Shedding More Than Pounds

In preparation for the post about to follow, just in case somebody out there reads it and wonders if I traded my happy-meds for a trip into Sylvia Plath-land, I’ll report that as of this morning I’m 202.0 pounds, down 49 in total. I’m 1.2 pounds from losing 20% of my original body weight, and today, somebody I don’t know checked me out at Trader Joe’s. Life is good. Life is so very, very good.

So the other morning I’m driving to work, wondering if I’m brave enough to order the chicken and baby spinach salad from Subway, or if I’m going to remain Conspiracy Theorist about the Spinach Lobby pressuring Congress to lift the ban on Popeye’s Greens before all the e-coli’s been swabbed off the offending plants, when the morning DJ interrupts me to announce the new 3 Doors Down single.

I like 3DD well enough, though I only really know their single Kryptonite, and even though I admit to enjoying that catchy tune, I acknowledge that the released single likely has little to do with the sounds on the rest of the CD (witness Uncle Kracker for anyone who doubts me. Does anyone else remember that barf-fest of an album that lured in teens and adults alike with that charming lilt of a tune, “Follow Me”?), I do still like the band. Well, the new single features a guest appearance by Bob Seger, Mr. Like a Rock himself, the old fella Down on Main Street, the guy who encouraged me to work on my Night Moves, Bob Seger, who must be pushing his walker toward 70 now, is singing with 3 Doors Down. Suddenly, I’m glad that Rachel Maddow isn’t the morning Drive Time host on Air America, because otherwise I would have missed this song completely.

The new song’s a ballad-a sad, stark tune about loss and loneliness. The lyrics sear me at once, and the tide of the melody sinks all interest in food, traffic or the waning warmth in the wind. This is no Dire Straits “Money for Nothing”, where you can hear Sting all over the song, but it’s still Mark Knopfler’s show, or Santana’s “Smooth”, where Rob Thomas sings, but all is brass and bass and you get the idea that Thomas, while an artist in his own right, is drowned completely by the mastery around him.

No, not this time. This is Afro Celt and Peter Gabriel, or Joan Osborne, doing that Bob Dylan cover from her 2^nd album; it’s both artists, both voices, every smidgen of talent mixed and blended until it’s something completely it’s own. Seger is in there: you hear him, both in the verses and throughout the song. And 3DD is there-it’s all them, vintage sound and instrumentation and recognizable at once as theirs, but with this golden thread of the Wise Man running through each rolling melisma and every angst-y riff. The song is Landing in London. I chucked my planned gold bracelet reward (for dropping into BMI ‘overweight’ from ‘obese’) for this CD, and bought it the very next day.

So I wonder now, tonight when the room is quiet, but the swirls of the 17 Days CD dance through my head, what it is about ballads and songs of deliverance that draws me to them? Is it their tragedy? Do I have karma that needs bathing in externally-generated tears before it’ll wash out of my psyche and downriver forever? I don’t know. What I do know is that I love them all-every one I’ve heard, and I love them even when I loathe every other song that band records. They festoon their lyrics to my brain, serenading me until I can recite every nuance of the singer’s voice, and the tears spring as soon as the opening chord plays. I played the Dixie Chicks Travelin’ Soldier tonight, and though it’s been 2 years since I heard it last, and I still don’t know anyone personally who has been wounded or killed in conflict (a fact I am exceedingly grateful to report), I misted up completely. I know further that if I play it again any time in the next few days, I will cry. I’ll stand in my kitchen or drive between errands and weep, the words wrenching me until my breathing shallows to gasps.

Eventually, though all of These Songs grip me, I find a way to appreciate them as the storytelling art that they are, and to honor the artist for writing something that’s simultaneously released for public consumption and gripped tight to the wounded, broken heart. Every song releases me to a degree, and I view them as Great Works, or Fabulous Stories, or simply, A Song That Makes Me Cry.

Every song, that is, except for one. Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill. That song is less ballad than it is Talisman. It played during some of the most intimate pinnacles of my life, and then, later, it appeared at the absolute nadirs. It materialized in abject moments, assuring me that all I had to do was wait for the apparition to come and I could go home, and reminding me, gently, that no one was coming, and that home did not exist. This song haunts me, even now when my life has turned in a direction where the deliverance message of the tune at last holds hope again. It should, and it does, and it will. I know, beyond the heartache and the history and all the fuck-ups that eventually, the eagle will come and he will release me.

Maybe that’s why I cry when ballads play: because I betrayed the first ballad I loved, the best ballad I’ve ever heard. I betrayed it, and it turned on me, the way a mystic muse abandons its vessel. I’ve been alone these years, waiting to call for it again, to hear that song when my heart is light and my mind is clear, to know that when I hear it next, that every memory it conjures and every meaning it invokes will be erased in a moment, replaced with the promise of a Delivered Life. Perhaps when that happens, when I can hear Gabriel’s words and smile instead of sob, then I will know that I am Home. In the mean time, I’m prey to any song that hints at heartache.

The thing is, in its own way, it’s over already. It’s over, and the words mean what they once meant. They mean them, and I know it, and yet, I can’t play it. I can’t hear him, not even a little, not even other works, though he is one of my favorite artists. I tried to listen to some of him this week, and I had to shut it down. He means too much, this means too much. I can’t come home until I’m ready, and I’m just not ready yet. I’ve planned my trip, but I’m not yet packed, and the journey has yet to begin. I see my home, and it’s more beautiful than I imagined it. I long for it, but I can’t walk toward it yet. I’m comforted that now, at least, my suffering has meaning and merit: its song is almost over, and this last hill, the longest, but also the highest and best, will lead me again to Solsbury.

Thanks for listening.

A the W(ithout Gabriel)