HEARING PAUL SIMON sing, “hello, darkness, my old friend…” the other night at Ravinia was pure soul medicine, a jolt of nostalgia, ribbons of memory wafted in the atmosphere as he sang. I lay down flat on my back on a blanket under a canopy of trees bursting with lush, green leaves, swaying in the subtle evening breeze.
A moment of peace, a moment of miracle, a moment of transcendence. How many times had I listened to that song, over and over again, throughout my life? I played Simon & Garfunkel songs on repeat as a soundtrack at every turn and pivot.
And it wasn’t just that song that sang into the familiar dwellings where my soul hangs out, it was “Mother and Child Reunion,” “America,” “Obvious Child,” “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War…”
I knew the words to every line of every song and so did everyone around me, including my older sister, who lay on the blanket with me, reveling in the splendor of each song, even as Paul Simon’s voice warbled with age, quivered with the uncertainty of muscle memory and time. We could barely hear him at some points during the concert—too much talking and laughing on the lawn—I wanted to turn around and shush them all.
I kept thinking: How could anyone be talking or laughing right now when God, through Paul, is singing to us?
To listen to a living legend sing every single familiar song from your childhood feels like an active, rare gift. Like trying to hold a precious bird in your hand that’s flapping its wings and you know you need to eventually release it, that it will fly away, but you want to hold on to the bird a little longer because it’s so damn beautiful and so alive!
My sister and I played Paul Simon’s tape cassettes in a shared walkman we took on long trips together through Cyprus, Morocco, India. We’d live through so many camp nights with these songs, so many long car rides with these songs weeping into the dark night in front of us. How many times did I play these songs in the car while driving past the Skokie Lagoons very late at night when I was a teen, with nowhere to go with my big feelings?
Homeward bound, he sings, I wish I was.
So many of his songs tap into those feelings of longing and belonging, leaving and returning, wishing you were anywhere else but here, and figuring out how to get there, only to realize you’d never left. This was such a defining feeling of my early years! And then I went out on the road to live the lyrics.
That night at Ravinia, I looked up at the trees and heard them talking to me. They said they loved living in a field where music always plays, that they are the happiest trees in the world—and lucky to be so well loved by their caretakers, who know that music lovers stomp through these grounds all summer, soaking in the sounds from the stage under the shade of these enormous, old Highland Park trees.
I love how we’re living in a time when people are openly confessing their capacity to communicate telepathically with trees and other living beings—how we’re breaking down the barriers that kept us from listening to what the trees were always telling us—about how to live a peaceful life connected to the cycles of life—I’ve always heard messages from trees but never posted about it for all to ponder! I’m seeing more of this now and it amuses and soothes me.
It's not always easy to make it to a live show—the wildfires, the oppressive heat, the suffocating air quality—and there’s also a ton of effort involved—time and money! I’m not always motivated to make an evening like this happen. But my sister found us tickets and we splurged and I’m so glad I went to this miracle of a show. It felt like going to some kind of church for time travelers. Where we prayed to the altar of timeless songs that live in the deepest parts of us and float up to the surface of consciousness to comfort us when we least expected we needed it.
My brother-in-law gave me a book of Paul Simon guitar chords a few years back for Hanukkah, “a little black book” of songs. Maybe he knew I loved Simon’s songs, and maybe he knew I loved playing guitar when I was a teenager. I so wished I’d learned to stick with it, through the hard part of feeling like a loser when it came to nailing those chord progressions.
I used to lug my guitar on the Dempster bus and ride it toward Evanston to take classes with a guy named Brian at the music shop on Main Street. I loved learning all the hippy songs we’d sung at summer camp, and I so wanted to embody the spirit of my idols—Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, Peter, Paul & Mary—I believed that if I tried hard enough, I could master the guitar songs that made hearts happy around a campfire.
But I never really nailed it. My fingertips burned. The sound of my own voice irked me, so far off from how I wished it to be, so I gave up, like many of us often do with musical instruments and other pursuits. I still have the guitar that my mother bought for me, though, when she saw I was getting kind of serious back then at the age of fourteen. She knew having a new guitar would motivate me and though we didn’t have a ton of cash flow growing up, she splurged on this for me.
I didn’t appreciate it then or thank her enough, I admit. There are years when I think I should sell it. But after this Paul Simon concert the other night, I decided I want to spend the rest of the summer learning how to play “America,” or perhaps “The Only Living Boy in New York,” two of my favorites among many greats.
I’ll take the guitar out of the closet and out of its case and tune it. And then I’ll pull out the sheet music my teacher Brian hand-wrote for me, the ones with the chords to these songs, because I was practicing these exact classics at the age of fourteen, in that little back room where I took classes long ago.
