The Whole World Is Singing My Song

The Dish And The Spoon

2015
April 9th marked 27 years Jan and I have been married. Yup, 27 years ago. A bit more than half a year before that, I was on the island of Crete. That time, I’d been away from the states better than a year. Jan, who had been in school in Paris, joined me in Spain and we lived and traveled together for some months. She left for New York and I went to Greece. I wrote this song there. It was played once. That was for Jan on the day I arrived in New York. And because the song was new and written for that one performance, I couldn’t remember most of it after a time.

For years, I thought I’d lost the paper it was written on. I tried to find it. I knew I’d put somewhere for safekeeping, but it was out my head. I looked in all my old songbooks, through every file and folder of papers, in every crack and corner of everything I owned. More than once. Plenty more than once. You know how it is. You know you have something, and you’ve searched everywhere. You tell yourself, it can’t be gone. You must be blind. So you go back time and again. Then you give up and, after a while, you give up on giving up and go try all over again. I did that so much, because I wanted it and it felt bad to lose it.

A few months ago, I was clearing out my studio. I had a leave coming up, and I wanted to get things just the way I liked them to paint. In a drawer stuffed with old shit, I came across the address book I use to carry in my pack. I leafed through it. There were old pieces of paper stuck in there. Notes. Phone numbers without names on them. Some with names of folks I’d meant to stay in touch with and didn’t. Addresses for this or that in some city or another. Just scraps stuck in there, torn and wrinkled. They were slipping out while I handled them, and some fell. One of these was a small, doubled over sheet of paper. I picked it up and, mood I was in, unfolded to see what it was about. And there was the song.

So I recorded it on April 9th, twenty-seven years and around seven months after that last and, up to then, only time I’d played it. This time, my son Noah played with me.

Wherever You Are Is Home

You know, one night stands have a pretty shitty reputation. We think of something cold, superficial, soulless, or even mean.  Maybe it is like that a lot of times for a lot of folks—the kind of thing you grab in the moment out of hope or need or some terribly human thirst, and it leaves you feeling flattened. Less than you were before.  Sadder.  

But it’s not always that.  Someone once said the loveliest flower has the briefest bloom.  I know someone said it, because it got into my head from somewhere.  I don’t think it’s entirely true.  But a lovely flower, and perhaps even the loveliest, might have the briefest bloom.  It can happen. That’s enough to know.  

Love doesn’t have to be long to be love.  It can just happen for a few hours on a cool night with the wavelets from the wake of a passing boat lapping a nearby bulkhead under the young moon visible through a glass door.  When it is as much to be a drink of water as it is to drink.  You don’t remember her name.  How could you after decades? You only used it once. Twice at most, and never again.  But you do remember the reach of skin, the soft and tender give of it against your own.  Hair, peach-scented, the color of walnuts.  A wet mouth and the taste of it.   For that cupful of time, it was sweet, sincere, and so gentle it felt like what home must feel like.  

Why shouldn’t something like that hold its place among the loves of a lifetime?  How could it not? 

But this song isn’t about that.  It’s about a whole other mood altogether.


Mark Ari