The images don’t look all that old. The faces don’t look so very different than ours now. The memories of that day are just as vivid as the experience itself. Yet somehow, here we are, our seventeenth anniversary just behind us, closing in on the twentieth anniversary, with two kids, a dog, a cat, a frog, a full schedule, and an entire pile of commitments in tow.
Yet even today, “twenty years ago” has a certain significance: twenty years ago, I was about to head back to Poland after two years in Boston. Having dropped out of graduate school (philosophy of religion is fascinating but of little practical value) and spent a year working at an internet startup, I realized I missed my life in Poland enough to give everything up and return, and so I did just that: packed a few clothes, a lot of music and books, and returned to the life I’d left in Lipnica Wielka.
One artist I took with me was a relatively new find: when I left for Poland the first time in 1996, I’d only just become completely enamored with the music of Nanci Griffith. She’d released her best album, Other Rooms, Other Voices, a few years earlier which I’d bought about a year before I left for Poland, and that album and her 1994 Flyer were among my favorite albums. At heart, Griffith was a folk singer, but she always had a parade of influences and guest artists in her work that it always seems more than simple folk. She sang about missed chances, the fleeting nature of now, the nostalgia of lost love and lost childhood — all the things I think about and write about. She’d begin a blog entry with things like “twenty years ago.” She wrote a song about it, in fact:
On Grafton Street at Christmas time
The elbows push you ’round
This is not my place of memories
I’m a stranger in this town
The faces seem familiar
And I know those songs they’re playin’
But I close my eyes and find myself
Five thousand miles awayIt’s funny how my world goes round without you
You’re the one thing I never thought
I could live without
And I just found this smile to think about you
You’re a Saturday night
Far from the madding crowdThe buskers sing by candle light
In front of Bewleys Store
A young nun offers me a chair
At a table by the door
And I feel compelled to tell her
Of the sisters that we knew
How when they lit their candles
I’d say a prayer for youIt’s funny how my world goes round without you
You’re the one thing I never thought
I could live without
And I just found this smile to think about you
You’re a Saturday night
Far from the madding crowdThe church bells ring for holy hour
And I’m back out in the rain
It’s been twenty years or more
Since I last said your name
I hear you live near Dallas now
In a house out on the plains
Why Grafton Street brought you to mind
I really can’t explainIt’s funny how my world goes round without you
You’re the one thing I never thought
I could live without
And I just found this smile to think about you
You’re a Saturday night
Far from the madding crowdOn Grafton Street at Christmas time
The elbows push you round
All I carry now are memories
I’m a stranger in this town
She died last week at the young age of 68, and I have been revisiting her catalog, wondering why have been ignoring her music for the last decade. In part, it’s K’s fault: when she was exploring my our CDs, she discovered and fell in love with Griffith, and she wanted to play her music a lot. A lot. I got a little tired of it, I guess, and that’s why I didn’t listen to it for years.
So thinking about our wedding seventeen years ago (yesterday) on a walk tonight, I listened Griffith’s music and found myself drifting further back, further back, further and further, thinking about events of twenty-five, thirty years ago, knowing full well that soon enough, I’ll be writing about our thirtieth anniversary wondering where all the time went. It’s a favorite theme of Griffth’s and mine. Maybe our only theme.
