Oh My: Jesse Winchester's "Brand New Tennessee Waltz"

(Below) Brock's Monument, Queenston Heights, Ontario.

"Diamonds and Rust" by Joan Baez deserves a mention somewhere, if only for these lines: 

Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling around/snow in your hair/Now you're smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square/Our breath comes out white clouds,  mingles, and hangs in the air/Speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.

For me, autumn has always been the most "real" season-- the cold winds, the warm coats, the sound of dried leaves under foot, the stilled conversations, the sense of diminished opportunity.  Memories of summer can drift into haze, ennui, an indeterminate place and time. 

And then, Baez sings,:

Now you're telling me you're not nostalgic/then give me another word for it/you were so good with words/ and at keeping things vague

Vague, I suppose, and non-committal.   "You were so good with words" is both an accusation and a lacerating confession: I believed you.  I may have been a fool, but I believed you, and even with the advantage of hindsight, yes, I'm nostalgic-- I wish I could believe again.

The Baez song also has a great opening: "

Well I'll be damned/Here comes your ghost again..."

In case you didn't know, the song is presumed to be about Bob Dylan.  I believe she has confirmed that.

July 29, 2010 

When I was about 14, I biked down to Queenston Heights one summer day and climbed up Brock's Monument, a tall, narrow cement column that culminated in a series of viewports embedded in a coarse sculpture of General Isaac Brock, the hero of the Battle of Queenston Heights, who was shot by the Americans when they spotted him on his white horse in his scarlet tunic.

The stairs up the monument were very, very narrow.  I was on my way down when I encountered a small group coming up, so I stopped and stood against the wall and waited to let them pass.  

 The first person in this group was a girl about my age.  She stepped level with me and turned to look at my face.  We were just inches away from each other.  That was 40 years ago, and I still remember thinking, "oh my, but you have a pretty face".   Not exactly in the words of the Jesse Winchester song, but the sentiment was the same: oh my.

I can no longer actually remember what she looked like.  What I remember-- and this is true of a lot of our memories, I think-- is the intensity of the feeling I had about that face.  In my catalogue of a lifetime of memories, of all the pretty girls I've ever looked at,  I still remember it as one of the most startlingly beautiful faces I have ever seen.  She had red hair and freckles and green eyes.  The average blonde may be more beautiful than the average red-head, but a really beautiful red-head with green eyes is peerless.  Her skin seemed luminous. I was so taken aback that I couldn't avert my eyes and she seemed so startled by my stare that she stared back.  She stepped away, up the stairs, and looked back once.

I waited at the bottom for a long time for her to come down, just to see that face again.  She emerged a time later, supremely indifferent to my existence.  She walked by me and left my orbit forever.