[amicus_curiae]

“As I approach the prime of my life,
I find that I have the time of my life
Learning to enjoy, at my leisure,
All simple pleasures,
And, so, I happily concede
This is all I ask.
This is all I need...

....I will stay younger than Spring.”

I heard Nat King Cole sing it; Sinatra, too, but it wasn’t until 1973, hearing the surprising voice of Harry Nilsson croon the tune, that I fell in love with “This is All I Ask.” Maybe it was that year’s girl. She had that naive sophistication. Forty years later she wrote to me of her ‘social retardation’ at that time. That may have been amongst the reasons that I loved her so deeply, so... cavernously?

But, no.

Eliot “measured out (his) life in coffee spoons.” I’m much too gauche, too much the caffeine-chugging proletariat, to have followed suit. I remember the chorus line of the lissome girls, of course I do, but: It’s the music that scored my life.

Maybe yours, too?

Those soft and mellow girls passed the time but music sweetened the decades.

I remember my first song. My mother sang it to me. The one about three fishies. It may have been the last song that she sang to me, too.

There followed a cacophony of early rock, show tunes, what-have-you as I moved from home-to-home before settling in with my father’s eclectic mixes on his reel-to-reel Ampex (long story, that). Brubeck for the ladies.

Then came 1962-68. Crazy, man. Talkin’ NY to visiting Sweet Jane in NY and Warhol and Him & Heroin and that poetic Home on High and that was overload, overdose, too many falls, too many falls. I needed pop in California but I was getting beer brewed and weed and the 1970’s just happened until, East Coast then the further East ex-pat boy and just as Spring became Strummer I went native.

Then came the fuzzy years. What was punk becoming new wave Elvis pop New Wave? Ever, ever studious, westerned back to the East Coast: more college, college radio. Murmuring at night. A decade or eight years and that brilliant blonde beauty hippie chick certainly like no other is wed wearing lace sleeves and a hint of makeup for mother. And I am wed, as well. Well-trained. Well-heeled. Well-healed. Here comes the break:

I lost twenty-two years of music. I lost twenty-two years of living.

My wife. I’ve had but her, only her, as a wife. I say, over twenty-years later, ‘wife’ rather than ‘ex-wife’ as that seems too complex, what with in-laws and deaths and ****.

To never never never never never wonder why.

The boy: Yeah, best left alone. Did I not Father him? God, I hope not.

I recovered from that long gap of 1. Music Unremembered, and 2. Music Unavailable.

Pet Sounds. The Enormous Orchestra. My potion.

I haven’t made my case, I know.

I think, maybe, that I mean to reveal that unspeakable connection between my mother and that girl that I danced with in 1973. I am certain of it. My bride, my wife, would never have become my wife had she known that my greatest love wore scent, perfume. Susan. Chanel No. 5. The same as my mother.

That’s coincidence, of course. What I only now - at this moment in time - what I realise is that Susan, unknowingly (I think?), abandoned me just as my mother had abandoned me. I knew that, of course, but I had concentrated on, spoken of, abandonments in-between 1961 and 1974. Superficial abandonments.

I have things to do. I can’t sleep, though. Not now. I have more important things to focus on.

Chronological musical influences. That’s what I meant to write of.

[Skeezyks]

Thanks for sharing this. I've always enjoyed music, although I pretty-much left popular music behind in my early twenties. And I can't say as I associate music with any particular stages of my life. I recall hearing someone, on some TV program I believe, say that as a person gets older they return to the music of their youth. That never happened with me. Thanks for the retrospective though!