It’s rare that I stop and analyze the lyrics of a song. Usually it’s a matter of latching onto a few hummable measures and repeating it inside my head until I get sick of it. Annoying as hell when trying to fall asleep. So this past week’s specialty was a limited edition of Michel Legrand’s Pieces of Dreams. I can hum a respectable amount of it yet I only know its first few lines:
Little boy lost, in search of little boy found
And that’s about it. So I’ve spent virtually all my adult life thinking it was a song about a lost boy. Now when I was ten years old, my mother brought me to a department store (the only department store in the small Connecticut town I was born in) and was told not to touch anything and by all means to keep it down. Well somehow I got tangled up in a display of very heavy curtains. Hence a dilemma. I couldn’t touch them and I couldn’t scream for help nor did I have a reason why I ventured behind them in the first place.
Curiosity, yes. Logic? Absent.
Though I was ten years old that mattered little to my mother who treated me as an adult from birth. I think I slapped my own ass in the delivery room for baby’s first cry given her patterns of (let’s just say) altered states. Ahhh Janet. She was a stitch, that one. Needless to say I became quite independent early on, so early that when I moved into the Bronx at age sixteen during the Summer of Sam no one seemed to flinch. Talk about little boy lost.
So I googled the meaning of the lyrics to Pieces of Dreams and learned it’s a song about lost love and fading hope, painting a portrait of someone sifting through the remnants of a relationship that has dissolved. WHAT? I’ve been humming it amongst images of being tangled inside velvet drapes screaming inside my head for an absent mommy. It was a song of terror, certainly not unrequited love. I just kept wondering, wandering, stumbling, tumbling in a sea of drapes. Pieces of Cloth.
But it gets worse. I recently found my iWatch. I stopped wearing it years ago since, well doesn’t everybody stop using it after a while? I brought it to Xfinity to get a designated wifi channel or whatever it’s called. Then I brought it home and started downloading music but I grew impatient with the process and wanted to get to the gym before nine. Naturally the only song I was able to download was …
Yep! A version sans lyrics. So I was wondering, wandering, stumbling, tumbling while peddling peddling peddling peddling.
Maddening yet a great workout.