It’s been a couple weeks of quiet reflection on my part. No stunning revelations or the like but a moment or two here and there along the way where I realize that perhaps I’m not the person I sometimes want to think I am. Then there are moments like tonight when I’m forcibly jerked from any concepts I have about myself into a never before realized place in what may ultimately be the scheme of things. I’m not going to sit here and try to tell anyone that I’ve suddenly become aware of what it’s all about because I haven’t but I have finally grasped an oft times shared concept I’ve had about myself for many years; I am the pebble that from time to time is dropped into the still pond that causes the ripples to wash up on the shore and move a grain or grains of sand.
I often ask the folks in the audience if they’ve ever had a song get stuck in their heads, one of those tunes that just won’t go away, and of course most people say yes they’ve had the experience. Then I tell them the story about me and a song that just won’t get out of my head:
The song snuck up on me out of nowhere and it simply wouldn’t leave me alone. It was a song I’d done years ago and for some reason had just let slip out of my repertoire for no good reason. Well, now the song was back and back in a big time way refusing to go away to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I was going just a bit mad. I asked the folks on Facebook about it and someone wrote back telling me it’s called an earworm. Well, I had an earworm of enormous proportions and finally decided I would have to relearn the song and one day perform it.
A few days later I was performing my normal gig at the Scottsdale Villa Mirage but this particular evening there was only one guy there and he was sitting at a table writing in a journal and not seeming to be paying any attention to me. Nights like that are the ones I use to pull out my notebook and practice some tunes that I’ve been working on but don’t feel completely confident about performing in front of an audience and so out came the 3 ring binder. I played a couple songs from the book, the fella kept writing and the earworm reappeared. Only one guy not paying any attention to me so why not haul out the old song and give it a go I decided and so I sang it seemingly to no one but myself.
When I finished the song the man at the table put down his pen, looked up at me and said, “That’s exactly what I needed to hear.”
He wanted to know about the song, what the name of it was, who sang it and where could he find it and so I told him it was a tune I’d learned off of a Michael Martin Murphy CD and the name of the song was “What Am I Doing Here?” He wrote down what I told him and he shared some of what he’d been going through over the past year or so, none of which I could really connect with the song though that didn’t matter since it meant something to him.
So I finish my story about the night and the song by telling folks that if they ever get an earworm to learn the song and then sometime just walk up to someone you think might need to hear a song and sing it to them because you never know but what it just might be exactly what that person needs to hear at that moment.
I’ve been sharing that story for about a year now and have often wondered about the guy I sang to that night. We’d not exchanged addresses or anything and we’d both gone on our separate ways until tonight.
I’m back at my usual Thursday night gig getting ready from the looks of things to do a bit of practicing once again. This time no earworms and for the moment no audience though sometimes folks come in fashionably late. Just finished tuning up the guitar when a guy walks up to me with a big smile on his face and says, “You don’t remember me do you?”
Most every week there are new faces though I’ve been doing the Villa Mirage long enough now that I recognize return guests now and again but his face wasn’t one that seemed to generate any memories.
“No, I’m sorry but I can’t say as I recall,” I tell him honestly.
“You sang me a song a year ago,” he says to me.
Something sort of comes back to me and I ask, “Were you the guy sitting over at that table that night and asked me about that song?”
“That was me,” he said “and you have no idea what that night meant to me.”
I’ve spent the better part of my life questioning so many things about myself, who I am, why I do some of the things I do and don’t do others that I think maybe I should be doing, and I am a man who yearns for the knowledge that something, anything, that I do has at least a shred of significance in the world around me let alone the world as a whole. I continue to question myself, my motivations and my reason for being and the truth is that I’m not the sort of person who does well not knowing whether or not I really have a purpose here on earth. So the smiles, the laughs, the tears and the warm “thank you”s I get from performing and telling the stories is a vital part of keeping me together and keeping me going sometimes quite literally from day to day. I doubt I would have ever done well with my name in lights and all the rest of that but I do know that I do well sitting with a few folks three times or so a week and walking away with the echoes of folks saying they enjoyed the evening and the memories it all brought back. I do not perceive of myself as someone who changes lives only someone who sometimes takes folks away from the here and now for an hour or so and when it’s over they go their way and I go mine.
He stood there gripping my hand firmly, looking me square in the eyes and what he said next almost brought me to tears, “That song you sang that night saved my marriage and me.”
I am little more than a pebble and I know that to be the truth of it all for me. If I ever get another earworm I will learn the song and I will sing it to one soul or a thousand. It will matter not whether I ever know the grains of sand that may be moved upon some unseen shore but I will believe that there is a reason to share the song.
Tonight I was affirmed for doing what I do in a way that I would never have imagined. Tonight I got to see the results of allowing myself to be once again dropped into that still pond and not to be the wave but merely create the wave that ultimately moved a grain of sand upon the shore. Tonight was a good night.
