Last Friday night.

 Last Friday night.

We took our turn.* Axel came and Nils, and Bel Monk. Roz served wine and crackers and cheese from the fancy big basket that showed up on our doorstep Christmas Eve instead of Moses in his ark or Jesus in a manger. “So God comes these days,” I said, “not as the one that will set his people free from bondage - or the whole world from sin and death - but as something pleasant to look at and to eat. Bread and wine,” I said, paused, “and cheese.” Or likely I didn’t say but only thought it. Or more likely I only thought of it later.

     I poured their wine, and a glass of water for myself. I put on the music. We ate quietly. The music played, Melody Gardot's My One and Only Thrill.

The album revolves around “if.” The first cut, “Baby, I’m a Fool,” begins: 

                   How was I to know that this was always only just a little game to you?
                   All the time I felt you gave your heart I thought that I would do the same for you.

The singer is the “fool who thinks it cool to fall in love.” The one she loves doesn’t seem to feel the same way. Or he doesn’t want the world to know he does. So, she promises that she “would never tell if he, too, “if you became a fool and fell in love.”

“If the Stars Were Mine,” the next cut begins, “I’d give them all to you.” If the birds were mine, if the world was mine, I’d give them all, I’d give it all to you: the stars in a jar, the birds in a song, the world in the brightest colors. IF. The lyrics are all in the subjunctive.

I can’t listen to Melody Gardot without thinking of her life, particularly how the bicycle accident, in which she suffered head and spinal injuries and a pelvis broken in two places, confined her to a hospital bed for a year, how she then had to learn how to walk again, how to remember again, how to tell time. How she still remained painfully sensitive to light and sound, so that she still wears tinted glasses most of the time and prefers quiet music. How her music aided in her recovery but didn’t take away the pain. She probably isn’t, but I see and hear her as both clear and confused, both sinewy and fragile. Likely I’m projecting.

We listen all the way through in silence: “Who Will Comfort Me?”; “Your Heart Is As Black As Night”; “Lover Undercover”; “Our Love Is Easy,” but “like water rushing over stones” (and won’t the stones get worn? I always think); “Les Étoiles”; “The Rain”; the title song, “My One and Only Thrill” : “When I’m with you, my whole world stands still.”; “Deep Within the Corners of My Mind,” which hopes eventually there will be “a place for you and me” in time, meaning, I take it, in the world as well as in the mind.

     There’s a bossa nova “Over the Rainbow,” which makes me think again about how the song ends - with another if. If “Little bluebirds fly over the rainbow, why, oh why (oh why!) can’t I?” Because, clearly, I can’t.

     Then the reprise of “If the Stars Were Mine to Give”; but they aren’t.

After we listen, Roz asks if anyone wants more wine - “Ted will pour it for you.” I am hoping no one does, especially when Axel declines. Bel hesitates; then Nils says, “I will, another glass of the red if it’s okay.” “Of course,” Roz says. Bel decides she’ll have another white. And I go to the kitchen to get it out of the refrigerator.

01.25-30.19

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 * For a musical evening. See here.