Come on, come on
It's getting late now
Come on, come on
Hold my hand
Come on, come on
You just have to whisper
Come on, come on
I will understand

Mary Chapin Carpenter "Come On, Come On"

I am not an album person.  I don't have the patience, generally, to listen to an entire album worth of songs by a single artist.  The number of albums I like as albums could probably be counted on one hand.

 One of  those is Mary Chapin Carpenter's Come On, Come On.*

It was a very successful record: seven of its twelve tracks hit the Billboard top twenty country charts. Songs such as "The Hard Way," "I Feel Lucky," and "I Take My Chances" became big hits, and gained Chapin Carpenter new fans -- myself included.

The past day or two I have been listening to the underrated title song.  It is melancholy, about losing things you never fully appreciated at the time, about loneliness and desire for things that you cannot quite name.

Some people remember the first time
Some can't forget the last
Some just select what they want to from the past

Memory is a tricky thing.  The faces blur, remembered pain remains, and the memory of hope.  Hope about the future, hope about who you would be, and what life would hold.  Memory of dreams.  Memory of longing.

I am getting older -- nearing fifty.  Lately I have been aware of how much closer my life is to its end than its beginning. Not in a morbid way, simply in a sense that time is slipping and if I am to become whatever I am to become, I should probably do it soon.

I am just as confused by life, by dreams, by hope, as I was when I was twenty.  I am not as afraid of the confusion, no longer believing as I did then that the world is an understandable place, and that my confusion simply indicated a failure on my part to adequately comprehend things around me.  At some point I came to the conclusion that however crazy I may be, everything else is still crazier. Confusion is a sane response to an insane world.

And yet...

It's the need you never get used to, so fierce and so confused
It's the loss you never get used to, the first time you lose


Mary Chapin Carpenter is talking about love, or its handmaiden, sex, but she might as well be of so many other things.  Desire takes many forms, for many things: for security, for certainty, for joy, and yes, for love.  And the loss of the feeling that all things are possible, that God is in His heaven and all is right with the world, is a heavy loss indeed.

The song understands.

* Sheryl Crow has an album called C'mon, C'mon.  MCC's is better.