Oh, Once Upon A Time

I wallow in nostalgia, looking at the Youtube video of stills of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan while the music of "Diamonds and Rust" is sung and the lyrics printed across the screen.  They seem to in love, so young, so happy, having such a creative good time; it is painful, and I think of me and my first wife, Mary, and how much we talked together and experienced new things in life, we were so young.  Just coming to Boston and buying our groceries at Haymarket on Saturday.  Who in Iowa had ever heard of artichokes?  Bob and Joan look so deeply complicated into each other's psyche and life, and I think back to Mary and me, and her smile while she was teaching me what I did not know, God, what an idiot I was!  So naive, so uninformed, and so odd that she died at 26 and I went on to write books and articles, and so somehow it seemed that I was the learned one.  You had to know her, is all I have to say.  It wasn't diamonds and rust, but it was a kind of heartache.  And then I married again, and Penny, well, she really wasn't ready for all that, and I hear her when I go again to Youtube to a performance of Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, and medley of the latter's songs.  It makes me think of the sorrow and tension of our marriage--"I Don't Want To Play House" "Divorce" oh, so many more all chronicling the pain and misery of marriage as it was lived by ordinary people, bored with each other, stupified by parenthood, yearning to get out, knowing that they had obligations.  All those years that the children suffered with us as parents.  I shudder as Fathers Day approaches.   Oh, Lord, how those country western songs nailed that impossible situation.  Was it really all better back when complete repression ruled the household?  But did it ever, or was the prevailing hypocrisy better able to mask the truth.  Funny how the music of Nashville, or the lyrics at least of those songs, takes it for granted that promiscuity, adultery, heartache, and sorrow are the ingredients of any marriage.  All so complicated and difficult.  In my third marriage I cannot think of any music that defines the relationship I have with my husband.  Without children in the home there is not that claustrophobic, hothouse of emotions, so many people bouncing off one another.  It is often remarked that the narrative in ancient tragic drama derives from the family.  Country western lyrics reflect this, although there is nothing do desperate.  Old age, they say all passion spent, yes, and in a good sense.  If you can make the increasing frailty and impending death part of your vision of a fulfilled successful life, then yes, indeed.