Rocky Mountain High

Just like yesterday or the day before, I stumbled backward again. This time it was a yearning to listen to John Denver. Today I happened to be somewhere that sold CDs and there happened to be a John Denver boxed set, and I happened to pick it up and it got into my shopping cart. Somehow.

Tonight, I happened to remember to retrieve it from the shopping bag and began listening to it. It took one disk of the three-disk set to satisfy my need for John Denver. The rest of the songs in the set are unfamiliar to me. They are nice and enjoyable but they are not songs I know. So the joy of singing along and traveling back in time was over after oh, say 45 minutes.

The songs I do know, “Rocky Mountain High” (with possibly the most profound line of lyric I had ever heard during my teen years: “He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year / coming home to a place he’d never been before” Dude. That’s deep),  “Take Me Home Country Roads” and “Back Home Again” among others took me back some 35+ years to a time when there were no bills, no mortgage or rent, no incurable disease or aging body and no middle-aged panic over living the remainder of my life alone.

Still can’t help closing my eyes and swooning to “Annie’s Song” and thinking afterward that John Denver caused me and possibly others some disappointment with that song, because we found no romance as alive and intense to give us what he describes in the song.

“Let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms…”

*Sigh*

I am not too old to dream of a romantic love that renders me helpless and oblivious to the surrounding world and a love that can sustain me in even the direst straits.

In my next life, I hope that a love like that finds me.

~K