Story of a Life

One of my favorite songs is Harry Chapin's Story of a Life:

I can see myself it's a golden sunrise
Young boy open up your eyes
It's supposed to be your day.
Now off you go horizon bound
And you won't stop until you've found
Your own kind of way.

And the wind will whip your tousled hair,
The sun, the rain, the sweet despair,
Great tales of love and strife.
And somewhere on your path to glory
You will write your story of a life.

The first verses are a beautifully succinct summation of childhood and adolescence. We can relate because we've been "there." There's a youthful idealism and optimism to these opening verses.

And all the towns that you walk through
And all the people that you talk to
Sing you their songs.
And there are times you change your stride,
There are times you can't decide
Still you go on.

People pass in and out of our lives. Many friendships that in our youth and adolescence that we believe will last forever fade-- or as was said in the film St. Elmo's Fire: "Forever got a lot shorter somehow."

And then the young girls dance their gypsy tunes
And share the secrets of the moon
So soon you find a wife.
And though she sees your dreams go poorly
Still she joins your story of a life.

There's a bittersweetness to this verse. The loyalty of the one we choose to spend our life with even after our dreams have come and gone and the reality of adulthood sets in. Companionship ends up trumping our dreams, after all what good are our dreams if we don't have anyone to share them with? What good are life's success if we don't have anyone to celebrate them with? And while life's challenges can be tackled alone, it's always nice to have someone in our corner to cheer us on even when things aren't going the best.

So you settle down and the children come
And you find a place that you come from.
Your wandering is done.
And all your dreams of open spaces
You find in your children's faces
One by one.

Being a father now, this verse hits me harder than it ever had before. The dreams I once had for myself I now have for my daughter. Not that I want to live vicariously through her-- more that my focus has shifted from achieving my own dreams from helping her someday achieve hers.

And all the trips you know you missed
And all the lips you never kissed
Cut through you like a knife.
And now you see stretched out before thee
Just another story of a life.

Admittedly, I'm not quite "here" in my life yet. There are the trips I missed and wonder about and I do sometimes wonder how my life would be different had I ended up with someone else. But inevitably it's a mere curiosity and nothing more. I'm happy with the lips I still get to kiss that I don't need to kiss any more to make sure I've found the right set, I already know.

So what do you do now?
When she looks at you now?
You know those same old jokes all the jesters tell
You tell them to her now.
And all the same old songs all the minstrels sang
You sing 'em to her now.
But it don't matter anyhow
'Cause she knows by now.

As time passes and you spend your life with that special someone she comes to know your quirks, your jokes, your dreams and in some cases she comes to know you better than yourself.  And one of the miracles is when you realize that you love one another because of, not in spite of those quirks and flaws.

So every chance you take don't mean a thing.
What variations can you bring
To this shopworn melody.
And every year goes by like a tollin' bell.
It's battered merchandise you sell.
Not well, she can see.
And though she's heard it all a thousand times
Couched in your attempted rhymes
She'll march to your drum and fife.
But the question echoes up before me
Where's the magic story of a life?

These are the verses of my life not yet written for me. There's a bit of cynicism that I hope I'm able to escape when the verses for that stage of my life get written.

Now sometimes words can serve me well
Sometimes words can go to hell
For all that they do.
And for every dream that took me high
There's been a dream that's passed me by.
I know it's so true

Very few of us accomplish all of our dreams and I hope that when the time comes and I start taking stock of my life that there will be more "dreams that took me high" than "dreams that passed me by."

And I can see it clear out to the end
And I'll whisper to her now again
Because she shared my life.
For more than all the ghosts of glory
She makes up the story,
She's the only story
Of my life.

The song closes and puts a smile on my face. There was an episode of Family Ties where the parents, Steven and Elise are talking about how they planned to grow old and when it came to the end they'd just count off "1-2-3-Die" and go simultaneously. Rarely does it pan out this way but it's a sentiment my wife & I have shared since our relationship was still young, fresh, and new.

Reflections on life and love in literature and music

So I've been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise-- likely Fitzgerald's most autobiographical tome. As I'm reading about the love shared by Amory and Rosalind I'm left feeling a bit touched that Fitzgerald would give his readers such an intimate glimpse into the love he felt for Zelda as Rosalind was at least loosely based on his wife, Zelda.

But the constant in Fitzgerald's writing is a certain loss of innocence or fall from grace-- the reality of the fragility of life underneath the illusion that life is grand.

On a similar tangent, today I was reading an excellent post by Sam de Brito on the "Peter Pan syndrome"-- a certain type of guy who refuses to grow up, perpetually relieving his youth by dating college girls and going to work in jeans and ratty old Converse sneakers. de Brito makes the argument that these blokes are the ones who at one point in their lives were burned nee charred by love to the extent that the connections they seek in life tend to be casual and fleeting due to that strong a fear of getting burnt again.

He also brought up the very real potential that these Peter Pan types will end up quite alone which brought to mind a certain Harry Chapin song

"and the little man
looked at the empty glass in his hand
and he smiled a crooked grin
He said, 'I guess I'm out of gin
And I know we both have been
So lonely
And if you want me to come with you
Then that's alright with me
'cause I know I'm going nowhere
and anywhere's a better place to be"-- from A Better Place to Be by Harry Chapin

What is it about some of us that allows us to risk that being burnt again in the game of love where others avoid love after getting burned by its scorching intensity just once? I thought about what made me the type who was willing to risk (and inevitably experience) that pain multiple times. And I think I can trace it back to a passage I once read in one of Douglas Coupland's books. The basic idea of the passage being that the possibility of becoming numb to lows of life comes with it the opposite side of the same coin-- the risk of becoming numb to the highs of life as well. At some point I just decided that the lowest lows were worth it because they made me appreciate the highest highs that much more. Each time I got burned it just made me appreciate love that much more the next time around-- an emotional education in love if you will.

Getting back to Fitzgerald, I'm left thinking-- perhaps the reason many of us don't enjoy reading the classics in high school is that we lack the emotional experience that allows us to empathize with the characters. I read Hemmigway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in high school and didn't much care for it. I read his The Sun Also Rises a few years after graduating college and absolutely loved it. On some level I could empathize with Jake Barnes in a way I'd not been able to do with Robert Jordan in high school. I hadn't yet lived enough. Both Fitzgerald and Hemmingway were able to touch on very real human emotions but only after they had steeled their emotions from the experiences in the grand adventure of life. Now with Fitzgerald, while I don't necessarily care for him, there's something about Amory Blaine that I can relate to in a way that I'd not been able to do with Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Much like with For Whom the Bell Tolls I wasn't "there" yet emotionally when I read Gatsby, I had a bit more living to do (that being said, I quite enjoyed The Great Gatsby when I read it in high school-- to the point where I used to refer to my friends as "old sport" which I'm sure got old fast).

Thinking back to the books I truly did enjoy reading in high school-- Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and John Knowles' A Separate Peace the protagonists in those books are either children or adolescents. Lee and Knowles recaptured an innocence of youth that at the time I was able to relate to in a way that felt far more familiar than Hemmingway or Fitzgerald (heck I've even gone back and re-read A Separate Peace at least 3 times since high school-- it remains a favorite of mine to this day).