Sunny Skies and the Shadow

Wednesday night, my partner Ann and I went to James Taylor’s sold-out concert at Seattle’s Key Arena. The first concert I ever went to was a James Taylor concert in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 35 years ago. A lot has changed since then, and some is the same. 

Wed. night, JT opened with his hit, “Carolina in my Mind,” the same song he sang to close that first concert. I remember the University of North Carolina crowd going bonkers for that song. I was a teenager, and many in the audience were college students at “Carolina.” 

Least week, the concert’s crowd was older than that first one, so it went bonkers in its more subdued fashion: bald heads and grey hairs clapping and whistling ‘til we needed to refill our oxygen tanks (just an expression—I’m not using an oxygen tank).

Time’s passage seemed to be on JT’s mind, too. When he sang the song, “Down on Copper Line,” a nostalgic song about the changes to a childhood area, the image of a rusted railroad bridge was projected on the screen behind him. As the song progressed, images of ivy gradually crept over the bridge.

Singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt was supposed to have opened the show, but she cancelled due to surgery for an “undisclosed illness.” A few songs into his second set, JT held up his phone and conducted us in a communal shout: “We love you, Bonnie!”

This aging crowd, many of us within a generation of JT (he’s 15 years and one day older than I am), understand illness and surgery and cancelling commitments we don’t want to cancel.

         I remember a Saturday Night Live skit where they took really happy songs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_Skies_(song), like James Brown’s “I Feel Good” and sang them in JT’s style. Everything sounded sad.

         The producer (or whoever makes such decisions) didn’t try to make some of the sad songs, like “Fire and Rain” happy. However, while he sang "Sunny Skies,"  another song he wrote when he was being treated for drug addiction and severe depression, the producer made the song seem happy by showing images of JT with his puppy. The video implied “Sunny Skies” was a very cute pug. This happiness is so off the song's story that it's weird.

         Though the music is upbeat, the lyrics are not. I believe the music is intended to be ironic, perhaps the voice of a musician who isn’t acknowledging the darkness in his life. The happy tune just makes the song sadder. 

         Last night as Ann and I left the stadium talking about the concert, I said, “My biggest surprise is that Sunny Skies is a dog.” 

Ann reminded me that just because they’d used images of a dog doesn’t mean Sunny Skies was a dog. “Remember James Taylor saying ‘That’s entertainment for you, Seattle.”

I thought about it more, and though I could make a lot of lines match the dog presentation, I couldn’t make sense of the line, “Sunny Skies hasn’t a friend.” After all, dogs make human and dog friends. That’s dogness. And in the video, JT clearly loved this pug. I therefore did what any curious researcher would do: I googled it,

Wikipedia confirmed my understanding of the poem’s darkness.  So now the question is, why did the producer decide to make such a sad song seem so happy? I don’t think the producer misunderstood the song. Maybe he was trying to “take a sad song and make it better.” Maybe that producer is too much a part of this culture, too afraid to face the darkness.

I’ve been reading Francis Weller and Michael Lerner’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow and yesterday focused on “the second gate of grief.” This section includes the assertion, “It is important to look into the shadows of our lives and to see who lives there, tattered, withered, hungry, and alone.” This assertion runs counter to the puppy video.

In The Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu discuss sadness and concur about its importance in our lives. The Archbishop Says, “I cry easily…. I suppose I love easily, too…. Shout out your sadness and your pain. This can bring you back to normal. It’s locking them up and pretending that they are not there that causes them to fester and become a wound." 

I have been thinking about sadness and my losses from brain tumors lately. I’m writing a memoir, and in the past month, my writing group has read the first two chapters. In those opening chapters, I receive my diagnosis and am surprised I don’t sink into depression. Instead, I feel especially grateful for the many gifts in my life. 

Group members who have responded are clear that, as one has said several times, “The lady doth protest too much.” One of their group members died from a brain tumor not long ago, before I joined them. Most of them are older than I am. Each of them must have experienced the shadow. Essentially, they tell me not to deny the shadow, but to look at it and write about it.

Perhaps they are right and I need to look at this darkness. Or perhaps in hearing the possibility of my own death, I also hear more distinctly my life’s gifts. 

I don’t know. The famous cartoon fish Nemo just had to “Keep swimmin’." Perhaps I just need to keep writin’ in order to discover what I think and feel, what I thought and felt.