And I’ll try to practice instead of scrolling, and I’ll try to sing instead of moping, and I’ll try to share the music with anyone who might enjoy it, on the porch perhaps, instead of keeping it a secret inside.
Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together…
A moment of peace, a moment of miracle, a moment of transcendence. How many times had I listened to that song, over and over again, throughout my life? I played Simon & Garfunkel songs on repeat as a soundtrack at every turn and pivot.
And it wasn’t just that song that sang into the familiar dwellings where my soul hangs out, it was “Mother and Child Reunion,” “America,” “Obvious Child,” “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War…”
I knew the words to every line of every song and so did everyone around me, including my older sister, who lay on the blanket with me, reveling in the splendor of each song, even as Paul Simon’s voice warbled with age, quivered with the uncertainty of muscle memory and time. We could barely hear him at some points during the concert—too much talking and laughing on the lawn—I wanted to turn around and shush them all.
I kept thinking: How could anyone be talking or laughing right now when God, through Paul, is singing to us?
To listen to a living legend sing every single familiar song from your childhood feels like an active, rare gift. Like trying to hold a precious bird in your hand that’s flapping its wings and you know you need to eventually release it, that it will fly away, but you want to hold on to the bird a little longer because it’s so damn beautiful and so alive!
My sister and I played Paul Simon’s tape cassettes in a shared walkman we took on long trips together through Cyprus, Morocco, India. We’d live through so many camp nights with these songs, so many long car rides with these songs weeping into the dark night in front of us. How many times did I play these songs in the car while driving past the Skokie Lagoons very late at night when I was a teen, with nowhere to go with my big feelings?
Homeward bound, he sings, I wish I was.
So many of his songs tap into those feelings of longing and belonging, leaving and returning, wishing you were anywhere else but here, and figuring out how to get there, only to realize you’d never left. This was such a defining feeling of my early years! And then I went out on the road to live the lyrics.
That night at Ravinia, I looked up at the trees and heard them talking to me. They said they loved living in a field where music always plays, that they are the happiest trees in the world—and lucky to be so well loved by their caretakers, who know that music lovers stomp through these grounds all summer, soaking in the sounds from the stage under the shade of these enormous, old Highland Park trees.
I love how we’re living in a time when people are openly confessing their capacity to communicate telepathically with trees and other living beings—how we’re breaking down the barriers that kept us from listening to what the trees were always telling us—about how to live a peaceful life connected to the cycles of life—I’ve always heard messages from trees but never posted about it for all to ponder! I’m seeing more of this now and it amuses and soothes me.
It's not always easy to make it to a live show—the wildfires, the oppressive heat, the suffocating air quality—and there’s also a ton of effort involved—time and money! I’m not always motivated to make an evening like this happen. But my sister found us tickets and we splurged and I’m so glad I went to this miracle of a show. It felt like going to some kind of church for time travelers. Where we prayed to the altar of timeless songs that live in the deepest parts of us and float up to the surface of consciousness to comfort us when we least expected we needed it.
My brother-in-law gave me a book of Paul Simon guitar chords a few years back for Hanukkah, “a little black book” of songs. Maybe he knew I loved Simon’s songs, and maybe he knew I loved playing guitar when I was a teenager. I so wished I’d learned to stick with it, through the hard part of feeling like a loser when it came to nailing those chord progressions.
I used to lug my guitar on the Dempster bus and ride it toward Evanston to take classes with a guy named Brian at the music shop on Main Street. I loved learning all the hippy songs we’d sung at summer camp, and I so wanted to embody the spirit of my idols—Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, Peter, Paul & Mary—I believed that if I tried hard enough, I could master the guitar songs that made hearts happy around a campfire.
But I never really nailed it. My fingertips burned. The sound of my own voice irked me, so far off from how I wished it to be, so I gave up, like many of us often do with musical instruments and other pursuits. I still have the guitar that my mother bought for me, though, when she saw I was getting kind of serious back then at the age of fourteen. She knew having a new guitar would motivate me and though we didn’t have a ton of cash flow growing up, she splurged on this for me.
I didn’t appreciate it then or thank her enough, I admit. There are years when I think I should sell it. But after this Paul Simon concert the other night, I decided I want to spend the rest of the summer learning how to play “America,” or perhaps “The Only Living Boy in New York,” two of my favorites among many greats.
I’ll take the guitar out of the closet and out of its case and tune it. And then I’ll pull out the sheet music my teacher Brian hand-wrote for me, the ones with the chords to these songs, because I was practicing these exact classics at the age of fourteen, in that little back room where I took classes long ago.
And I’ll try to practice instead of scrolling, and I’ll try to sing instead of moping, and I’ll try to share the music with anyone who might enjoy it, on the porch perhaps, instead of keeping it a secret inside.
Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together…
