The Name of the Song

Yesterday my silver necklace breaks, falls into the laundry basket in amongst a load of back-to-school clothes, all of it fresh and clean and wrinkled, and I don't find it until after midnight as I sit, stupefied, folding the clean fresh wrinkled things my daughter will soon stuff into her dresser drawers like cotton candy, like insulation, like caught dreams, and I can only be grateful that I found it at all, broken though it is.

This morning I focus the Nikon through back-to-school emotions, and find her there, in the center, where she belongs, all straight-banged and Nike-clad and holding the black-and-white cat while the black-and-white dog watches through the screen, and drive her down the hill toward The Lake and let her listen to that station I hate, the way my mother used to do with me, and watch her climb out at the curb and disappear into the crowd of Nike-clad adolescents of which she is now a part, and drive back up the hill while that station I hate fills the car with a sound like perfume, like the perfume she might choose if she were ever to choose one.

The upscale market where I shop, this morning for apples and coffee, is empty but for that ubiquitous grating background noise people who have no ears call music, so I cover my own to drown it out, and make my hastened choices, complaining again to the uncomplaining checkout girl about the lack of appropriate ambience, I actually say that, but the girl needs some ambience of her own or at least a dictionary, and I'm fighting something all the time everyday wherever I go and particularly this day and I don't know what and so make my hastened departure.

I drive home through the end-of-summer haze, edgy and tired and somehow heartbroken, for everything, for all of it, and turn the radio to that news station I like, and turn into my driveway just as she tells me, just as the voice on the radio tells me, and now I'll always remember where I was, like JFK and Elvis and John Lennon and Mama, I'll remember I was in my car in my driveway when I heard the news, back from dropping my daughter at her first day of school, and having heard it, felt my heart break finally, for everything, for all of it, and sat in my car in the driveway and wept.

I unload the groceries and let out the husky and feed the cat and wander the house, and I want to hear it, right then, right now, that song that I love, the one that I play when I'm at The Cabin alone with the husky and a bottle of wine, red sauce on the stove, when I crank the volume on Great Moments of Opera so loud the husky is forced to join in, only to hear one song over and over, and I don't know its name or the opera or composer or the meaning of the words, though I surely know the singer, and with that small clue I find it, here on this computer I find him, and now I'll always remember where I was, and the name of the song.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=VATmgtmR5o4