Seasons of Love
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure - measure a year?
In daylights - in sunsets
In midnights - in cups of coffee
In inches - in miles
In laughter - in strife
In - five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure
A year in the life
How about love?
How about love?
How about love?
Measure in love
Seasons of love
Seasons of love
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Journeys to plan
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure the life
Of a woman or man?
In truths that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In bridges he burned
Or the way that she died
It's time now - to sing out
Tho' the story never ends
Let's celebrate
Remember a year in the life of friends
Remember the love
Remember the love
Remember the love
Measure in love
Measure, measure your life in love
Seasons of love...
Seasons of love.
December 24. The Grove may be crowded, but everyone is upbeat for Christmas shopping.
--Did I mention the Abercrombie and Fitch hunks at The Grove were cuter than their A & F counterparts at the Third Street Promenade? Especially one dark-haired puppy! The "Hunky Santa" at the Beverly Center... wasn't. There were plenty of shoppers that could have (and should have) put him out of a job. Maybe they rotate more than one actor/model/waiter/Hunky Santa. Likewise, today, perhaps due to the Santa Ana-induced summer weather, brought out the beauties to The Grove.
Could this movie [Brokeback Mountain] have been made earlier in the epidemic? I think not. As the film ended, I got hit with the memory of the AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco, Mike's and Dennis' funerals at the Higashi Honganji Temple in Little Tokyo, and catching the plane from Stockton when my visit to Albert was over, and other memories so obscured I couldn't picture them clearly enough to see what they were. I don't know if I'd've wanted to see this film for the first time with a big crowd as Dacarla had originally planned. A team of theatre employees earnestly thanked the last of us stragglers out of the theatre unlike any time I've left a movie before. They were almost like church ushers at a memorial. Was it akin to when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was first displayed around the country? No doubt this film has been sucker-punching quite a few patrons since it opened. I detoured into the restroom to try to let the tears finish; it didn't work. I thought I was okay, but I could barely keep it together as I crossed the huge lobby and exited the theatre.
As hot and summerlike as it was when I went into the theatre, it's dusk now, with a slight chill already in the air. "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" sung by Bing Crosby pouring out of the hidden speakers so feels out of place for my state of mind -- yet The Grove is still filled with people caught up in holiday cheer.
...And it's everything I can do to keep from losing it in the middle of the crowd.
This is an aperture into a chamber of my subconscious that I have not visited for a very, very long time. I cannot run from it; it isn't frightening, other than the response in my gut similar to when a person choking runs from a restaurant from some innate fear of embarrassment or public impropriety.
I had forgotten, caught up with the swirl of feelings coursing through me, that it was Christmas Eve. This hardly seemed like the time or the place to unleash the pent-up tears that were hammering to get out.
How many other people viewing BM could say they were actually living in Wyoming in 1963? A disassociated part of me wondered how odd I must have looked to all those throngs of happy people strolling through The Grove.
Less than half an hour after I left the theatre, I was shivering by the time the bus came. Never mind the well-deserved buzz from the critics, the film made a deeper emotional impact that I couldn't possibly be alone in feeling. Time will provide us with the proper careful analysis of the movie's importance -- along with no end of shallow, ill-informed critiques, I'm sure. It would be too much to hope that people would allow others the right to their own emotional responses.
Circumstances have unfolded to make me a loner so much of time -- not that I'm antisocial or even prefer solitude to the company of others. All those moves when I was growing up, constantly dislocating me from my peers; sticking my head in a book; feeling so different and apart from those around me so often; perhaps there's something in my DNA that tilts me in this direction. I know well enough that I didn't deliberately cause it, nor am I likely to be able to change it at this point of my life. I can live with it, as best I can, since it's part of who I am -- but not all that I am.
Looking through my address book to see who else I should send cards to reminds me that I have been loved; I haved loved; I am loved. I should be grateful for having had so much more than most people could ever hope for (even if that doesn't include lots of money... at the present moment). Who knows, right? Like love itself, always maybe just around the corner.
I think I superimposed my life over that of the two main characters in the film for purpose of comparison. The endless discussions, debates and criticisms about the sexual orientation of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal is not the point here that people ought to be focusing on. But for a twist of fate here or a lucky opportunity seized (or not) there, how do I measure the distance of my life experience from the two protagonists? Is this divine intercedence in my life that has given me a history of many and varied relationships --and my sobriety, that so rare gift that has been entrusted to my tending-- really possible to acknowledge and comprehend?
In diapers - report cards
In spoke wheels - in speeding tickets
In contracts - dollars
In funerals - in births
In - five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you figure
A last year on Earth?
Figure in love
Figure in love
Figure in love
Measure in love
Seasons of love
Seasons of love
December 25, Hollywood. Thick morning fog melted away by ten o'clock, leaving a hazy, warm sky. The trade-off for a window seat on the ocean-side of the bus is a guaranteed stream of sunshine. So this is Christmas morning, 2005, in the company of disparate strangers all with unknown destinations, unknown stories. The familiar California viewed through the window, hills and peaks rounded and jagged, covered with indigenous vegetation as opposed to the cities with non-native landscaping and ever more construction pushing the boundaries of urbanization.
From Camarillo on, though, the fog returns overhead. Out to sea a thin line of sunshine can be viewed on the horizon; the Channel Islands are for the most part obscured.
San Luis Obispo. The town is shut down tight. Even the air is... Christmasy.
2:30 a.m. Monday morning. Leave it to SLO to have the first political stickers I've ever seen on bottles of alcohol. I dunno -- maybe they've been doing that for a while. After all, booze and politics have a long and checkered relationship.
I was thinking of the song "When I Think of Home" from "The Wiz," to try to illustrate what it's like to have a family home that isn't technically my familial home where I grew up. Yet I'm no stranger to SLO, it having been part of my life for ...half my life now. I am at once the exile,, the immigrant, the migrant, and with family in as much as a home as our crazy family wanderings can allow for. When I read the lyrics to that song, though, it didn't fit my mood as much as "Seasons of Love," from "Rent" which has been haunting me for days along with Tevye's introduction to "Tradition" from "Fiddler on the Roof." It is the violin solo as much as the words that follows me around all day.
So now, Christmas is over... as soon as I go upstairs to bed. Tomorrow we'll head up to San Francisco and I'll get to see my littlest nieces and nephews. :)
For some years now, I've made a tradition of playing the greatest hits of the Fifth Dimension when crossing over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco or passing the San Mateo-San Francisco county line by Candlestick Park (of which now only the ghost remains) that harkens back to my fondest memories of my family's earliest days in California.
For some years now, I've made a tradition of playing the greatest hits of the Fifth Dimension when crossing over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco or passing the San Mateo-San Francisco county line by Candlestick Park (of which now only the ghost remains) that harkens back to my fondest memories of my family's earliest days in California.
Et en Arcadia ego.
No comments:
Post a Comment