The Glass Character: Something wonderful

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Something wonderful

This is a man who thinks with his heart,

His heart is not always wise.

This is a man who stumbles and falls,

But this is a man who tries.

This is a man you'll forgive and forgive

And help and protect, as long as you live.

He will not always say what you would have him say

But now and then, he'll say something wonderful.

The thoughtless things he'll do will hurt and worry you,

Then all at once, he'll do something wonderful.

He has a thousand dreams that won't come true

You know that he believes in them and that's enough for you.

You'll always go along, defend him when he's wrong

And tell him when he's strong, he is wonderful.

He'll always need your love and so he'll get your love

A man who needs your love can be wonderful.

This is a man you'll forgive and forgive

And help and protect, as long as you live.

He will not always say what you would have him say

But now and then, he'll say something wonderful.

Post-blog thoughts. This sort of welled up in me out of nowhere - no, it was somewhere. I had to trundle all the way in to Vancouver by bus today - God, it seemed like a long trudge, though I used to do it several times a week. Had to go see my doc. Had to go see my HEAD doc, as a matter of fact, who has helped me probably more than anyone else I can name, but just the fact that I GO to one is somehow ice-floe territory. But there you are.

It wasn't quite time for my appointment on the 17th floor of this luxe building that has such a gorgeous lookout on the waterfront, it would be the ideal place to commit suicide if you could only get through that 2"-thick plate glass. At any rate, having had a bad lunch at the food fair and having a teensy bit of time left, I forced myself to walk into the "local book store" (a big impersonal chain I've called Big Booky in my posts), which I knew to be the only place that might still be carrying The Glass Character. "Still" referring to the three-month window most small-time authors get before having it all sent back to an unhappy publisher.

Anyway, I walked past all the displays of useless high-end gift items, plus a few tables of mass mega-best-sellers by people everyone knows/no one knows, and ascended the TWO giant escalators - up, up, waaaaaaaay up - until, buried at the very back of the third floor, I found a rather small, obscure section called Fiction. And I began to hunt. Surely it wouldn't be there. But I had to look. In nine interminable years of non-publish-hood, I never again thought I would see a book of mine on a shelf in Big Booky or anywhere else (and in Vancouver, by now, there literally ISN'T "anywhere else"). And I saw the H's and I worked backwards and.

And, he was sitting there - listen. This isn't just a book. I wish you'd read it. It's a piece of my heart and it's still aching and breaking, even now. I came to be familiar with Harold the way some people must have actually known him, almost intimately. He was a heartbreaker. And I saw him up there, and oh God, and yes, there his is, by the holy. The phrase "something wonderful" kept echoing in my head after seeing him in all his blue-ness on the Big Booky shelf (and it's unlikely they have sold even one of them).

Something wonderful.

Then I thought of that melody, and couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept hunting for a good version to post here, and one didn't seem to exist. They were all oversung and schmalzed-up, the worst offender being Barbra Streisand, whose version I used to like 20 years ago. Then I found something strange - a delicate piano version, just the tune, in fact sounding more like music minus one, an accompaniment that peeled back the Broadway schmaltz to reveal the iridescence of the chords beneath.

I think Harold's character was a lot like the man in this lovely translucent song from The King and I. Then I got that yearning or craving or whatever-it-is, and because I can't make art I had to start pasting things up, to try to express some of this. I wanted to keep Harold out of it entirely, but I couldn't. If I COULD paint, maybe I never would have needed the head doc in the first place.