Author: dianneP

And, I am worried about it.

Does John Prine know? Do The Wallflowers know?

This weekend my daughter Sophie was at her art lesson, my husband Dave was fixing the headlight lightbulb on the car at somewhere not our house, and I was enjoying my alone-time by doing a lot of Devil’s Party Press work, drinking coffee, and enjoying some music on Alexa. Often I will ask Alexa to “shuffling songs by Jack Johnson,” but instead I had asked her to play John Prine as, for some reason, John (let’s just act like he and I know each other, why not? We should, anyway.) had popped into my head. After a considerable while of Alexa shuffling songs for me, I remembered one of my favorite songs by John, “Unlonely,” and I asked her to play it. She refused. Alexa is nothing if not capricious, and so she left me no choice but to stop working, and start searching for the song on “the Google” or any place else I could hear it. I found it, and now you can hear it too:

John Prine: Unlonely

And, as I am often wont to do, I replayed it… about a zillion times.

Then I took a shower, and while in the shower I kept singing it. And, on one go-round, I found myself mixing in the lyrics from another song:

The Wallflowers: One Headlight

At first I thought this might have been because Dave was out getting our headlight fixed.

Then I realized that the music, underneath the lyrics, the singing, was pretty freaking similar.

Go ahead, click back and forth between the two.

Does John Prine know?

Do The Wallflowers know?

I assume, with Jakob Dylan in the band, The Wallflowers know John Prine and his music. They would have to, right?

And yet, I never heard anything about this from David Dye, and David Dye would know:

David Dye

Add to that, now I was thinking about David Dye too, and wondering why he doesn’t look like he sounds… however the disconnect between voice and appearance is one I cannot hope to solve in this blog entry. No, no, no.

And then, my husband came home again, and I was telling him about the problem with The Wallflowers and John Prine. John Prine is too far away in style from the Pet Shop Boys for my husband ever to like him, and he felt the need to ask me if Eric got me interested in him. The answer is no. I was interested in John Prine before I ever met Eric, and that was because David Dye and Q102 got me interested in John. Eric, though, was a prior love of mine who was heavily into Irish music and Bluegrass. I never truly embraced the Irish music, but I did like quite a bit of the Bluegrass. I dated Eric for 10 years, and then I dated Mike the alcoholic, and then I married Dave. I had my other little relationships before Eric, but he was my first big one, and it was a big one.

And so this lead to me thinking more about Eric. He is dead now. Though he wasn’t an alcoholic (that I knew of) when we were together, he apparently died as one. Eric was my first big love, and, initially, when we found out we both liked music like John Prine and Bonnie Raitt, we were very compatible, and he made me very “unlonely.” I guess that part of what Eric did for me was to make me feel secure and attractive. I guess I made him feel secure in his own desirability, because he decided, in our later years together, to try it out and try it on with quite a few other women. I left him over the last one, and he seems to have married her at some point, all while never moving out of the house he bought for me, and then she left him, he was her 5th husband I think, and he proceeded to drink himself to death. It is hard, when thinking about Eric, not to romanticize the past, when we were both very young, and very in love, and he made me unlonely. And yet, I still have to think about the person who cheated on me over and over, and who finally had the bad luck to marry a woman who had divorced 4 times prior to marrying him, because she had cheated on her spouses over and over. And when she dumped him, I guess it broke his heart, or some part of him anyway. It broke him. He was broken and not unlonely, and so he medicated his pain quite heavily until he died quite messily. And it had nothing to do with me, except that if he could have been happy with the known, instead of feeling like he was missing something out there in the unknown, I probably would have made him unlonely for life. But, I never did.

And that story reminds me so much of the lyrics to “One Headlight”:

I was lucky, thanks to my mother and sister, to spend a few days last week at my favorite place on earth, Ocean City, New Jersey. And I snapped the above photo with my phone (of course with my phone!).

OMGosh, I have been to Paris, Beijing, Tijuana, Los Angeles, NYC, how could my favorite place ever be in Jersey? Which exit is that?

Okay Jersey haters, back down.

Ocean City has a certain magic to it. Now, true, the magic does not entirely still exist. To be fair, they are doing their level-best in OCNJ to develop the magic right-the-heck out of it. Greed, it’s a terrible thing.

But, today, there is yet some magic there. Still I could see some of the old brick or clapboard houses that are not sky high, and do not stop the wind from caressing every structure and every person with the smell of a salty sea. And that, I think, if I’m honest and want to boil it down to the cause, is the magic of Ocean City: its smell. Or at least the smell is where the magic begins. It starts in the nose, as you drive the causeway and over the bridge to the island, if you roll down your windows, you can smell the salt smell. I live on “The Eastern Shore” now, and those beaches, though lovely and enjoyable, do not have that smell. I don’t know why OCNJ has it and they do not, but the smell is evocative like few other smells.

