Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?

My mom absolutely LOVED Stevie Nicks. I don't think love is even a strong enough word for it! Once, back in 2001, or 2002??? ( I lose track) she, my sister and myself went to Chastain Park Amphitheater  to see her. It was a MAGICAL evening. First of all, if you are familiar with Chastain Park, you know that it is such an intimate cool venue for live music. We spent the afternoon leisurely primping around the house getting ready. We were drinking wine, blaring music, putting on make up...we even put glitter tattoos on our faces. We were having a ball! We put on our long flowing Stevie Nicks dresses and lace up platform boots, and set out for the show.
IT. WAS. HOT.
I remember, we found our seats and were anxiously awaiting Stevie as we frantically fanned and tried not to sweat. All of a sudden it got gray and VERY dark. Did I mention that Chastain is an OUTDOOR amphitheater? Well, the wind picked up, and the thunder started rolling in. We were pretty upset, we thought that surely we would get rained out or at least rained on which would not have been much fun in our long flowy dresses, lace up platform boots and glitter tatoos...
Stevie hit the stage, and just like that, the thunder stopped, but the cool breeze kept on blowing throughout the ENTIRE show. It was PERFECT! Mom was certain that Stevie had somehow arranged the weather just so in order to make the tempueratures a little more bearable. Maybe mom was right?
That night, The Edge of Seventeen could NOT have gotten any better! The guitar lead in to the soong went on and on and on...building our suspense until we could hardly stand it! We were all smiles and dancing.....
We ended the night like a couple of teenagers...driving through Krystal's for some "gut bombs". Then we got home to find we had locked ourselves out and had to throw stones at the window just to get someone to let us in......ahhh, to be young again!

...fast forward many years, and here I am. Left on this earth with no mom.

Funeral's come fast. There are so many things to consider. Things that you don't dare think about until you have to. When it came time to select music, it was pretty simple. We all knew that there had to be some Stevie in that Chapel! Even mom's old girlfriend's from work inquired if we were going to play Stevie.
Mom always told us stories about what all of the Stevie songs meant. It was important to her. The one that we chose to play at the funeral is near and dear to my heart. It was written by Stevie Nicks for Joe Walsh. I found a great write up that explains it perfectly in case you are interested it is in the post below the video.
Mom's cousin, held service for us at the funeral. I am so glad. He listened to the music before he planned the service, and he perfectly tied the message into the song. How, no one can write our funeral for us. We write our funeral with our lives. Mom wrote a beautiful life for herself. Full of joys, sorrows, and plenty of grankids to carry on her legacy! We miss her terribly.
I wrote something for mom and I spoke those words at her funeral. Maybe one day, I will share them here, but for now...please enjoy this beautiful song.





This song was written as a tribute to Joe Walsh of the Eagles. In the liner notes of her TimeSpace album, Stevie explained:
"I guess in a very few rare cases, some people find someone that they fall in love with the very first time they see them... from across the room, from a million miles away. Some people call it love at first sight, and of course, I never believed in that until that night I walked into a party after a gig at the hotel, and from across the room, without my glasses, I saw this man and I walked straight to him. He held out his hands to me, and I walked straight into them. I remember thinking, I can never be far from this person again... he is my soul. He seemed to be in a lot of pain, though hid it well. But finally, a few days later, (we were in Denver), he rented a jeep and drove me up into the snow covered hills of Colorado... for about 2 hours. He wouldn't tell me where we were going, but he did tell me a story of a little daughter that he had lost. To Joe, she was much more than a child. She was three and a half, and she could relate to him.


I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things going on on the road, and he decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows. So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she EVER complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain. As we drove up to this beautiful park, (it was snowing a little bit), he came around to open my door and help me down, and when I looked up, I saw the park... his baby's park, and I burst into tears saying, 'You built a drinking fountain here for her, didn't you?' I was right, under a huge beautiful hanging tree, was a tiny silver drinking fountain. I left Joe to get to it, and on it, it said, dedicated to HER and all the others who were too small to get a drink.


So he wrote a song for her, and I wrote a song for him... 'This is your song, ' I said to the people, but it was Joe's song. Thank you, Joe, for the most committed song I ever wrote. But more than that, thank you for inspiring me in so may ways. Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore, since we took that drive.





2 comments:

rayna said...

beautiful...like your mom, like you.

Vickie said...

I am sorry for your loss. Your post was beautiful and heart felt. I lost my Dad at a young age and it still shakes me to think my Dad isn't here with me on earth.