Noon

A gorgeous melody breaks out into the overcast air on an otherwise quiet Sunday. Outside, from the church tower. Melancholy but absolutely perfect, in some minor key, filling the whole neighborhood. There’s a sense of complexity in it, an old-world maturity.

I have to stop what I’m doing and stare out the window at the bluish-grey glowing skies and rooftops and tall trees, listening. The beautiful view from my second floor apartment.

Long after the music quits and the birds tune in, so light underneath that bolder frequency, I still hear it over and over. The feeling resonates.

What would life be without music?

Maybe we would never be able to remember ourselves.

Our true selves.

The House of Mystery

“They took her baby away.”

He told me “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” was about an acquaintance of Leonard Cohen’s; an early hippie who was the daughter of someone important. “And she went crazy.”

“She was from an important family, her father was a senator or something like that. I think they didn’t want her to be the daughter who had an illegitimate child. They took her baby away, and she killed herself. She was in hospitals, and she blew her brains out.”

-“That’s horrific,” I said.

“The mental hospital, that’s the ‘house of mystery’ I think.”

-“Hm. Well I think the reason it’s so relatable, is because we all have that place, inside of ourselves. A house of mystery.”

“A place that no one wants to visit?”

-“Yeah.

-But artists do. Art visits. That’s what artists are good for. That’s why people like Leonard Cohen are important. That’s why art is important.”

Everyone loves Nancy now.

Everyone cries for her. Now we understand, Nancy

And we are sorry.