So, in my perfect world, I wake up; I step out on my porch to look out on the ocean or the bay (I would be happy with the bay, though I prefer the long scary swath of the ocean; who knows what tidal waves could be forming just beyond the reach of my progressive lenses?), and my nose is assaulted by the slightly dank salty smell; it’s like your best lover’s sweat. I love strong smells, and strong tastes, and I know, standing on the porch each morning, I would inhale that sea funk like jasmine, and I would still never get enough. And, in my perfect world, it is never summer at the beach, but more Ocean City in the transitions from season to season, when the landscape could be cold and bleak one day, warm and inviting the next. And, in my perfect world, I am alone, and slightly lonely. And I need to find some way to fill my time with purpose. It may be that there are shells I need to collect, or a dog I need to walk, or a bean soup I need to make. Of course there is coffee I need to drink, and maybe a jigsaw puzzle to spend a little time on. The house plants need to be watered. I will meet a friend for lunch, or to write, or to go to Ocean City’s excellent Chinese restaurant for dinner. My friend and I will talk about how we wish Shaftos and Campbells had never closed. We will talk about how we thrilled to see the mast of the Sindia before the dredging buried it forever. We will tell each other family stories. I will tell her how, when I was young, we would clam on the beach, and collect starfish from the jetties, and my grandmother would warn us about the two little boys she swore were sucked under the sand while wandering near the jetties, never to be seen again. She will tell me how her aunt found a Cape May diamond as clear as a real diamond, and the size of a filbert. I will brave the cold wind to get a cut at Mack Mancos almost every day, and though they’ve dropped the Mack from the name, and doubled the Mancos, blessedly the pizza remains the same. And all other pizza is some other thing entirely that is anything but pizza. I will watch the handsome pizza boy toss the crust in the air, and I will make my stupid joke about how I want this pizza to be my last meal on earth, and the server will Kindly chuckle each time. I will buy all my clothes at The Flying Carp on Asbury, and everything I wear will be voluminous and linen, and made for a tall thin woman with a long neck and hair, and yet, like my grandmother, I will most certainly be a short stout woman with little hair. But I will wear it anyway, elevated on my noisy clogs, and teach my back to straighten so I can walk with the long strides of tall women. I will treat myself to cookies from Wards more than I should, and I will not care about my weight. I will live in the mysterious purple house in The Gardens that used to have mannequins dressed up in the sunken living room, by the place where we sent my father’s ashes out to sea, or I will live in one of the big homes in the north end that are festooned with fire escapes because they grew so tall. I will never get in my car. Only jazz bands will play at The Music Pier, and Grappelli and Brubeck and Gordon Guaraldi and Getz will not be dead, ever, and will play there every other month. (Surely Brubeck should have changed his name to Grubeck.) I will be a member of the fishing pier club, whatever that is exactly, and I will finally have access to that long locked pier, and I will fish there with an old man named John, who will also be my friend, and who will take the fish off of my hook for me. In exchange I will flour and pan fry our catch, along with some potatoes, and invite him for dinner. I’ll open the can of peeled tomatoes and thicken them with flour, but no sugar. We will drink strong coffee followed by flavored brandy as we chomp some of the cookies from Wards. We will talk politics and play Stratego, and at least half the time I will win, and he will think I am smart and feisty, but we will not fall all the way in love, lest we lose our lovely lonely feeling. In the summer months I will escape to somewhere cooler or less crowded; I will trade my house with a family in Greece or Guanzhou. I will bring home souvenirs in the fall, and rearrange all the furniture to fit them in.

To be in a windy place is a good thing; the wind is constantly cleaning and sweeping everything. Los Angeles was never windy, unless it was the hot desert wind. City winds do their job well, but too roughly; they slice into you when you try to walk against them. But the sea wind is perfect because it pushes, it sweeps, but it also wraps you up; it twirls your hair and clothing around you. It makes of you a little package and then it holds you in its hand. I am grateful that where I live now is affordable, windy, and has the shrill sound of gulls from time to time to bring my mind to the sea.

Dear OCNJ, as the real estate agents stretch you thinner and thinner, may you find a way to keep your unique scent, your lovely wrapping wind, against the onslaught of the greed of men. I love you.

Look at the joy on the face of Aretha Franklin as she records one of her many hit songs.

I wish you could see the sadness on my face today, as I mourn her passing. I never was lucky enough to see her perform live.

However, if you ever heard Aretha sing, live, or on a record, you’re lucky enough.

Rest in peace dear Lady Soul.

I want to share with you today, as I do my 9-5 job, one of my favorite poems ever, “Hay for the Horses,” by Gary Snyder.

Gary Snyder reading Hay for the Horses

Hay for the Horses

by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night

From far down San Joaquin

Through Mariposa, up the

Dangerous Mountain roads,

And pulled in at eight a.m.

With his big truckload of hay

        behind the barn.

With winch and ropes and hooks

We stacked the bales up clean

To splintery redwood rafters

High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa

Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,

Itch of haydust in the 

        sweaty shirt and shoes.

At lunchtime under Black oak

Out in the hot corral,

—The old mare nosing lunchpails,

Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—

“I’m sixty-eight” he said,

“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life.

And dammit, that’s just what

I’ve gone and done.”

Time to write!

Happy Monday!

🙂

Dianne