Song Doors

Some songs are doors you stumble through to a different time. Sometimes the air around you lightens and shifts direction with the notes of a particular tune. And for some reason, hearing songs on the radio gives them a weight and reality that playing them on your own just can't attain.

Fairytale of New York always stills me. American radio stations don't play it around Christmas, so when the season approaches (about October 3), I spend hours online hoping to catch the Pogues and Kirsty McColl warbling away on some UK station. And whole Christmas seasons have gone by without me catching more than the last seconds of the song - I always seem to be too late. But somehow, yesterday, (for St. Patrick's Day?), the station I was tuned into began the opening chords of Fairytale of New York.

Time doubled back on itself.

It's Christmas time in London. I am mashed into a car with four or five other people, all of us dressed outlandishly for the children's pantomime we are on our way to perform. Our drama school books about a weeks worth of performances for free in the area, and though I have never even seen a pantomime before this year, I am entranced by them. I am entranced by most of this experience - a year of school where the only thing I concentrate on is being an actor, a year in which I live in Britain, where the voices make different, beautiful shapes for me, the year of the cuckoo, for I have stolen the nest of the family I live with, a year of beauty and freedom and straining ever closer to becoming something I should be.

However, I am not entranced with this car and being mashed with this group of people. They frighten me, set me on my guard. The slim clear-eyed girl whose every gesture seems to say she is both right and entitled, the short, sharp boy whose affections are like a shaft of light that has yet to fall on me, these people are part of something I am not, and in the car I am acutely aware I do not belong.

On the radio, Fairytale of New York is just beginning.

"Oh, turn that up, turn that up!" the boy is fluttering, and his northern accent inverts the u sounds so that they are eggs and not cups. "This is the best Christmas song ever. It's not smarmy or sentimental at all, that's what makes it so great!" And off the song goes, into the drunk tank with a disappointed couple who listen to the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay, while the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

And he is right, it is a wonderfully joyful song while being true, and sad and honest, and it is Christmas in a way that Away in a Manger can never be. (The Baby Jesus, no crying he makes? Sure, right....) As I recognize his rightness, a small window opens somewhere in my belonging. I am less isolated, liking this song with its status as an undisputed Christmas classic.

It takes much longer than a ride in the car, but my affection for the same people who previously intimidated me grows, and though I never become a native, a different set of walls opens up and I become part of something else there. And time passes, and though it is too romantic to say I love the song Fairytale of New York as my point of entry into another world, the song itself continues to strike me like a gong. And every time I hear it, I am in that car, and happy, and on my way to make very young children laugh with glee.

Makeover

I got my shoes polished the other day. "Shined" isn't demonstrative enough to describe how beautifully they were cared for, or how much I enjoyed the experience. My shoes themselves, about two years old, have never been shined before, and were looking much the worse for two years of wear. A sturdy, Swedish design, the black leather was worn through at the toes to a dull grey. They looked pitiful, I confess.

I had cash in my pocket, a lunch hour to squander, and the knowledge that in the bowels of this very office building there is a shoeshine setup, a little room, glass-lined on two walls, tv set mounted high in the corner. The two guys shining shoes were a study in contrasts, one an expansive, expanded chatter, the other a quieter, more focused gentleman. They were of that cheerfully intelligent class of people to which builders and house painters belong. I did want to offer them a cup of tea with three sugars, but since they were African-Americans, a Coke might have been more appropriate. Same gesture, different cultures. As I left, they gazed, spell-bound, at the television screen on which an attractive African-American female newscaster was shuffling papers.

"Man, she looks good."

"She's had a makeover, ain't she?"

"Whatever she did, she's looking mighty fine."

But all this distracts me from my point: it was fabulous. A day at the spa, practically. It felt like a massage to the feet, happily once removed due to the leather. (I've ticklish feet. Please do not use this knowledge for evil.) I was sitting high up and my knees blocked my view, so I could concentrate on the easy pressure of polish being applied, brushes shuffling back and forth, soft cloths buffing. It felt fantastic - that tingling feeling in the scalp was rustling around my head. I might have started drooling.

Best of all, when the gentleman (the studious one) was finished, and I moved my knees out of the way, my shoes gleamed like bowling balls. My shoes looked shiner than new, completely liquid black. My shoes were luminous.

As I headed back to work, completely contented, I began mentally counting pairs of shoes...tomorrow I could wear a different pair and get those shined. . . yeah. . . oh, yeah. . .

Time

I worry that my life is flying past me and all I see is this the blur of movement in my periphery as something swift moves the air around me. Events have occurred but I fail to inhabit them, the way you speed-read ahead in impatience but realize later you haven't absorbed anything in the paragraphs you rushed.

A co-worker of mine died about two months ago, and I still look for him on the street on the way to work. When someone passes my desk with a particular footfall, I look for his grin going past. I haven't found a way to accept his absence as permanent. His death was unexpected and at an odd juncture - he was old enough that you can't say he "died young", but young enough, and with enough left to accomplish, that his life was unfinished, a book left open. On the other hand, I perform a show for senior citizens two days a week and often I am dealing with people who are alive long after their lives have been finished - is that any better than dying before every 'i' is dotted and every 't' crossed?

How do you grieve appropriately for someone you weren't that close to, but whose absence makes such a loud noise?

In a separate case but still on the subject of missing what's happening to me, I've been spending a majority of my time with one person in particular but I'm reluctant to admit even to myself that this person becomes increasingly important. A simple pie chart of my week's activities would give me away, but does time equal emotion? Habits don't make feelings. Yet I wouldn't be there if I didn't enjoy it. Actually, the present doesn't worry me, it's the future. It would be far better for me to come to the end of my life and look at the person sitting next to me and say, "Amazing. Honey, look at that, we just spent our whole lives together," than have to make some promise to that effect early on.

Although, truth be told, what worries me is that, as my co-worker's death proves, it's not early any more. Perhaps I should get off the fence and love someone. Which is worse: missing your life as if rushes by you because you're afraid to invest in it, or having to negotiate the failures and successes of your investments as they evolve? Tricky. You only get to choose one course, so it's hard to make an objective comparison.