Friday's Grief Song, 4.21.23
a love song to my middle school heart
I have fond memories of listening to this song in my Walkman while going on a road trip to Virginia with my family, my cheek pressed to the window, watching spring rains fall over the beautiful green luscious countryside of rural western Virginia. I was 12 or 13. I had a cassette tape of this album and later, a compact disc. Something shifts in young people when they turn 11, 12, 13. We move from the (ideally) tender close sphere of close family, hearth and home to a sense of our place in the Cosmos. In this culture it’s often a reckoning with knowing things aren’t what they appear to be. It was the age I began thinking about suicide for the first time. Loneliness and longing and the weight of mortality began to visit me.
I don’t remember having the language to talk about what I felt with friends, family or teachers. I felt alone in the weight of this new knowing. So like my young teens in this culture I turned to music and my journal. Lines like this one spoke to me:
“With words that tear and strain to rhyme.”
Though Paul Simon wrote this song and originally released it on his own, it’s the second release that I grew up with from Simon and Garfunkel’s classic album Sounds of Silence.
Listen to Kathy’s Song here on YouTube or here on Spotify.
Kathy's Song
written by Paul Simon
1966
I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory, it falls
Soft and warm, continuing
Tapping on my roof and walls
And from the shelter of my mind
Through the window of my eyes
I gaze beyond the rain drenched streets
To England where my heart lies
My mind's distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie with you when you're asleep
And kiss you when you start your day
And a song I was writing is left undone
I don't know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can't believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme
And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you
And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I