Daughter

Something was in my head all day, sweetheart, and as I was crossing Central Park over by the Delacorte, I had to sit down on a bench by the ballfields there and write this down:

I heard a snippet of a song last night watching the Giants game, a tune I wasn't familiar with, but so compelling that I did a quick Google search to investigate. Turns out it's by Loudon Wainwright III. Do you know him? Sorta a 70's folk singer. Father of Martha and Rufus Wainwright, both singers in their own right. The tune starts out as something of an acoustic ballad that progressively gets more country-rock ala the Gram Parsons era of the Byrds crossed with a lead electric riff reminiscent of what Ringo famously described as Harrison's "slide-ish" guitar. It's not, of course, George on the record, but clearly the session player has listened to All Things Must Pass in its entirety more than once.

Anyway, this song now stuck in my head is called "Daughter" and it moved me to tears repeatedly, even in its current deployment as background music in a Walmart commerical (gah). I think you'll understand this, my love. I know we've spoken of it. I loved you even before I was in love with you. Your beautiful spirit. Your beautiful soul. You stirred something ancient and eternal and true in me that my heart instantly recognized across the eons and it's why I know even though we're on different planes just now with your passing, that we will be together again and forever when I too pass because it was ever thus.

When Curt died, a friend of mine gave me a phone number of a guy out on Long Island who was something of a psychic. She wrote it down on a tiny post-it, a blue one, that I stuck to a wooden box in the kitchen before it promptly disappeared. One day I found it and actually called and made an appointment. You had to schedule months and months in advance and I mean to sometime tell you the entire story of the rainy, tempestuous day I took the train out there and saw him. But for now there's just one thing I want to report in its relevance to this story, this feeling I have.

He told me that the people we best love, the dearest, like you my love, we have known forever, in many incarnations. Without his knowing anything about you or I or our adventures in the arts, he described this phenomenon with the analogy of the theatre. He said that with our dear ones it is as if we were a small company of players and that when one of us pass, it is simply as if they have exited the stage and gone to the dressing room where we will find them at the end of our own performance. That sometimes we are lovers, other times brother and sister or father and child. But that we are eternal. A kind of small cosmic rep company, together forever.

And I had never heard this idea before, my darling. It seems so right somehow. Because before I ever fell madly in romantic love with you, my beautiful lover, I loved you like that. And still do. I love you in every way. And I can be stirred to any part of that even with something as mundane as a formerly obscure song from the 70's now in service of an infamous union-busting corporate department store. Of course you are not my daughter, you are my partner and True Love. But maybe one of the life works in our rep schedule has something like those roles on Saturday matinee. Because I can feel it so keenly when old Loudon sings the elongated single word "Ev-ery-thing" that begins each verse before joining it up with something paternal to complete it like - "everything... she sees, she wants" or "everything...I say, she takes to heart." The chorus rhymes "that's my daughter/in the water", continuing, variously, "everything she owns/I bought her" or "who'd have ever thought her?".
There's one other but it's too sad to say just now.

I think this would not exactly be your favorite song, my sweetheart. It's a far cry from your beloved Goldfrapp or our DCFC or Bon Iver or The National. But I also know that you would look beyond the surface, I know that you would look into my tear-flooded eyes and know how very deeply I love and miss you, how you cleft my heart in twain and that with the great compassion and understanding and love - the great love of my life - you would take me in your arms and quiet me and repeat, as you did when you were here, that will love me forever as I do you. "I promise, " you said. "I promise". And I believe you, my little sweetheart. I believe.