This album came out before I was about to go through some of the biggest changes in my life. My mother would pass away in January of the next year (1999), and I had just turned 25. A quarter decade. At the precipice of me realizing that everything that I had built my life on at this point, was because I was my mother's child. I always wanted to make her proud, and when she died, it left me completely incapable of understanding who I was. I was my mother's daughter. I look like her and sound just like her. She was too good for this world and inadvertently I had made a lot of my life choices to make her proud whether or not those choices were things that really fulfilled me. It's a helluva time to lose the parent you are closest to and this album carried me through the first year she was gone.
"Lets Go Do What Happens" by Francis Dunnery is my album of inspiration for me for this month. It was released April 28, 1998 and was a popular release on WXPN, the radio station I was actively in-studio volunteering for at the time. In fact, that year I believe he headlined WXPN's summer concert at which myself and friends (sadly whom I've lost touch with), proudly belted along as audience members and fans. Since, I'm again at another crossroads in my life at age 49 now, and I've started a challenge for myself called "Get Serious September" where I start to get more focus on the things in my life that fuel my soul, and also find what makes me feel alive now after losing my partner. Therefore I find myself dusting this release off and cranking.it up as I start to move forward on my journey in life.
Every track holds meaning for me, but I'm going to focus on my very favorites on this album.
1. My Own Reality
The first track was the first single released (I believe), and was a great start to understanding where this album takes us. It's about not settling for the status quo and turning inward to figure out who you are and how you want to function in the world. It's a personal favorite and was quite popular back in the day.
2. Sunflowers
In the past, this song was just a fun single release, but now it has a more potent meaning for me. Merik wanted to plant sunflowers. We talked about it often and I was worried that they would be too large and end up falling over. He disagreed and we talked about lining the fence inside with them, along with a row of corn inside the fence perimeter. We never got there. So in this I hear us talking to each other. I would like to buy him Sunflowers.
6. Riding on the Back
This was another single from this album and highlights the pure serendipity of life. I love all the "connections" he references and the perfect "coincidences" that those of us who believe in the possibility of love even after all we've survived know or suspect are all a part of some larger plan that we're not privy to. Even now, as I contemplate either seeking love in the future, going the Golden Girl route, or living alone for the rest of my life...I secretly pray for one of these moments or happy accidents in my future. We shall see.
7. I'95
This song is the strongest memory and connection for me. I was living in New Hope, PA with my first husband and I had told him that I was starting to have feelings for a friend of mine. I told him I was extremely confused by this, and that it didn't mean I didn't love him. I was actually preparing my mother, 2 weeks before her sudden death, for the possibility of me and Chris separating. I was falling in love because I found someone who really appealed to my mind, my intellect, and my sense of humor and weirdo-ness. It was the closest I felt to anyone in so very long, and as much as I did indeed still love my husband, I could not change how being valued for these things made me feel. Chris was also trying to find himself and was getting deeper into sports and ultimate frisbee, which I highly encouraged. I always felt he was holding his true passions back during our marriage because although I tried to get into them, I would never feel about those things in the same way he did. I was, as much as I hate to admit this to myself and to you dear reader, having an emotional affair and the girl who had gotten engaged to Chris at age 16 and survived not a moment of weakness or a stray thought for 5 years while he finished college, was completely shattered. I had no idea who I was, and I was lost. My mother's death just magnified it all and tipped the scales. I couldn't reconcile the woman I thought I was with the woman I wanted to be. I fell from grace. Remember, I've never pretended to be perfect, but I have learned a lot from all my mistakes. Judge me if you will, I have for years.
Regardless, in the summer of 1999, Chris provided me an opportunity to figure out how I felt about all the things in my head and heart since my Mom had died. He paid for me to have a studio apartment in Fort Walton Beach, Florida for three months where the friend I had feelings for lived as well as the friends of his I had become friends with via the internet. It was the most selfless thing anyone has ever done for me in my life. That summer I made the white sand beaches and the tide help me understand my own rhythms in life. During that summer, my friend and I drove across the state of Florida to visit one of my cousins and their husband. At one point we were on I'95, the interstate that I drove on to get to my apartment in the panhandle. The interstate that would carry me back home at the end of August. On this journey, miles of reason, miles of inner debate, miles of finding me somehow during all of this was happening. This song completely understands that for me.
When Chris and I divorced through mediation, he always reminded me that we "both" were part of why our marriage fell apart. He always said to me borrowing from James 4:17, which teaches "Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin." Its opposite is the sin of commission, i.e. a sin resulting from an action performed. He did the omission, I did the commission and it was what it was. In our last phone conversation, he told me that he didn't think I could have or would have become the woman I became if my Mom was still alive. He is right. In so many ways, he understood that the girl he married became a woman in the years after her death. I gradually took all the things my mother gave me, and I found my own voice along the way. I will always love Chris, even though he shut the door on our friendship a while back, I follow him on Instagram and am so proud of the wildly wonderful world and life he's created for himself. We lived off the I'95, and I'll always associate this song with this time in my life. "Still on a journey that I started long ago," and I thank you Francis Dunnery for the songs that remind me of my perfectly imperfect journey.