Four years ago, Mia Wallace and I joined Sarah the L, Smoochie Poo, Peace Corp Girl, and Head in Hinesburg to mourn the end of yet another year while simultaneously celebrating the beginning of the next one. After Mia Wallace shared with me her belief that how you celebrate New Year’s Eve impacts how you spend the rest of the year, I made sure to do my part in helping to plan a great evening. I even went so far as to create the first of what has now been five straight Mr. Benchly’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve Super Mixes. I made a copy for each partygoer. And though I did my best to make the CD a soundtrack for the evening, what I was actually doing was attempting to create a soundtrack for my life.
I know I’m not alone when I say that I’m intrigued at the thought of having a movie soundtrack play in the background of my everyday life. Whether it’s an inspirational Explosions in the Sky song for the walk to the Election Day voting booths; or a heartbreaking Bright Eyes song playing on the drive home from a break-up; or the upbeat Belle & Sebastian song that makes the stroll down Church Street that much more entertaining; or the hopeful Beatles song seemingly inspired by that first kiss; I’ve often dreamed of my life being set to music. As Caden Cotard said, every person in the world is a lead in his or her story. If that’s true, don’t we all deserve a musical accompaniment?
One song that has never made its way onto one of my Super Mixes despite its rightful claim to be there is the late great Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Auld Lang Syne.” The song tells the tale of two old lovers running into each other in their hometown and then spending the snowy evening drinking and reminiscing of days gone by. They toast their past and their present, and they attempt a conversation riddled with “emptiness.” In one of my favorite lines, Fogelberg says that the two were “living in our eloquence.”
I can’t think of a better way to describe a conversation between two old flames than how Fogelberg paints the picture in his song. Anyone who has ever experienced such an encounter firsthand knows that interacting with an ex is a complicated dance: there’s the obvious connection that drew you to each other in the first place, but it’s been marred by whatever drama that inspired your break-up; depending on how much time has passed, feelings are either confused or gone altogether and with them has gone the love-is-blindness that helped you overlook your ex’s flaws. What remains and the only thing capable of sustaining the conversation is the eloquence of your words. But your relationship has already ended for good reason and it’s inevitable that you’ll “run out of things to say.” Such is your fate as exes.
Despite “Same Auld Lang Syne”’s especially relevant subject matter this past holiday season (considering my break-up with Ms. Darling in the rainy autumn), it failed once more to make the final cut for my most recent Super Mix. Instead, I tried yet again to create a soundtrack for my life and, as embarrassing as this is to admit, like a documentarian trying to rewrite history, my song choices reflected my hope at reconciliation with Ms. Darling. A few of you received copies of the Super Mix before, predictably, I realized how unhealthy such a compilation was; I suppose that these copies will now be considered collector’s items. The lesson learned here is that though we each are leads in our own stories, we can’t act out our lives; we can only live them. Since that day, I’ve done my best to live my life to the fullest.
What’s so sad about Fogelberg’s song is that it’s autobiographical; it’s a genuine soundtrack to his life because these are words he actually lived. And it’s a song that will never be mistaken for a hopeful one. At the end of the night, the old flames kiss and go their separate ways back to their separate lives. Fogelberg sings, “Just for a moment, I was back at school and felt that old familiar pain. As I turned to make my way back home, the snow turned into rain.” Ms. Parker and I have debated the meaning of these lines and I’m not sure that we ever settled on an ultimate interpretation, but I don’t think that it’s much of a stretch to say that Fogelberg was going for symbolism with his words. My belief is that the snow represented joy or hope, and the rain, sadness or realism.
This song and my interpretation of its symbolic lyrics were on my mind late last year on an unseasonably warm and rainy December day when, on my walk to work, I heard a woman say to her friend, “well, at least it’s better than snow.” As timing would have it (and you know how this blog and its author love timing), this depressing, global-warming-loving comment happened two days after I met Cherry on Top, and inspired me to write her an email to tell her about it. I told her that though I may not ski, and though I’ll most likely feel differently in April, even I will admit that in the winter, I prefer snow to rain. And later that day, as I typed another email to her, adding yet another page to this new chapter in my life, the rain outside turned into snow.
Benchly'sword 