Sometimes a song, especially a country song with the melancholy whine of the steel, becomes twisted up with your life.

It’s the lights of the houses mirrored on the lake, it’s a bottle of white wine, it’s summer drifting into fall.

It reminds you of a long drive on a country road, the greens and grays blending, unwinding, your feet on the dashboard and the keys clinking against the steering wheel.

And then it’s something more distant and a little more ethereal- it’s where you want to go- that place you can see in your head, with the mountains all around you. And when you peer through your dirty windshield, you realize that beauty is what you were looking for all along.

So pretty little thing, sometimes you gotta look up- let the world see all the beauty that you’re made of. Cause the way you hang your head, nobody can tell. My Virginia Bluebell.

Virginia Bluebells

C’est tres belle.

baby blue.

I write songs. Sad, melancholy songs.

I leared to sing from listening to hours and hours of Jewel. I even sang “You Were Meant For Me” at a talent show. Oh yes. I got up there under the bright lights.

I try to write happy, upbeat, optimistic- but in the end, they all boil down to minor chords and loss.

There is a place in me that needs to play them as a catharsis. I’ve written about more unrequited love (without the scent of bitter almonds) and lonley East Texas nights …

I sing them when no one’s around. Someday I’d like to get up on a stage again and see if all my hours of toil and tears are worth the ear of even one person, but for now, I’ll play them for myself and my patient dog, Maggie. She sits at my feet and wags her wide, white tail back and forth, back and forth.

A carpeted metronome.

Swish, swish….

It’s a familiar feeling. I’m studying for the GRE and expect to feel it when I get my scores. Or from the graduate schools I apply to.

Louis and Clark felt it: there’s even a Cape of Disappointment named after their frustrations.

The job market is full of it. Every time I apply, I get an email three weeks later saying, “Thank you for your resume, but…”

So when does the disappointment end? When do the doors and windows of opportunity fly open?

When did Louis and Clark feel the elation of a succesful journey across a continent that opened up the frontiers for America?

Thank you, Ken Burns, for that insight.

I’m never sure that this Journey of Desire I am on is going to lead somewhere - if hope is going to leave me forever hanging, or If I’m going to wake up one day and know that I did it. I’m there.

the lines on your face

are they pain, or are they grace

in the photographs we take

you look so lost.

I hear your voice on the telephone wire

It trembles slightly, then expires

I don’t want to listen, but I’m caught

heart strings all in knots.

Let me run.

Let me fly-

Unbind my wings,

From this cage of wire.

But you’re still there,

Fingers in my hair

you still haunt me

Even in my sleep.

Run, baby, run.