Published June 2, 2018
It was a long time ago. I was 19, and M was 25. We worked together and played music together. At my dad’s funeral, I played guitar, and she sang. Her articulation of “On Eagle’s Wings” soared. She had sung the song at other funerals, sometimes accompanied by my guitar, but she and I had become close in ways I couldn’t have foreseen when we first met, and I could hear new layers of emotion this time.
Hours before my father died from lung cancer, I helped M celebrate her last day of work before her move back to her hometown to begin a new life. Soon after his funeral, she was homeward bound.
Where to put this part on the timeline is impossible to know, because I can’t recall what night it was. It’s a better story if it happened after she’d decided she was leaving my hometown for hers, so I will float that possibility here. That would make it an echo of other moments with important people in my teen years soon before they would share that they’d be moving on.
We were in her apartment, and I had my guitar. She asked me if I knew how to play “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” by Seals and Crofts. I didn’t, but I said I’d give it a try. Largely self-taught on guitar, I didn’t know how I could play songs by ear; I just could (I still can’t read sheet music). So with the expectation that she would begin singing at the appropriate time, I began playing the song’s opening notes.
At some point after the first line, as I continued to correctly guess chord after chord and finger-picking pattern, M’s unstoppable laugh cascaded into her vocals. She soon explained, after my run of good fortune had ended and I was stumped as to how to proceed, that she was amazed that I was playing the song as if I’d played it many times.
We didn’t finish the song, at least not that way. I couldn’t figure out where to go from there on the fretboard, and she played the song on her record player (I told you it was a long time ago). I can’t say for sure that I was wise enough to pick up on the subtext of the moment as James Seals and Darrell Crofts repeatedly sang “We may never pass this way again,” but I’ve been reminded of it every time I’ve heard the song since then.
For years, for decades, from blog to blog and therapy assignment to therapy assignment, I wanted to write about that night with M. Something about it was too perfect, while the rest was exquisitely imperfect. It was magical, but real. I didn’t write about it until now because I couldn’t figure out where to go from here on the keyboard.
I still don’t, really, except to say that we have these moments in our lives that stand out, and they won’t happen again except in memory — and we bookmark them for all kinds of reasons, including some that we don’t fully understand. I learned a lot from M, and I grew because of knowing her, and then she was gone, and our paths didn’t cross again. The memories are joyful, embarrassing, enlightening, funny, poetic and painful, imbued with the requisite 20/20 vision of hindsight.
Those memories bookmarked in our subconscious mind hold special meaning, even if we’re never really sure where to go with them, as if we’re carrying a secret, a mystery that will one day be solved. “And all the secrets in the universe whisper in our ears, and all the years will come and go, take us up, always up …”
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