Layers

We all have songs we love, that convey with them a whole host of memory.  For me, it is anything by the Eagles.  Our next door neighbors babysat us in the seventies and would play the records for us.   I thought the album cover of “One of These Nights, ” spooky.   However, the band followed me to camp where the counselors would often sing a cappella, some of the lyrics from their latest album.

The soundtrack of our summers at the beach became another place where “New Kid in Town,” “Desperado,” and “Hotel California,” poured into the emotional DNA of the experience.

My high school dance teacher used “Heartache Tonight,” as warm up for freestyle movement, and my father wrote a piece about his brother’s struggle with schizophrenia and linked the lyrics to our experience of his struggle with madness.  “Don’t you draw the queen of diamonds boy, she’ll beat you if she’s able.”  My uncle would talk in code, referencing cards sometimes to speak about his family.

Every word of “Desperado” fit the total of his struggle all his life, including the desire of his extended family, to love him past and through his illness.   He likewise taught us, that love meant wrestling with how to care for him when the madness drove us nuts.  He was a lesson in how hard love can be, how much sacrifice the cross really means.  It always means more than we thought.

My brother learned to strum it on the guitar and it became a regular around the evening summer campfires.  The songs drifted in and out of our everyday lives, in mixed tapes, CD’s, albums and downloads.   My youngest son sang “New Kid in Town,” or crooned about with it when he turned three, and it was a sign to us that language would not always be his enemy.  We also sang “New Kid in Town,” whenever a new baby showed up.

In 2013, I gave my husband tickets for Christmas to see them in concert.  I phoned my sister from the Capital One arena to gloat mid set.   Glen Frey died two years later.  There will be no more tours that go on for decades after the songs, and that’s too bad, because attending that concert, the crowd sang along to every song.  For everyone there, there were layers and layers and layers of memories sandwiched between the notes and the words.

Driving home from picking up my daughter, she pulled up Spotify and we sang Eagles all the way home, and I found another layer of joy from songs now over fifty years old.   I wondered how many more layers we would discern in our lifetimes, would the songs echo to the next generation?   I wondered how many songs we hear now, would have echoes decades long from the melodies of today.   The lyrics, “They will never forget you ’till somebody new comes along.”  wafted into my head.

And I thought about how these songs get layers with time, and so do we. Our relationships, our decisions, our lives, all reflect the sum of our struggles, talents, trials and triumphs, and thus become ever deeper as we drift towards eternity.