I Keep This Moment By and By

Dear Kate,

I was listening to this Sarah McLachlan song just now, a song that made me pick up piano again a few years back (nothing came out of it; please don't ask).

Then I remembered too I wrote about this song, certainly not the year before, maybe two or three years ago.

So I searched this blog and of course couldn't find anything.  Then I searched my blog before this and nothing came forth either.  For a moment I thought it's all in my imagination: for I couldn't have remembered it wrong if I remembered it so vivid; but maybe the writing wasn't done on the keyboard of a computer but that of a piano, a black-and-white portal to heaven that is anything but.

In confusion I suspended my disbelief and searched my first blog, one that I started 15 years ago and started me on this writing journey ever since.  And, lo and behold, the piece was there, written six years ago.

Here, sharing with you, not the full piece (it was looong), but just enough about my lingering thought on a lingering image.

Yours, Alex

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It is not hard to write a Christmas song; there's a stockpile of wintry imagery of mythical proportion for a songwriter to recycle and salvage.  One doesn't have to--to allude to another McLachlan song--"build a mystery" from the ground up.

Yet this is also why it is hard to write a good new Christmas song.  What is familiar and accessible can become warmed-over, or worse, overcooked.  A new Christmas song has the difficult task to give new insight to old myth.

I love this McLachlan song.  Listen to these final lines:

And this is how I see you
In the snow on Christmas morning
Love and happiness surround you
As you throw your arms up to the sky
I keep this moment by and by

Breathtaking.  I couldn't believe my ears.

Do you see--hear--what she's doing? She starts off by taking from the treasure trove of Christmas "stuffs" but speaks everything anew in a language that a baby can understand, singing a lullaby you know all your life but not enough of it until now.  Then comes a twist at the end: the image of a man, a lost love, throwing his arms up to the sky, and the song just stops there with a picture she trusts would linger in our imagination as it certainly does hers.

What is the man doing?  What does his throwing his arms up to the sky mean to her the storyteller?  Does it evoke an once tender moment that makes her forever vulnerable to its recollecting?

The songwriter does not explain.  Enough said, she suggests, and just leaves you there, in the snow, on a Christmas morning, an arm's length from where her heart is.

You don't know where you are.  But you do.