Rocky
Lately– most of the day, actually–this song, from my youth (1975), has been echoing endlessly through my grey cells:
- Alone until my eighteenth year, we met four springs ago.
She was shy and had a fear, of things she did not know;
But we got it on together in such a super way.
We held each other close at night, and traded dreams each day.And she said Rocky I’ve never been in love before, don’t know if I can do it;
But if you let me lean on you, take my hand, I might get through it, through it.
I said baby, oh sweet baby, it’s love that sets us free;
And God knows if the world should end, your love is safe with me.We found an old grey house, and you would not believe the way
We worked at night to fix it up, took classes in the day.
Painting walls and sipping wine, sleeping on the floor;
With so much love with just two, soon we found there’d be one more;
And she said Rocky I never had a baby before, don’t know if I can do it;
But if you let me lean on you, take my hand, I might get through it, through it.
I said baby, oh sweet baby, it’s love that sets us free;
And God knows if the world should end, your love is save with me.
We had lots of problems then, but we had lots of fun;
Like the crazy party, when our baby girl turned one.
I was proud and satisfied, life had so much to give;
Till the day they told me that she didn’t have long to live.
She said Rocky I never had to die before, don’t know if I can do it…
…Now it’s back to two again, the little girl and I;
Who looks so much like her sweet mother, sometimes it makes me cry.
I sleep alone at nights again, I walk alone each day;
And sometimes when I’m about to give in, I hear her sweet voice say to me:
Rocky you know you’ve been alone before, you know that you can do it;
But if you’d like to lean on me, take my hand, I’ll help you through it, through it.
I said baby, oh sweet baby, it’s love that sets us free;
I told you when the world would end, your love was safe with me.
She said, Rocky you know you’ve been alone before, you know that you can do it… — Austin Roberts, Jay Stevens, Kenny O’Dell
Somewhat maudlin? Yes, but a song (much like Bobby Darin’s ‘Honey’) that; though I have wished over the years it did not; gives expression to a facet of who I was then, and continue to be to this day.Rocky was one of those songs that carried something deeper, more meaningful, concealed in the wrapper of a largely ignorable bubble-gum rock tune; and, because of that, it was largely discarded by the music-consuming public. IIRC, the tune made it to #22 on the Top-40 charts, sometime in late-1975/early-1976–my sophomore year in high school–right around the time I started working in hospitals and was more or less continually exposed to the last flickers of the flame of life within young and old; as well as attendant struggles to preserve those fading sparks of life.
All too often–certainly too often for my adolescent sensitivities–we failed in our attempts. In Loma Linda Community Hospital, I held the hand of a ten year-old girl, as she departed this life. It was a devestating experience for me, in response to which I changed the hospital environment wherein I worked; yet, it was an inescapable conclusion that everyone who eventually died had, at sometime been a little girl or boy. I ultimately removed myself from the environment of medicine.
What I brought out from that paradigm was an awareness that, no matter how unfair the circumstances of life and the tragedy of death happen to be, there is something beyond that compensates for it all. It is the only answer to what we experience daily, the only way that the universe can be made just.
Hope, love and eternity stand as the only rational components to a life that, at times, seems like such a cruel joke upon beings who are self- and other-aware. They are best best practiced with an eye upon that which lies beyond what most people consider to be an ending–a new beginning–with the greatest of these is–as has been repeated countless times–love.
The contrast between the then of my adolescence and the now of my children’s adolescence is marked–at least it is to my eye. When I look at what our society feeds our children–in terms of the ideals contained in advertising and music–and feel so blessed to have passed my adolescent years in such a “sappy, bubble-gum, pop-rock” era.
I have so much that is good and inspiring to draw from when ‘things’ are at their very worst.
It’s at moments like this that I find myself reflecting upon how dearly I love my wife, and how humbled AND honored I am to be her husband.
In that we have lived and loved, it is now sufficient that we have lived thusly.
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