Single Song Sunday: In My Life
There are places I remember…
A moment in time, on a stone bench with Pia, our backs to the rubble that was once her home. Showed her an AP photo of a man holding a page from her account book, which had flown 80 miles to make the news. Admired the clean hole that was her home’s foundation, and the clothes – her daughter’s, her son’s, her husband’s, her own – she has been collecting from the neighborhood. Left her looking in the flat mound next to it for the other shoe to match her daughter’s favorite pair, and her family’s rings – later, I heard, they found the sapphire ring on a branch in a tree, three houses away.
An old woman standing by the assisted living facility just on the standing side of the street, looking out into the headless forest, and her neighbor’s totalled homes, her eyes questioning at the disaster just beyond. 82 years in town, she said, and she’s never seen anything like it. Three days since the storm, and she’s finally come outside, but just to the end of the garden; the rest, she said, is too much, too soon.
Back and forth all morning in the town offices, a hundred years of records and files strewn across floors thick with dust and ceiling tile, bright sun shining in from the torn roof above. We got everything out of a score of offices, packed it up for the long move across town, and though we all wore masks, we knew who we were, and nodded as we went past.
A dozen power company trucks, winching wire through shattered streets. A family, standing on the third floor of their home, looking outward through a wall that used to be there. Truck beds of trees, moving past at a crawl among the gawkers on Main Street; military vehicles full of National Guardsmen, their eyes wary and tired. Backhoes, pushing lumber and glass, branches and belongings, into piles as tall as the houses that once stood here.
So much pain. So many shellshocked. So many people, their t-shirts dark with sweat, twenty to a yard, climbing through the trees, pulling, sawing, hauling. So many of the people I love, descending into the neighborhoods with water and sandwiches, information and friendship, and most of all, the silence that is the community together in shared loss.
Today I saw the wreckage firsthand, whole neighborhoods flattened into nothingness. This morning I walked and worked my way through the war zone that is my town. I cannot tell you where I was – the place looks so unrecognizable, I truly did not realize which streets they were, though a little voice in the back of my brain tells me that these are streets I have driven hundreds of times before.
Monday, the schools will open – for a while, with teachers and counselors in every classroom, to help the kids see the familiar spaces as they were before, and help them in their long path to normalcy again. Tuesday, classes will begin again, if the roads are clear enough for buses; Wednesday night, graduation will take place, a week to the day, a community coming together to celebrate those kids who walked through town today in their senior class shirts in groups of fours and fives, and humbly bent to help wherever they could.
I’m not sure I should, yet. But I’m thinking of taking the elderchild down tomorrow, to see. Because the people I saw today need children, and laughter, and the hope of future generations before them. Now, more than ever before, it is clear: this is what community is all about.
And so I turn to a song that once made me cry, when we said goodbye to another community. A song that another senior class, in another time, chose as their senior song, and we sang along, me and my wife, the elderchild and the infant wee one, pink-slipped into oblivion with no prospect of a job, about to be kicked out of our campus housing onto the knife edge of homelessness, ready to join the graduates on our next grand adventure.
It brought us here, once, this song. And it will bring us home again, too.
- June Tabor: In My Life
(from Rubber Folk, 2005)
- Johnny Cash: In My Life
(from American IV: The Man Comes Around, 2002)
- Reid Jamieson w. John Sheard: In My Life
(live from CBC’s Vinyl Cafe, unknown date)
- Ben Lee: In My Life
(from This Bird Has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribute To The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, 2005)
- Chantal Kreviazuk: In My Life
- Shawn Colvin: In My Life
(from Music From The Television Series Providence, 2002)
- Richie Havens: In My Life
(from Sings Beatles & Dylan, 1987)
- Leah Siegel: In My Life
(from The Beatles Complete On Ukelele, 2009)
- Allison Crowe: In My Life
(from Tidings, 2004)
- Dave Matthews: In My Life
(live, 2001)
While our server and bandwidth costs continue to rise as our popularity continues to grow, here at Cover Lay Down, we believe in passing it forward. So although we encourage you to check out and purchase albums by all artists featured here before moving on, Cover Lay Down is pledging 40% of all donations given between now and June 30th to rebuilding our local community after the recent tornado cut a swath through the hills and into our downtown area, destroying our Town Offices and leaving well over 100 people homeless. Won’t you consider helping out? Click here to donate.
Category: Uncategorized 36 comments »
June 5th, 2011 at 12:56 pm
I’ve been away for a few days and hadn’t seen the blog and over here in England it’s not such big news. But my shock was still real at what I read and would only want to add my voice to the others who have expressed their support for you and your neighbours. A long time ago I read American Studies at university. One of my favourite writers was Robert Frost and a small bell rang somewhere in my mind after 30 years of leaving the Uni. Here’s his depiction of the deep-rooted fear that exists in each one of us when faced with the power of Nature and that very loud voice that tells us to not even bother as we can’t succeed. Well done for bothering!
Storm Fear – Robert Frost
When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lower chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
“Come out! Come out!”—
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length—
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away,
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether ’tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.
June 5th, 2011 at 4:13 pm
powerful words, sadness and hope. all the best getting home.
June 6th, 2011 at 6:01 am
Terrible news, Boyhowdy. I feel for you and your community. All the very best.
June 8th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Beautiful words and insight for such a sad tragedy
June 10th, 2011 at 9:05 am
What a terrible devastation. Strength to you all.
Just found another nice “In my Life”
John Denver 1966
http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=681
June 12th, 2011 at 8:12 am
So sad this is, great story though and its very emotional. Enjoy life and hope for the best. Sometimes you just cannot control stuff like this happening, this is life.
June 12th, 2011 at 8:13 am
[...] XX: more covers of and from Sam Billen, The Farewell Drifters, Rufus Wainwright, Dylan & more!Single Song Sunday: In My LifeEverything Is Broken: A Tornado Hits BoyhowdytownNew Artists, Old Songs, Vol. XXI: From the fringes [...]
June 12th, 2011 at 8:13 am
[...] XX: more covers of and from Sam Billen, The Farewell Drifters, Rufus Wainwright, Dylan & more!Single Song Sunday: In My LifeEverything Is Broken: A Tornado Hits BoyhowdytownNew Artists, Old Songs, Vol. XXI: From the fringes [...]
June 17th, 2011 at 5:00 am
[...] XX: more covers of and from Sam Billen, The Farewell Drifters, Rufus Wainwright, Dylan & more!Single Song Sunday: In My LifeEverything Is Broken: A Tornado Hits BoyhowdytownNew Artists, Old Songs, Vol. XXI: From the fringes [...]
June 17th, 2011 at 5:00 am
[...] XX: more covers of and from Sam Billen, The Farewell Drifters, Rufus Wainwright, Dylan & more!Single Song Sunday: In My LifeEverything Is Broken: A Tornado Hits BoyhowdytownNew Artists, Old Songs, Vol. XXI: From the fringes [...]
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