Thoughts on the flight home

One of my favorite songs ever is Hollaback Girl, by Gwen Stefani. I love Gwen: she's a great writer, extremely creative and personal, but slick and catchy and professional too -- true talent, brilliant range -- and all that as a musician. Hollaback Girl tells a story beautifully, perfectly capturing the feel of the moment and the character in high school. The language, the pace, the style, the silliness (what an inspired use of "Bananas"!), all are perfect.

But my favorite part is a sentence that I mis-heard, and was oh so disappointed to learn was really something else. The real line is the perfectly reasonable "It's not just gonna happen like that" -- where "happen" is pronounced "hap-bin". Well, I heard it as "It's not just gonna have been like that..", which put me into a kind of grammatical ecstacy.

In my version, the sentence writhes through tenses in a way that -- to me -- perfectly expresses the complex thought processes we all perform all the time, immediately and without effort, but which are so hard to convey. The singer does not think it would be OK for the situation to work out in such a way that she had allowed it to be like that. Looking forward, she anticipates that inaction would result in a future where the past had established an untenable precedent, which, here in the current moment while she has a chance to act, she realizes she must prevent. It is not the specific action she must prevent, it is the future in which that action has been allowed to have just taken place, without resistance.

I love how perfectly her pithy phrase captures this, with no hard work, just right to the point, and in language you might truly expect to hear in the mind of a high school cheerleader. It sounds so natural, although when you allow your mind to course over the phrase, it wraps and curls around itself in a lovely, serpentine, moving kind of way that is hours of entertainment for a freak like me. How sad that this was not what she said at all!

And another thing:

If and when I die, and there is a funeral or a celebration or cermony of some sort, someone should please play Sam Cooke's Twistin the Night Away. Nobody else's version, please, but that one. Of course you can play lots and lots and lots of other music too -- Talkin About a Revolution, and Cherry Cherry and Moonshadow and It Aint Me, Babe, and The Battle of New Orleans and Rockin in the Free World and It's In His Kiss and Meet Me at Mary's Place and so many many more. You need to bury me with a whole shitload of my favorite music, playing out loud so the worms can hear it and the grass trembles with it. Beethoven and Mozart too, and all that stuff.

But please play Twistin the Night Away, and everybody dance, or everyone who wants to anyway, and think of me dancing in the upstairs bedroom of the Mission Viejo house, with Ama downstairs washing the dishes and my wife around the house somewhere doing other chores or helping Ama, and a happy young me up there every night holding my one-and-a-half or two-year-old girl on my shoulder, in my arms, singing to the music, swinging her in my arms, tossing her out this way, back this way, up and back, twirling and laughing, night after night. Dancing to the music with my baby. It makes me want to cry every time I hear it. There is no better feeling. There has never been and there will never be anything that meant as much to me as that. Or holding her gently to sleep on my shoulder as we played Moonshadow, humming softly, easing her down onto the bed. Or chasing her down the slide and sitting and telling stories and walking and playing with her in the park at her pre-school. Or walking her home from school. I want to go with that in my heart.