Sandy Denny wrote Who Knows Where the Time Goes when she was 19 years old. It’s one of those songs in my collection that I keep returning to again and again. I can’t recall exactly when I first heard it, but this morning I counted and I have six versions of the song on my computer. All done by Denny at different moments in her life. Six.
My first listening would have occurred in the seventies somewhere and I remember the heightened sense of the seasons changing, life changing, me changing, all contained in a few words and few bars of music. Timeless. Every year more meaningful. How could a 19 year-old already know this, I wonder?
Here’s one of the earliest recordings of her performing her own song, with a group called The Strawbs. It’s not the most famous version, it’s just her and an acoustic guitar. A gift.
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I am awake, lying in the dark in a queen-sized bed under a comforter that is adequate to the task of keeping the chill of the room away. I squint at the clock on the dresser and finally can see the numbers 3:28. My bladder insists that no matter what the clock says it is just about time to attend to matters. My wife is sleeping very near and I can hear her softly breathing. Willow the cat has joined us and has arranged her body so that it lies lightly against my left arm. We are three smallish creatures in a large bed and there is more than enough room for us all.
Later on, out there in the daylight, it will be Election Day, and important things will be happening. I made my small contribution to history by voting last week.
Yesterday I visited my physician and he wants to go poking about in my corpus once again so we arranged yet another meeting to do that. It was never one of my aims in life to develop a close relationship with a urologist, but there you are. Life sets its own agenda.
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The days have their issues but right now, in this present moment, when it is 37 degrees outdoors and 62 degrees indoors and I am cowering deliciously under the comforter, I am happy as the proverbial clam. Love is the word that comes to mind.
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Can’t help myself. Not even trying. What’s going on out there in the national election is so right, after all these years of being so wrong. The so-called “blue wave” turned out to be real after all. Democrats have taken both Senate and House of Representatives. The phrase that comes to mind is Cluck is done, stick a fork in him.
Even though some Democrats were playing their version of hara-kiri (Fetterman and Stevens) and honestly, I would rather have a job herding cats than Democrats, the revulsion against the brutal authoritian state that all those orcs and goblins were building while the dark lords behind them were spreading their money around like water to shore it up … all for naught. We The People have finally said Enough!
Maybe it took a the cost of filling the gas tank on their cars rather than the cries of families being torn apart, but the huge wad of Americans have shifted slightly toward the left side and that was it.
The next two years will be something to watch. All those committees, all those agendas, all those investigations … maybe we’ll finally deal with the Epstein files after all. It won’t change many minds, most of us who want the truth to come out could write out a list of perpetrators if we felt like it without even breaking a sweat. And MAGA wouldn’t believe the dozens of women whose stories of abuse we’ve already heard if they all had videos and DNA samples to prove it. But the survivors will finally get their day in court.
Now it almost goes without saying that eventually the Democrats may fritter away Tuesday’s victories, as they have done so many times in the past. Even while the party was coming out on top today, the Pelosis and the Carvilles and the Jeffries and the Schumers were still bleating away about those horrible Democrat Socialists and hoping they would lose rather than giving them seats at the table. Arrrggghhhhh. Speaking of sticking forks in things that are done … .
It’s a good morning. Maybe all is not yet right with the world, but the air this morning smells a whole lot sweeter.
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