown on my way through that day’s drive through motherhood. Who was I not to think it was a sign? How could I not hear George?

And then, instead of some commercial or promo, came “Here Comes the Sun.” A live version. The one from the concert for Bangladesh. The only recording that I remember us having on both LP and 8-track.

While it was playing, I wondered which one really was SOTD. Could “Here Comes the Sun” win over “Give Me Love?” Was there a way to know which one meant more that day?

Jodi came on and told us that George Harrison had passed away four years earlier, on November 29th, 2001. And one year later, on November 29, 2002, the Concert for George was held in his memory. And he played “Handle With Care,” the Traveling Wilburys song, performed by Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison. We were going up the hill to Balcones and I was wondering if I could make a Traveling Wilburys song SOTD; would Chris’s hatred for Jeff Lynne mean that I couldn’t let it be SOTD? What was Chris’s role in all of this anyway? Was I writing SOTD for him, so he’d talk about music with me?

I thought of how it would feel to play a song you’d played with someone who had died, a song that felt like his return to light heartedness after a life of serious searching, the sound of five people having a great time together. I thought of how Tom Petty must have been feeling. I chose Tom because I love him. By focusing on Tom, I could ignore Jeff Lynne and Chris’s critical voice trying to make me stop feeling a feeling.

When I decided to write about music, I wanted to try to get over my self-doubt as a person with credible opinions about music. I was ready to put myself out on a limb and declare that my lack of cool or super aficianado status didn’t negate my thoughts. It was time to claim my seat. If I started not including songs because they might make me seem uncool, well, the entire idea of this thing was just to write about what I like, not what I think will make me seem cool.

The fact that this blog quickly devolved into another search for meaning exercise just frustrates me more. I wanted to write to entertain myself and my friends, to maybe come up with a clever way to work on my chops, maybe even an avenue to publishing some funny story about a middle aged woman who’s obsessed with the radio. The idea was that I’d get going with the blog post and then move into the other, serious writing where I could put all the theology and symbolism and mysticism I wanted. SOTD was to be quick and funny. And here it had turned into some sort of modern day Kierkegaard as far as I was concerned.

If I rejected “Handle With Care,” I should just close up shop. But I wanted to write about “Take a Chance on Me” and “Oh! You Pretty Things.” I wanted to write this stuff. I was looking forward to writing it. I kept thinking about it and trying to figure out when I’d find the time. I wasn’t finished with SOTD, even though it seemed like I was about to admit that there was no God and that I was just so fragile that I hang my life on a song.

By the time we were crossing over MoPac on the Hancock bridge, I knew that all three songs were SOTD. There was not only no way to pick between them, there was no need. According to Christianity, God is father, son and holy spirit. According to Hinduism, there’s Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Who am I to say that there can’t be three songs one day? Who am I to say there has to be a song every day? Who am I to say there is no such thing as SOTD?

Don’t shoot the messenger.