What song this time?

 

Monday, January 20, 2014

 

Maybe I ought to be playing Simon & Garfunkel in my car when I drive through the streets of the county the way I did that terrible week in 2001 when the whole political and then later, ordinary world fell into ruin.

Simon & Garfunkel songs somehow serve as a sound track for my life (along with The Beatles, the Stones, the Monkees and Judy Collins) some songs catching in my head as to reflect what goes on around me.

In 2001, the disasters with Robert Janiszewski being named in a corruption probe, and his sudden vanishing from the scene after a year of secretly taping fellow politicians in an effort to work out a deal that would keep him out of jail. A week later, terrorists attacked on 9/11, and I drove around in a haze not too dissimilar to the one in which I had in 1969 when I fled west with some mob money. In those days, it was the Sound of Silence and the associated songs with lyrics like “I got to fly down the highway before they come to catch me I’ll be gone.”

Other times, on the road, I heard things like Homeward Bound, stirring up the need for me to come home and straighten up my legal woes. Even separately, Simon and Garfunkel seemed to capture feelings I was feeling at the time – and listening to some of those songs now, I’m brought back in time.

Hank and I used to sing many of their songs on the streets of New York City in during the Summer of Love and later, and I remember the first time we actually saw the 59th Street Bridge and broke out laughing.

The last few years, we’ve hovered at the edge of yet another scandal, of pending doom, political and personal, supposedly according to my new age friends, culminating these week after years in the making. I’m always on the periphery of such things, watching things unfold, not able always to put the pieces together before the whole thing explodes, but always stunned inside and out by what happens.

Dramatic change – such as all that is going on associated with the governor and his lieutenant governor – makes me feel as if I ought to be listening to some Simon & Garfunkel song, knowing that the stakes are so high, and the fabrications by media so intense that someone will have to suffer a personal and professional 9/11 before this is all over.

So what song should I be listening to: “Nothing but the dead and dying in my little town?” in mourning the political demise of a mayor who challenged the governor, or “At the zoo,” for the media frenzy to see someone bleed, or perhaps “Fakin it,” for a governor who won his seat as an anti-corruption crusader, or “Flowers never bend in the rainfall,” for myself?