I got back from a road trip to Cleveland this month which is a three-day drive I quite enjoy and have done a few times now. In the car, I spend much of the time scanning through various Sirius music channels and occasionally Spotify’s radio channels based on artist algorithms. Usually I come home with a list of new music to explore from Sirius stations like The Spectrum:
https://youtu.be/wJO0IoWY4t4?si=VfFHx-iSFO7Xpk6f
https://youtu.be/zccVGbRbjII?si=pyKfLD4m8SlUPXOP
https://youtu.be/5cXCUp6j5M8?si=PoLY7_WGGmTvOrjK
Or (not-so) guilty pleasures I haven’t heard in years (I totally forgot about these guys!): https://youtu.be/sGsWJ0PcLfU?si=n-I8-fZOAT8xH7Lh
But this trip’s music plays served up a song or two that I hadn’t heard in years if not decades and their lyrics reminded me they had been substantial life guides to me from back to childhood or young adulthood.
I can’t think of a single equivalent poem that has done this for me, a verse with a line that pretty much guided my entire life. For example, since poet Andrea Gibson died recently of Ovarian Cancer, she’s been on everyone’s mind (for some, like me, for the first time). My friend gave me her 2015 book Pansy and as I read it I haven’t found a poem I didn’t love. I’ve underlined most of the book’s amazing metaphors and lines. The book will definitely guide me in activism and on sorrowful days, but poetry tends to be complicated and to complicate. It tends to beautify the complications, not to simplify them.
And as I get to the end of my life, I can appreciate how solid some of the pithy pop song advice actually was.
The first song along this line was “Peace of Mind” by Boston, a band my two older brothers both listened to. I remember driving around St. Louis before I even started working full-time jobs, coming across the song on KSHE while flipping through the dial and thinking these lyrics sounded like very sage advice written by the band’s Tom Scholz.
“I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind.”
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we didn’t have lyric websites (or even websites) and so my version of the lyric was “I don’t care about gettin’ real high” (corporate-ladderly speaking). Same idea.
“Now you’re climbing to the top of the company ladder
Hope it doesn’t take too long
Can’t you see there’ll come a day when it won’t matter?
Come a day when you’ll be gone.
…People living in competition.
All I want is to have my peace of mind.”
The amazing thing is, I have never questioned this idea and have followed this advice at every decision point of my office and writing life. I lived this and have no regrets. I didn’t climb the corporate ladder. Maybe I would have been more envied or more laid if I had, but I had me some great peace of mind.
“Lot’s of people have to make believe they’re livin’
cant decide who they should be.”
I’ve seen this everywhere, year after year, in friends, family, co-workers, on TV and social media, people presenting a life that is enviable I guess, but pretty worthless tbh. I’ve had a lifetime to see it play out.
And how increasingly emphatic was Scholz’s final suggestion?
“Take a look ahead.
Take a look ahead.
Look ahead!”
I heard the same idea expressed in the positive this week by Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” with its declarative “I’ve got a song. I’ve got a song… If it gets me nowhere, I’ll go there proud.”
There are no poems I’ve read that can compete with this good counsel so compacted. And not even any line from a movie I can think of. Although I did write a poem a few years ago that mentioned how lines spoken by Jessica Lange to Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie have always guided my decorating decisions, specifically as regards to wallpaper, but that’s another story.
Dustin Hoffman brings us to the fact that I saw Rick Springfield in concert a few weeks ago with two younger gal pals and I pitched to them about my theory that Rick Springfield once caused a lot of early-80s tween girls to go suddenly boy crazy. I asked them who it was in the later-80s tweens who might have turned them boy crazy (even though I already knew the answer). They confirmed it was Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. A large swath of girls my age and younger did go nuts for the boys in Duran Duran. But I had no such rock singer for myself because all my crushes were on actors, with one exception later. Maybe I took this Peter Allen song too much to heart at age 8. Musicians seemed like bad news. Although, as annoyed as I was with Rick Springfield, I would have picked him before Simon Le Bon. Turns out actors weren’t such great news either. And comedians could be the worst because they’re always on and everything in their lives is fodder. (It’s the devil you know.)
