A half forgotten song

I heard the song only once. It was the end of the quarter crunch at my college, and the computer center was crowded. The fact that we all had to go to a computer center with mainframes to get our work done, I know, dates me. I remember the song, or half remember it, partly because the tune was catchy, and the words just repetitive enough to be memorable, but also because the occasion was unusual. Many times I had listened to some other student sing and play guitar, in one or another living room or bedroom in student housing, or when the coffee house had an open mic night. Never before or since did I hear someone sing and play in the computer center, sitting right beside the terminal where we entered ourselves in the queue for computer time. As the queue was long, I got to listen to the whole song.

I don’t know whether it was a song by a professional artist, that I only heard the once, and can recover, if someone else happens to recognize the words I have remember, or whether it was a song composed by the student who sang it, perhaps now forgotten by nearly everyone else except the singer. I’ve half remembered both. There’s the song one of my college roommates loved, “Wake Me Up Gentle,” which I’ve recovered once I found someone else who knew it. But there’s also a snatch of lyrics that I still remember from a guy I knew in high school:

And it’s hey, hey, I’ve been in the night,

Looking for a brighter view of life.

I’ve been in the middle, when I should be on the side.

Time and again I’ve changed my aims,

And find myself on old St. James,

To see what I can salvage from what washes in the tide.

And there’s another that I half remember that was written by a college friend:

Leslie, can your guitar come out and play today?

It seems to me it gets a little lonely,

Sitting there in your chair.

Leslie, can your guitar come out and play?

This song might be one of those. It was, I would say, a passionately “one day at a time” song, and I am reminded of it often when someone says some version of that phrase. The first verse began, “If only I can make it through today,” and I remember some of the rhythm of the rest of the verse, but not the words, because a single hearing is rarely (only once, really) enough for me to learn a song. The second verse began, “If only I can make it through this week,” and the next line, perhaps, “Maybe then the future won’t look quite so bleak,” or something of the kind (that was definitely the right rhythm. And so it built up to the conclusion, “Still, I think I’ll try to make it through this life, if only I can make it through today.”

If anyone has ever heard of the song, and can fill in my memory, feel free to let me know. If no one else knows it, I have half a mind, someday, to write my own version of the rest of it, just so that, when it comes to mind, I can have a whole song running through my head rather than less than half a song.

 

by

Married for half my life to someone who lives with bipolar disorder. I live in California and work with computers.