To Ease the Passing of Time

Sometimes listening to a song can bring back a lot of memories. That’s what happened to me when I heard this song on YouTube a few days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdWzKgeVXE0&app=desktop

I was looking for the regular and more popular version of that song that was playing a lot on most radio stations in the South, at the time that I was there, when I came across this particular version that sounds exactly the way Joanne and Normand used to sing it forty-five years ago, in 1975, in the kitchen of our little house, in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Normand would play the guitar and sing while Joanne played the mandoline. Joanne and Normand would drop by our place whenever they felt like it. They didn’t have to phone before coming, and we didn’t have to entertain them as if they were real visitors. They would just sit there, play the guitar and sing while we were doing our things. Joanne and Normand lived in a small village near Lafayette called Carencro. They were married, really married; they were not just shacking up like most couples at the time, and you could tell that they were really in love. We were not really hippies because we didn’t smoke grass and didn’t have long hair, but we had a bit of the lifestyle of the hippies. We didn’t care about formalities, and we shared a lot of things.

My roommate, André, had a girlfriend that used to live in a small town north of New Orleans. We had to cross a long, long bridge to go to her place. Sometimes we would all go there for the weekend to ride bicycles with an older American couple who were about the same age as we are now. They had a lot of bikes. Sometimes we would go to the beach in Galveston, Texas, or to the Preservation Hall, in New Orleans, to listen to Dixieland music. I remember that for the Thanksgiving long weekend, at the end of November, we flew to the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico, for a couple of days. There were all kinds of music everywhere that we had never heard before: blue grass, Cajun, zydeco, gospel, blues. In the middle of nowhere, you could find a club that looked like nothing where you could listen to the most incredible music.

We didn’t plan a lot; we decided to do things on the spur of the moment. Looking back, I think that’s what being young is all about: you don’t have to plan; you just play it by ear. And being young also means thinking that you have a lot of time ahead of you. I really thought that I would have time to come back to Louisiana to visit the places that I didn’t have time to visit the first time, to learn how to dance the Cajun two-step really well, and go back to the French Quarter, in New Orleans, to listen to jazz music.

And as I listen to that old haunting song from years gone by, my mind is softly waltzing through space and time to a place far away, a long time ago, where my life used to be. Even though it may sound very sad to you, this song doesn't make me sad. It’s the key that opens the door to the past, and when I look back at the past, I always try to pick the nicest memories. Do I think that I was happier when I was young? I know I wasn’t. Maybe I had more fun but I wasn’t happier. I am much more content with my life now, even if I know that I don’t have a lot of time left. Like it says in the Old Book, everything turns, and there’s a time for everything, and if you want to be happy, you have to make the best of where you are now. That’s also what my wife tells me, and I know that she is right.

Preservation Hall in 1975