Light-Bright – At Sea – [06/27/2012]

So beat the drums slowly and play the fife lowly
Take me to the green valley
And lay the sod o’re me
I’m a young cowboy and know I’ve done wrong

Sometimes, things come up and jump on you completely out of the blue. I thought I knew most of the solo guitarist’s chart book, I certainly know the standards he plays every night – over the weeks he becomes a lovely background to my evening, but I don’t always pay a great deal of attention to him. And then tonight, he suddenly strikes a very familiar chord, that I can hardly really believe I’m hearing, and it takes until the first line to realize what I’m actually listening to.

It’s The Streets of Laredo

Some things take you back to another time in the blink of an eye. There are about six songs that do that for me, Laredo is one of them. Suddenly I’m not sitting at a desk reading a Stephen King book about the effects of time travel on history – I am time travelling, and I’m standing on a stool in the kitchen of the house I grew up on, helping my mother clean the kitchen, and she’s singing Laredo…it’s a comic version, the parody done by the Smothers Brothers in the 60s, but it’s the same song. And she’s laughing because we always forget the words. The dishwasher songs we used to call them, her mother had taught them to her, had sung them with her and her sisters before there was such a thing as dishwashers – and so my mother taught them to me, and whenever I cleaned up the kitchen at home – to this day – I still sing the same set of six or so songs.

And I realize that I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m fighting back tears, and I don’t know if it’s because I miss home, or because I miss being a child when I had nothing more to worry about than drying the dishes – or because I never really had nothing to worry about, or because it’s just one of those lit up moments in the universe, thrown against the greyness of reality like the explosion of fireworks on a summer day.

The past is never what we believe it to be, if you ask a hundred people about an event you will get a hundred different points of view on what happened, but the important thing is we sculpt our own truth. Human beings tell stories to ward off the darkness, it’s a part of what makes us human, and if we tell the same story to ourselves long enough, we’ll believe it, even if a part of us knows that darkness is still out there.

It really, really is all about the lit-up moments.