Love Songs

Judy Pollard Smith

Description

If you’ve lost your partner and need a jolt of warmth this book was written with your comfort in mind. It is humourous too, and sensitive in a way that Baby Boomers might appreciate.
The reader will enjoy several finely crafted personal essays interspersed with amusing vignettes. The essays provide a spirited and sensitive look at nature, music, literature, family, friends, heritage, multiculturalism and personal loss. Some of the essays have been previously published in newspapers or magazines. They are short, salient and to the point.
This small tender book offers a unique glimpse at grief recovery. What do the bereaved do with the long corridor of empty hours? How do they go about recreating life? Where does the balance sit between continuing in sorrow or telling oneself that putting one foot in front of the other is essential?
How do we hold onto the history of our loved ones? What life rafts have we in order when we need them? Who and what will we put in the drivers seat?
In spite of the the loss factor the authour’s lyrical writing style brings smiles and hope. It is forward looking and honest.
It is a calming read for lovers of life.

Sujets

• Musique
• Loss
• Music
• Love
• Love (disambiguation)

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 10 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665726801
• Langue: English

Extrait

Love songs
Small Tender Essays
 
 
 
 
Judy Pollard Smith
 
 
 

 
Copyright © 2022 Judy Pollard Smith.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.
 
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2679-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2680-1 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912506
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/08/2022
Contents
1.Acknowledgements
2.Prologue
3.Small stories
4.Upside Down
5.Vignette in St. George’s Anglican Church Garden
6.Date Nights
7.Vignette on a Tuesday
8.The Greats
9.Vignette on a Sunday
10.Up and Over
11.Vignette on a Wednesday Evening
12.Janine’s Summer House
13.Vignette on a Summer’s Afternoon
14.Chosisme
15.Vignette on an Afternoon in Early Spring
16.Dear Dennis and Liz…
17.Vignette on a Thursday
18.Cookie by Cookie
19.Vignette with Scissors
20.Letting it Go
21.Vignette on a Friday
22.Who Said Anything About Being Too Old?
23.Vignette on a Breezy Sunday Afternoon
24.On Becoming Irish
25.Vignette on a Rainy Saturday Morning
26.Libraries
27.Vignette on What Have They Done?
28.Porches
29.Vignette on Saturday from The New York Times Online
30.Taste and See
31.Vignette on a Monday
32.Broken Piano, Heavy Cello
33.Vignette on a Thursday
34.Shepherd’s Pie
35.Vignette on Wednesday
36.Christmas of 2014 Was Just Ducky
37.Vignette on a Quiet Friday
38.The Trails We Leave
39.Vignette on a Cold, Windy Sunday
40.Birds
41.Vignette on a Friday
42.Collecting
43.Vignette Nearing the End of This Book
44.One Thousand and Fifty Days
45.About the Authour
46.Bibliography

Acknowledgements
W ORDS THAT MAKE UP stories and essays don’t fall out of the sky. Small ideas are given to us as we go through life. It isn’t happenstance. Many of my own essays come from thinking about interactions with other people. Some of them started from small seeds dropped into the ground by those who were in my life long ago, others more recently. I think of those people as the Johnny Appleseeds of story planting.
I am fortunate (more than!) to have a coterie of people in my life whom I love. They’ll understand if I don’t thank them one by one. Wouldn’t it be awful to wake up after the book is published and realize I’d left someone out? Horrors!
The fact that you are out there, all of you, makes me one fortunate woman indeed.

