Some, not much

I've completed a couple of things, not many, but just enough to feel like I'm no longer a complete waste of space.

Tonight I'm listening to these old old folk songs, beautifully harmonized, and thinking about how elemental they are, how each song tells a story that could still be happening right now and be just as relevant.

My favorite on this cd is Clyde Waters (the original is Clyde's Water, I think, but it doesn't scan as easily in the song that way), about a man (William) who wants to go off to see his girlfriend.  His mother doesn't want him to go that night, there's a storm.  She ends up cursing him - if he goes, the Clyde Water will drown him.  But he can't care, he wants to see to see his Margaret, so he gets on his horse and heads off.

And he sings the most beautiful, most heartbreaking thing to the Clyde Waters as he travels by them:

"Make me a wreck as I come back; spare me as I'm going..."

Isn't that how we all plan to pay, every time we approach love?  We just want to get there - we know there's going to be pain, and death, that curses are inescapable, that hurt is unavoidable.  It is coming for us all, no matter what we do.  But just let us have the one we love first, and we'll face it.  
Because it's a ballad, of course, Margaret's mother is no better, and has turned William away by pretending Margaret is busy with other men.  Off he goes, to face his fate without love, without hope, without the comfort of whatever he hoped to get up to in Margaret's bower.  (And these ballads are mostly full of pregnant women, so I doubt she would have turned him down.)

He drowns.  The only comfort he gets is that Margaret, heartbroken that her mother turned William away, heads right off to Clyde Waters to drown herself too, so they can at least be dead together. It doesn't seem like much comfort to me, but it is a beautiful end to the song, Margaret walking into the water to hold William through eternity.