I’m pretty sure I figured out the proximate cause of my depression attack.
It was this.
A YouTube video of Linda Ronstadt singing “Long, Long Time.” (This is a truncated version, by the way, omitting the plaintive third verse so the producers could fit 20 seconds more of valuable commercial time into the slot.)
One of my favorite songs of all time. It’s so beautiful. So poignant. So evocative.
And it makes me feel so very, very sorry for myself.
LOVE WILL ABIDE; TAKE THINGS IN STRIDE.
SOUNDS LIKE GOOD ADVICE BUT THERE’S NO ONE AT MY SIDE.
Takes me back, that does, to my year-and-a-half of servitude at a country radio station. It was a country station in two senses. Not only did it follow a Nashville format, but it was actually located in the country, out among the cornfields in rural Wisconsin.
The managers did at least one thing for the announcers that was kind of nice. They’d approved a work schedule that allowed each of us to enjoy a full, two-day weekend—once every three weeks. If you’ve ever worked radio, you’ll know that’s pretty rare. Radio announcers are assumed to be doing “fun” work—“Heck, I’d pay them to let me do this!” says the company man—so a ten hour day and a six day week is pretty standard. (I used to say that if I’d known about this before I got in, I’d have just become a migrant worker and saved the expense of broadcast school).
But this schedule required one weekend guy, on rotation, to work a pretty brutal weekend schedule. Part of that schedule involved doing the sign-off on Saturday night (at midnight) and then being back in to sign on again Sunday morning (6:00 a.m.).
When I had one of those weekends, I’d sweeten the ordeal by signing off with “Long, Long Time” the last thing Saturday night. This would put me in the mood to drive home alone in the darkness to the trailer I rented (and couldn’t afford to heat properly), and lie in the embrace of insomnia, running those lyrics through my head and thinking back six years to The One That Got Away, The Bus I Missed, After Which There Were No More Buses…
CAUGHT IN MY FEARS; BLINKING BACK THE TEARS…
I don’t think I’ve ever been so frightened in my life as the day I called her to ask her out. I first met her when she was next-door neighbor to a friend and his wife, living in residential houses converted to apartments on a college campus. She was studying drama, and she asked my friend to take a part in a one-act play she had to direct for a class. “And do you think Lars would be willing to take a small part?” she asked him.
“No, I don’t think so,” my friend said. “But if you’ve got a large part you haven’t cast, he’d probably do that.”
And so I worked with her on the play (a cut of Anouilh’s Antigone, if you’re curious), and the more time I spent with her, the more I realized that, although I’d originally thought her skinny and kind of horse-faced, she was in fact slender and graceful, and she had the kind of grave beauty I associate with Pre-Raphaelite paintings. She was funny and smart and spontaneous, and one day I realized I was falling in love with her, and I did not fight it one little bit.
And so I said to myself, “You’ve got to ask her out. There’s no chance that a woman this wonderful is ever going to just drop into your life this way again.”
I was 23 years old. I’d never asked a girl out before.
WAIT FOR THE DAY YOU’LL GO AWAY;
KNOWIN’ THAT YOU WARNED ME OF THE PRICE I’D HAVE TO PAY…
A spring afternoon in 1974 (the following year). It must have been late May or early June, because she went away that June. I called her (I could have just walked over and asked [I’d shrewdly taken over my friend’s apartment]. But somehow it was easier to call first) and asked if she wanted to walk down to the Dairy Queen.
“Well, I guess I could,” she said. “Just a minute.”
A few moments later she said, “OK, I just subtracted the money from my trip budget.” (She was a missionary kid, and she was going back to see her parents.)
“I’m paying,” I said.
“No, no,” she replied. “I’ve written it down now. I’m not going to go to the trouble of adding it back in.”
So we took our walk. I tried to memorize every moment; every word. Soon she’d be gone, and she wouldn’t be back for eight weeks. Eight weeks seemed like forever.
AND LIFE’S FULL OF LOSS; WHO KNOWS THE COST?
LIVIN’ IN THE MEMORY OF A LOVE THAT NEVER WAS…
When we got back we sat on her front step and talked. Somehow the conversation turned to the old bromide that goes, “If you love something, let it go. If it does not come back to you, it was never yours in the first place.” I said I agreed with that.
“I talked to my mother about that once,” she said. “I told her, ‘If you really love someone, you have to give them their freedom.’
“And she said, ‘No. If you love someone you want them with you forever.’”
‘CAUSE I’VE DONE EVERYTHING I KNOW
TO TRY AND CHANGE YOUR MIND;
AND I THINK I’M GONNA MISS YOU FOR A LONG, LONG TIME…
After she flew away, I got letters from her. She wanted to be pen pals. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity.
In one letter she said she’d like to stay in that country, if people weren’t waiting for her back here.
I told her she should do what she felt was best for herself. I hoped she didn’t think anyone was trying to force her to do anything she didn’t want to.
So she didn’t come back.
And then she got engaged to a guy over there.
And I’ve always wondered—had she told me what she really wanted, that evening 33 years ago this month? Had she been telling me she wanted a man who had the strength to say, “Come back to me. I need you in my life”?
I’ve wondered for a long, long time. But I’ll never know.