Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart. You’re shaking my confidence daily. Oh, Cecilia! I’m down on my knees. I’m begging you please to come home. Come on home.
For some odd reason I awoke in the early morning darkness with Simon and Garfunkel’s Cecilia running through my head. The song was released in 1970 when I was just a kid with the entire world before me. No doors had yet been closed in my path; I couldn’t really even see my path yet. But even at seven years old I knew that I wanted to achieve something. I just had no idea what that was.
Forty-four years has changed much in that regard. Except now some doors have been closed. Perhaps a lot of them. And I still haven’t figured out what I hope to achieve.
It’s possible at the time that some people thought the song was scandalous. In the middle of it, one of them, Simon or Garfunkel, got up to wash his face and when he came back to bed someone had taken his place.
But according to the famous songwriters, Cecilia wasn’t just some woman they’d picked up in a dive bar. She was, in the Catholic tradition, the patron saint of music and to them represented the evanescent manner of songwriting. At one moment, you are happily inspired, the next you are in the dregs wondering where the music will come from — and if it will come. Perhaps the person they found in bed with her was Mick Jagger.
In the end, they did OK — the song hit number four on the American pop charts.
I have no idea where the song came from in my dream except for the fact that I’ve been thinking lately about all of the doors that have closed behind me in life. Sometimes there really is the concept of “it’s too late.”
In a few weeks I’ll be 52 years old. I’m quite aware that to much of our readership that is still relatively youthful. To another segment, it’s an ancient age in which I lived for a long period without cellphones or MacBooks or even the Internet. Yes, I’m of an age in which I once wrote letters and waited — often weeks — for a reply. Can you imagine that?
It would be difficult to make the argument that my job is hard work. After all, there are a great number of people who truly do go to work in the morning and come home at night feeling physically beat up. I know a little about that — I have done such jobs in the past in order to put food on the table. But writing is an oddly and uncomfortable fluid way of making a living. Sometimes Cecilia is there with me whispering words that I can somehow hear through hearing-impaired ears, but more often than not I’m begging her please to come home.
But somehow just thinking about her is enough lately — although that enough usually results in a tumultuous confusion that is often overwhelming. The year that song came out wasn’t necessarily a pretty time — there was Vietnam, Kent State, in which four college students were killed and nine were wounded in 13 seconds and the firing of 67 rounds — and there was way too much tear gas being launched. But, holy smokes, the news is bad these days.
Certainly by next week when the midterm elections are over, the general outlook will improve, but stuff is so bad that it has usurped even the hellish modern political attack landscape. Basically it has come down to one person demonizing another along with headlines blaring about murder, mayhem and really scary diseases mixed in. On Halloween Day, The New York Times news summary stated that, of the week, the least scary story they ran was about a bar in Brooklyn that employees felt certain was haunted.
In contrast, my memories of 1970, softened by 44 years and the fact that I was still a child and knew next to nothing and worried about even less, seems like it was a fairy tale. And, to be honest, it scares the daylights out of me that 44 years hence, a seven-year-old of today is going to wake up reminiscing from a dream that had hip-hop music playing in his head. Oh, for the love of all things holy — pull up your pants and play some Simon and Garfunkel before it’s too late.
By the time you read this, Florida will (hopefully) know who will be sitting in the governor’s chair for the next four years. Ideally, that person would make it his mission to rebuild bridges and instill some confidence into a populace that is pretty weary of the uncertain present. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that is the seven-year-old in me talking. Those who have decided to hate the person who was opposed to “their guy” would likely answer any such attempt with accusations of being a communist or a fascist. Sometimes I swear we are our own worst enemies. And it’s not like we don’t have enough of those already.
The Seventies was not what many would call an attractive decade. But even in the middle of all of the plaid, polyester and the deaths of young Americans on battlefields few could pronounce, let alone place on a map, there was still some sort of unshakable, underlying optimism. Although inflation, the lines for gas that ran for blocks, and so many other things were discouraging, it seemed as though most people still felt better days were yet to come for our 200-year-young nation. I worry we are losing our optimism. We shouldn’t. We’re still young. If nothing else, it would be nice if we could stop fighting with one another.
As you read this, the election will be over … hopefully. That is a call for jubilation from my perspective. And perhaps, sometime soon, Cecilia, or better yet, Veronica, the patron saint of photographers (and, yes, also of laundry workers), will love me again. And then she’ll come home. Or, perhaps, we could go home to her. I think she’s attracted by optimism. It’s time to look for some.