Anyway, the actor who convinced me that boys were worth the trouble was Paul Sand (and not Barry Manilow as one could imagine; I had a sixth sense about that one). And interestingly, I eventually discovered this thing I loved about Paul Sand was not transferrable to other boys who looked somewhat like Paul Sand. This was necessary because Paul Sand was very, very obscure and I didn’t have a video recording device back then to catch him on The Mary Tyler Moore Show or The Carol Burnett Show. He was hard to come by. I tried to like Dustin Hoffman (meh) and Jeff Goldblum, who is very interesting person but he didn’t take, although I came across this very funny thing today:
…and later Al Pacino (which did take for a minute because he had the best movies, but my enthusiasm for him also did not last).
There was just some essence of Paul Sand that went beyond the markers of his physical self. And it operated on a level of intuition I could not rationalize. Maybe it was contingent upon past lives or maybe it was simply a heart’s broken mold.
But anyway I was driving to Cleveland after the 80s Rick Springfield show and his self-penned song “Don’t Talk To Strangers” came up, another song that seemed like a monster-hit during that time I was losing all my friends to Springfield’s pop enchantments. It was for this reason I had avoided the song and its lyrics at the time. But this line came through to me now:
“Who’s this Don Juan I’ve been hearing of?
Love hurts when only one’s in love.”
The simplicity of that caused some laughter in the car. But it soon occurred to me that hundreds of thousands of pop songs have been written all-to-say. It’s actually the ultimate statement of the situation. I mean…all other explications are always appreciated forever in perpetuity, but this is the tightest summary for sure.
To love someone all-of-itself should be enough. As one of the great show-tune lyrics of all time states, “to love another person is to see the face of God.”
But that is never enough somehow. Like 500 miles away from enough.
Which brings me to the another song that has guided my life through many decades, although unlike the Boston song, I’ve always struggled to follow it.
As someone from a gambling family, (I convinced a friend in St. Louis to play credit-card-roulette a few weeks ago), I’ve always appreciated the extended metaphor that is “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers. Whenever a teacher asked a class I was in to assemble a list of our favorite poems, I always included this lyric by Don Schlitz in my list. The song is a fully-realized extended metaphor about how to live life, the tenor, through the vehicle of playing out a hand in poker.
“You gotta know when to hold ‘em,
Know when to fold ‘em.”
This is a good time to say I am a family-famous terrible poker player. The game always demanded quicker decisions from me than I was ever capable of making and I never could make sense of all the possible patterns in front of me. (You can work out the life-metaphor there yourself.) Years ago I was playing with my family in their tradition of playing among variations of the game. We were in my oldest brother’s kitchen (in Boston coincidentally). I was always coerced into playing and for me it was always a few hours of feeling both performance anxiety and boredom alternatively. I was allowed a cheat sheet that made no sense to me (I was in my mid-20s, too.) My brother declared himself the winner of a hand and started pulling the chips into his stack. Then it was my mother who said across the table, “No actually, Mary has a Straight Flush.” I couldn’t see it. My brother had already confused the pots. And he was pissed off! He angrily said, “Mary shouldn’t play if she doesn’t know what’s in her own hand.”
(Lord have mercy, metaphor. Lord have mercy.)
And that was it, the last time I have ever played a game of poker or ever will. It was like a (somewhat traumatic) get-out-of-ever-playing-poker-again card.
And now, looking back over my life since I first heard these words of “The Gambler” sung so deadpan by Kenny Rogers, I see so much does seem to depend not upon a red wheelbarrow but upon knowing when to fold ‘em. You could spend decades of your life holding on to what turns out to be, if not technically a bad hand, (after all, every hand’s potentially a winner and a loser), but one of those hands that you will never be able to win with.
Knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em is where all of life’s most heartbreaking lessons in love and in work seem to be, especially for those of us who have never been able to tell the difference.
