Lucinda Williams - Lake Charles
Writing by Segal on Monday, 8 of October , 2007 at 12:07 am
“You are the music while the music lasts.” - T.S. Eliot
Enveloped in the dampness of early morning evergreens, parked on a service road somewhere in the hills southwest of San Jose, California, I arose from partial sleep in the shotgun seat of a delivery truck, and Lake Charles was playing from a boombox wedged between the windshield and dashboard. Gabriel was in the office park a hundred yards yon, dropping off the sandwiches and sodas, quick now before the office workers arrive in the cafeteria to secure their day’s sustenance. Up the embankment he came, handtruck in tow, and my eyes drifted mesmerized from his path to the silhouette of treetops along the orange-grey backdrop of sunrise, jagged and resolute like a seismographic fable. Within two minutes, we were off again, up to Cupertino, and I drowned again under the spell of sleep with Lucinda moaning softly:
Did an angel whisper in your ear
And hold you close and take away your fear
In those long last moments
In March of 1999, I drove to northern California to escape. I had just broken up with someone whom I thought I would love for the rest of my life, though at the time, the rest of my life was still imaginary. My residence in college was mottled by the traces of good friends and bad grades. The logical choice, had it been available, would have been to return home and re-ground with the permanence of family and familiarity. Instead, I headed as far away from home as I could in a day’s drive, to visit Gabriel, a friend from high school who had ended up squatting with some friends in Santa Cruz, delivering food to corporate customers while he bided his time and, like me, waited for his future to arrive. The morning after I arrived, he woke me up at 5:30 and invited me along his rounds, taking us through the day from Morgan Hill to San Francisco.
Did you run about as far as you could go
Down the Lousiana highway
Across Lake Ponchatrain
Now your soul is in Lake Charles
No matter what they say
No world events marked that day. Nobody famous died. It rained slightly. Despite the apparent lack of conspicuous revelation to the outside world, I, in this lumbering steed filled with accordion figures and slightly rancid egg salads on wheat, opened and closed my eyes on a hundred different views. At this particular stop, number twelve I believe, perched precariously on a hill high above a sea of Pacific madrones and headache trees, came the revelation that at this moment in time, all of the conceits I had proferred to Gabriel for driving up were, in fact, as fleeting and gossamer as the disappearing night.
The essence of the repetune thus far has been the inordinate amount of time we spend recalling a certain song because of its obstinance, its unwillingness to vacate the cerebral premises. Perhaps a hook, or a single lyric, is embedded and never truly lets go, becoming the substrate to a situational enzyme. Sometimes, the repetune isn’t about a song being in your head everywhere you go. It’s really about getting somewhere, and the song being there waiting for you.
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Category: Lucinda Williams
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