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.