If you only have love

As I was making the apple pie today, I had Jaques Brel playing on the CD-player. He sang If you only have love, or the French version and I started to laugh.

I had to tell my housemate the story behind the song.

I was about to marry a second time, and I asked my housemate to learn the song to sing at the wedding. "It's the last song on the album," I said. She had a great voice.

A couple of days later she asked, "Are you sure you want me to sing that song?" When I said yes,
she shrugged. She asked again a few days later adding, "But your mother will be there?" I knew my mother was prudish, but there was nothing sexual in the English translation of the song.

The third time she asked I understood. There were two disks in the album and she had mistakenly taken the second one. The song had lyrics like: "The hotel where we played games,"
You bayed the moon just like a hound," and "You see, I've forgotten your name."

The lyrics turned out to be prophetic for the short lived marriage. I gave up getting married, she did not give up singing.