Lonely, Longing, and A Little Long Island

That’s what I called the CD mix I recently compiled for my daughter. I was feeling nostalgic and a little bit sad and thought I would make a soundtrack for that. I pictured her on a rainy day in Boston playing it in her lonely apartment. I decided that no song would be too sentimental and if possible I would include a few I used to hear as a teenager growing up on Long Island. “Oh, Mom understands me perfectly,” my daughter would think. “She’s so cool.”

But some good instinct led me to listen to the whole thing yesterday while riding my bike and closer to a normal frame of mind. It didn’t hold up in broad daylight. I had not realized, for example, that Marianne Faithfull’s version of “As Tears Go By” was so slick and over-orchestrated. And though “Catch the Wind” still sounds sort of pretty, I wanted to gently tell Donovan that “dee-dee-dee-dee” does not a lyric make, even in the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty/when you want to be/ in the warm hold of her loving mind. Then there was Cat Stevens’ “Sad Lisa,” a song from the 70s that struck me now as cloying, and I couldn’t shake the image of Lisa sniffing and snotting into some guy’s flannel shirt, while the English teacher in me winced repeatedly at the line that I suppose is “tell me what’s making you sad, Li” but sounds exactly like “what’s making you sadly” in order to rhyme with “she must be hurt very badly.”

That wasn’t even the worst of it. Let’s just say it was a Turn-Down Day and I suddenly didn’t dig it. I didn’t dig it at all.

Many of the songs that appealed to me when I was young simply haven’t held up very well. I was, after all, a girl who went to see Gene Pitney in concert at the Long Island Arena in Commack. It’s true. I was deeply moved by “Town Without Pity”, so that gives you some idea who we're dealing with here. Chad and Jeremy were the opening act that day, and they too were big among aficionados of sentiment. Remember “Summer Song”? (“They say that all good things must end someday/autumn leaves must fall”) Chad and Jeremy were a small part of the British invasion of the 1960s, pretty exciting stuff for the Commack Arena. A young woman in a mini-skirt and white go-go boots climbed onto the stage and had to be dragged off by two policemen. But not everyone was sophisticated enough to swoon for Gene Pitney.

And here I am writing about a CD mix gone awry while everyone else is accomplishing things. In the past week alone, four people have told me they are writing novels. It's National Novel Writing Month. Who knew? Everyone but me, apparently. I can’t picture myself writing a novel anyway. But in the wake of that writers’ conference I went to last week, I AM convinced that I need to work harder and write more. Am I writing now? I guess this is closer to typing.

It brings to mind something a friend said long ago: “Everyone else is storing up acorns for the winter except me. And it’s awfully late to start.”

Yeah, that’s how I feel right now while those other folks are banging out novels and playing guitar and fluently speaking Italian.

No acorns.

Meanwhile a bank of fog has settled over the hills and this house, and it’s exactly like being in a cloud, and I’m eating toast and typing trifles, watching tears go by on a turn-down day, not crying into anyone’s shirt, but I may as well try and catch the wind.

If this leads me into an honest-to-goodness self-pity fest, I’ve got the soundtrack ready to go.