A Mother's Day post
[I wrote this around the time my first wife's mother passed away.]
My first wife introduced me to the music of Simon & Garfunkel. (It's funny, but not relevant to this story, that my parents told her early on in our relationship, "thank you for introducing him to some GOOD music", referring to my love of the what-I-recognized-as-"classic rock" that was only a couple of years older than I was, which they didn't approve of [in particular, Queen....ask me about it sometime]; her immediate response to them was, "I dunno...I like Queen, too." It may have been just an unthinking, honest response that meant exactly what she said, it might have been something else entirely. It might have been a non-confrontational way of telling me [and my parents] that she had my back. My biggest regret in life will always be that I didn't take her at her word. As hard as things got, as much as I fucked up, she was never the one that gave up on us. That was me. I wanted a divorce because it was easier than seeing her disappointed in me anymore, because I still wasn't really figuring out my shit.)
For whatever reason, I gravitated towards their later stuff. A lot of the bleakness of the lyrics really resonated with me, and some of the angst as well. That said, one of my absolute favorite songs by Simon & Garfunkel very quickly became "America". The story of our narrator and their partner Cathy taking a Greyhound bus across the country "to look for America", the song seemed to perfectly capture my feeling of wonderment at the world, along with my feeling completely, hopelessly lost in blackness, looking for headlights or streetlamps or anything that might offer some reprieve.
More than a decade later, that song was on my mind again as I sat on a Greyhound bus with a new partner, headed towards Chicago for what was supposed to be the start of an exciting new chapter. In fact, it WAS an exciting new chapter. It just wound up being what I needed rather than what I wanted, and at the time I couldn't see the good, because it all looked bad.
While I was in Chicago, trying to distract myself from how terribly things were going and trying to conserve as much money as I could, I decided to further my musical education, and try to get into Yes. I went through, album by album, grabbing a couple of tracks who's titles caught my eye, adding them to the playlist I was making online. The plan was to listen to this playlist until I really got into some of the songs. But that's when I noticed it: "America".Â
THE "America"?
I quickly looked at the album credits.
"Yup. 15 minute prog opus cover of 'America'? Yes, of course it's going on the playlist."
It, of course, rose to the top of my favorite Yes tracks.
As I write this, it's February 9th, 2026. Every day, the news gets scarier and scarier. A lot of people seem to suddenly be seeing that they don't recognize America anymore.
"America" (the original) came up on my shuffle today. That ending chorale of "We've all come to look for America" took on an entirely different meaning for me today.
My first wife's mom died yesterday. I'm not really sure what that has to do with anything. It just feels like it should be noted. She deserves to be remembered by everyone who knew her. She was a great lady, and I never took the opportunity to apologize and acknowledge to her that I recognize I blew up everyone's lives.
