Songs

Sometimes when one hears a song, it stays and replays in your head.

I loved the folk singer / song writer Bob Franke. In the 70s I listened to him sing at coffee university in Harvard Square. I bought a CD and didn't listen to for a few years. The on the trip from Geneva to the south of France, I played the song.

The URL is for the sign "For Real."

The words kept playing in my mind, but not the melody, but the words on what was said between lines. I started thinking more as a writer than a music lover.

The details of the observations revealed how the widow copes. The writer sees the pain.

Death took the husband of a neighbor of mine, on a highway, with a drunk at the wheel. She told me "Keep your clean hands off the laundry he left, and don't tell me you know how I feel." She had a tape that he'd sent her from a Holiday Inn, and she never played it much in the day, But when I heard him say he loved her through the window at night, I just stayed the hell away. 
 
The same song talks about his relationship with his father. It is easy to imagine how they disagreed during the childhood. 

My father never put his parachute on in the Pacific back in World War Two; He said he'd rather go down in familiar flames than get lost in that endless blue, And some of that blue got into my eyes, and we never stopped fighting that war, Until first understood about endlessness, and I loved him like never before.

He talks about his current relationship with his wife and daughter. 

It's lucky that my daughter got her mother's nose, and just a little of her father's eyes, And we've got just enough love that when the longing takes me, well, it takes me by surprise, And I remember that longing from my highway days, though I never could give it a name; It's lucky I discovered in the nick of time that the woman and the child aren't to blame

He takes the three stories and then goes into his own feelings both good and bad.

For the hole in the middle of a pretty good life, I only face it 'cause it's here to stay: Not my father, nor my mother, nor my daughter, nor my lover, nor the highway made it go away, And there's too much darkness in an endless night to be ashamed of the way I feel. I'll be kind to my loved ones, not forever, but for real. Some say that God is a lover; some say it's an endless void; Some say both, and some say She's angry, and some say just annoyed, But if God felt a hammer in the palm of His hand, then God knows the way we feel; And love lasts forever, forever and for real. Love lasts forever.

As a writer myself, I often use music to start a writing day when I don't use a writing warm up myself.

I have no idea how long at night when I close my eyes at night will Bob Franke's song go through my mind as I fall asleep. Maybe another song will take its place. Maybe it will be a passage from some book I'm reading.