Prologue
G RIEF IS AN ELEMENTAL, universal experience. We can’t get through life without it. It makes us fully human.
Our losses demand that we pay grief its due.
And then, after a while, it asks of us to devise a small plan on how to engage with life once again. Those who grieve a death are not the only ones who hurt. There are many in this world who need a hand up, something to eat, refuge, a friend.
That’s where altruism comes in. I had thought of myself as altruistic until I realized that it alludes to good deeds that are done with no ulterior motive. I am highly motivated to suck the marrow out of life and to be well, so any action that I might do to help a fellow traveller works for me too, gives me a jolt of joy. I can see no wrong in that.
Perhaps that is how humans have been designed, so that those in need of food can be fed by those who need to feed in order to feel good themselves. A win-win. An eventual panacea for grief can be this very thing.
I have written a variety of short essays, a few about grief which are intended to be honest but not overwhelmingly sad. The bereaved do not need to be reading about sorrow. They know it well. It’s the curative that they seek.
I’ve included a variety of other essays too, some of which have been previously published in newspapers with permission to reprint them. Others are extracted from a pile as high as the Eiffel Tower in my cabinet, where I relegate essays that have not yet found a home. Some are funny, some perhaps thought provoking.
Maybe my love of music will come through as you read. Music changes me, helps me to get the jiggles out and let the light in, helps me to see the way things are meant to be. All kinds of music does this to me: secular music, spiritual music, classical music, the crooners. Both violins and rock bands fit into my world.
This is a small book, a book that you can pick up at any time. It’s not meant to demand anything from you, but I hope it brings you peace.

Small stories
~ These words have I written for John ~
“You’re the cream in my coffee
You’re the salt in my stew
You will always be my necessity
I’d be lost without you.” 1
L YRICS LIKE THOSE ABOVE don’t come along often. Having someone as the cream in your coffee gets the point across.
If you’ve never heard that jaunty tune, look up the lyrics, or better yet, listen. Nat King Cole does a silky job of it.
That was my theme song for our forty-two years of marriage.
I used to sing it to him. I am not a good singer.
But he put up with it.

Upside Down
T HINGS ARE UPSIDE DOWN, inside out.
Everyone thinks he or she is a doctor. Outside the bank, customers line up along the sidewalk while the teller goes up and down asking, “Are you feeling well? Fever? Symptoms? Been quarantined recently?”
During the break between waves of the COVID virus, I went for a haircut. The stylist came out onto the pavement, quizzed me about my health (as if she was both an epidemiologist and a bank teller), and took my temperature. In the normal course of events, the stylist would talk to me on the phone and the doctor would click the thermometer on my forehead. When I called her last week with a small medical question about an unrelated issue, she would only talk to me on the phone.
It’s always Thursday when I think it’s Wednesday, and then I wonder what happened to Tuesday. That is what comes of having nothing penned in on those big white squares on the calendar that I keep on my refrigerator door.
Family dinners have ceased to exist. At Christmas Round One, I cooked and the kids dropped by the porch for take-out, when what we all needed was more of the eat-in-together variety.
We created some fun on Christmas morning, drinking hot chocolate in the snow. Duvets were pressed into duty on the summer lawn chairs to ward off the chill. By Christmas Round Two, doing the same things felt a bit passé.
Lockdowns provided the opportunity to see how I could value each day’s events without there being any events at all. I worked to cherish the moment. I was alive, not hospitalized as were so many.
The baby goldfinches on my fence this past autumn were tiny shooting stars across my sightline, until they packed it up to go elsewhere. The hundreds of wildflower seeds I threw around failed, for the most part, but I did get lupines. I’ve wanted lupines all of my life. And there they were: rosy and lovely and ready to greet me every morning, until they grew tall and fell over. By next summer, they will have multiplied and I’ll have even more of them to look at.
That was the thing about observing nature. I needed proof that some things don’t change. Seeing the flowers come up in spring and die back in autumn was when I knew I could trust the world to carry on.
One night at 3:00 a.m., I went into the kitchen for a drink of water. The moon was a huge circle of gold peeking over the top of the yellow café curtain at the window. It splashed its warmth and light across the red linoleum floor. I stood to stare. I was being reminded of how it all began, with those great and gorgeous lights in the sky: sun, moon, stars. And here it was now, billions of years later, still doing its thing on time. Going down in the morning, popping back up at night. An ordered universe is what I most longed to see.
Our daughter could not come home for a summer visit because they live south of the border. Instead, she sent me daily photos of the progress of her monarch butterfly project from the milkweed she had planted. Her photos documented the egg-caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly cycle. In normal circumstances, she would not have had time to watch the caterpillar crawl down from its egg-laying leaf, wiggle its way up and over the lavender to get to the hydrangea leaf, and document this beautiful procedure.
The guy I call Bookshop Dave and his son bicycled over with my book orders, and we chatted on the driveway. We commented ho