John Denver "Annie's Song"

I just started laughing.

I'll try not to get too graphic here, or too personal, but see if you can picture this.

It's 1am on a weeknight.  Both you and your spouse have had a long day a work, a tough time getting rowdy kids to bed and have spent the last couple of hours trying to cram in some more work on your individual laptops before going to bed, too late.  While reconvening in the bathroom, trying to put a cap on the day, you ask "How was your day?" and your partner spins into a short story of a particularly awful work scene (in this case, involving an awful elementary school age child).  Then the toilet backs up.  Dressed halfway between day clothes and pajamas, a plunger is being sloshed in a dirty john while your spouse shares the kind of painfully honest answer to a banal question that you could only share with someone you knew deeply and intimately . . .

And I just started laughing.  There was no other response.

"Yeah, this isn't the old days, is it?" she smiled, with an equal mix of pain, nostalgia and realism.  "Nothing romantic about this . . ."


Cut to, The Old Days . . .

We'd only met a couple of weeks before, and she was coming to the Island again to see me.

February is not exactly a great time to impress a girl with the fabulous-ness of Martha's Vineyard.  There aren't too many activities happening, restaurants open, or scenic vistas you can visit without freezing your tail off.

But that didn't matter. 

Within hours of meeting each other for the first time we had discovered this electric chemistry between us.  Two weeks in, and I knew that this relationship was different than anything that had come before it.  When we were together, the rest of the world disappeared.  We entered a bubble and we needed absolutely nothing else, except maybe some take-out every few hours.

We spent the weekend on my bed, just talking.  Talking.  Talking.

Talking about everything.  Getting to know one another.  Sharing in the things we loved.

Of course we continued to talk about music.  The Replacements.  The Beatles.  Rufus Wainwright.  Travis.

She said, somewhat hesitantly, "You know what song I hear when I'm talking to you?"

I could tell she was a little embarrassed, because whatever she was thinking about was not cool.  And she was about to open herself up, even over the possibility of being mocked.

"You know that, um . . . that John Denver song? . . . 'You fill up my senses'  . . . ?"

There was a pause.  She worried for a moment that I was going to say her song was lame or cliche or cheesy.

Instead I rolled away from her on the bed, and reached down into the cabinet door of the side table next to the bed.  I pulled out my own copy of John Denver's Greatest Hits on vinyl, and put it on the record player.

"Annie's Song?"

We listened to John Denver on vinyl all weekend long.

And if that sounds not cool, cliche and downright schmoopy, you're damn right it was.  But we were so happy.*


We're still happy, but it's a different kind of happy.  It's a real-er kind of happy.  Because it has to be.

It's the kind of happy knowing that your partner is there for you to keep you from killing the kids, to be your cheerleader when work sucks, to look at you when it feels like you are barely keeping it together and just laugh because you know you're with the best person in the world, the person who didn't laugh but loved that you wanted to listen to John Denver in bed on your third date and that is how you knew you were meant to be together.

It's the kind of happy that comes from knowing you've got their back, and they've got your plunger.


Hear the song on Youtube.

*  As a side note, after the weekend my roommate at the time said, hilariously, "I didn't see you guys all weekend but I knew you were in the bedroom.  I kept hearing John Denver.  And I thought, 'Is that how PJ gets girls?!?'"