Maybe I'm a man

Maybe you're the only woman

Who could ever help me

Baby, won't you help me to understand?

-Paul McCartney-

 

I've heard this song a trillion times since 1970. As a kid it was a sappy love song. As I got older I'd hum and sing along to it w/o bothering to really listen to the lyrics. I do that with a lot of songs. There are songs I've heard that I've never bothered to learn the lyrics to and most times that's because I can't understand what they're singing.

Today, “Maybe I'm Amazed” came on WCIB and w/o thinking about it, I listened.

I thought to myself, “God...remember when you thought a girl would 'Save you?'”

In my 20's, I, we all had, deficits we knew intimately. None of us is perfect. Also I'd think that if I met the right girl, if we hit it off the right way, this would somehow fill the gaps in my life that I had a hard time filling myself. The “Perfect Love” that was somewhere out there, I just had not found it yet.

I'm wasn't alone in these hopes. Everyone I knew back then thought similarly but would never dare divulge that information.

Yeah well...you come to find out people are messy, imperfect as hell and they can't “save you.”

What I did come to learn was a little better than that fantasy.

If I was in a healthy relationship, where it was easy to be open and completely myself, the girl would allow me to bring forward the best in myself. The holes in me remain unfilled but I brought forth the best I owned already with abundance. That is growth. Someone I knew called that “blooming.”

Women have great perception. I can remember years ago, when I was 19, sitting on the front steps of M's house with his girlfriend when were just talking. We really didn't know one another well enough to give one another eye opening revelations to one another. Well, I didn't have any to give to her, I was a guy, and by definition, dense as a brick.

“”Ron, you are so ready to bloom now. I can see it. You ought to just move out on your own and it'll come.”

I was quietly shocked and I kept that reaction to myself. How the hell did she know what was eating at me? I never told anyone. Women and their X ray eyes....she knew.

I too, could bring out the best in others.

I remember C. She came off as a dumb blonde but wasn't really. It was a role that seemed to bring her the things she needed in life. One time at Scarborough, as we sat on the benches watching the surf, she pointed to the horizon and said those cumulonimbus clouds out there were headed our way.

“Cumulonimbus?” I thought to myself. I had no idea she understood weather nor had any use for Latin prefixes and suffixes. There was a side to this girl I never knew about and I turned to her and smiled and asked how the hell she knew that. She said she learned it from being a Girl Scout long ago. This side her actually made her more pretty in my eyes. I figured she felt comfortable enough with to drop the duh-duh blonde routine and let her real self come out for a bit.

It was simply feeling comfortable with one another and that's huge.

At my age now, I still own some of those old deficits in my personality. I may own them still if I reach 94 years of age. But, those things are like holes in the road, you fill them in as you can and sometimes it takes forever. The only person who can do that is you and not your loved one.

I was struck by a few lines in the Lincoln movie that came out last year. In one scene, he's arguing with his wife, Mary, about letting their oldest son join the Union Army. Mary would have no part of it since she lost one son already. She threatens Abe with Holy Hell if he dies.   After being berated by Mary, Lincoln says;

“I must make my decisions and Bob (their son) must make his, you yours. And bear what we must. Hold and carry what we must.

What I carry within me, you must allow me to do it.

Alone, as I must. And you alone, Mary, you alone may lighten your burden or render it intolerable. As you choose.”

Our lives are our own and that dream of being saved, fixed when I was in my 20's was a nice dream.

And “Maybe I'm Amazed” is still a good song.