SLEEPY LITTLE TOWN

We stopped in Burley Idaho for gas and dinner. Merlyn and I were headed back to Utah after a recording session. My brother, John Hansen, lives in Boise. He was producing our album Out of the Blue and the studio, engineer and musicians live there (including John, guitar player extraordinaire). Merlyn and I made the 5 hour trek to Boise on weekends when Merlyn was not working and when Dave was home to handle our kids. What great memories we have of those recording sessions! We finished the album in Nashville after Robby, our engineer, moved there. Great memories there as well. But I digress….

It was a wintry day, the ever-present Idaho wind whistling through the windows of the car. We drove down the main drag in Burley looking for a Wendy’s or Arby’s. The streets of those old Idaho towns are wide; wide enough, I suppose, for teams of horses pulling large wagons to fit side by side. They paved the roads the same width when horses turned into cars. Hanging above us, swinging in the fierce Idaho wind, were long strands of Christmas lights. These lights, as opposed to the feminine twinkle lights of the suburbs, were full size light bulbs - not big pointy Christmas lights, but Edison-like round topped light bulbs, in all different colors. I suspect this is a necessary thing in Burley, with that wind and all. It was so charming to me. I looked down the thick ribbon of Main Street and watched the zigzag of color shift with the moving air, rising and falling like kids on roller coasters. It seemed so old fashioned and comforting; so Christmassy.

The rest of the way home I felt the glow of those lights as the snow swept across the barren highway back to Utah. I got to thinking about the Christmas decorations of my childhood. Of the Salvation Army Bell Ringer outside of the entrance to South Hills Village; of the tinsel hanging in the aisles of DiStefano’s Drug Store; the aroma of peppermint and end caps full of Chia Pets at Woolworths, and the sprays of decorations hung from the lamp posts and telephone poles along portions of Route 51 and Old Clairton Road. I thought about the beauty of a generation that embraced allowing a Nativity Scene to be set up in front of City Hall. I thought about standing on risers on a December night, singing that high-high soprano part to the Halleluiah Chorus, hearing the echo of altos across the Thomas Jefferson High School stage answering us – seeing my sister among them, a hot tear springing through my lower eyelashes as the music swelled and I could see our teacher Mr. Rotella being moved by it. My throat closes in when I cry, making singing painful and unpleasant to the ear. I wish, how I wish, I cried pretty when I sang!

When I started writing Sleepy Little Town all these memories swirled in my space. It was a sweet trip home. I remembered, in the process of writing, how it felt to be away from home for that first Christmas. Dave and I were engaged, so I flew home for a couple days to meet his parents. But my family had decided to spend Christmas in CA with my sisters Sherry and Sue. I remember boarding the plane, it may have been Christmas Eve day, and aching with the thought of leaving Dave. I remember writing on a TWA cocktail napkin, a little love letter to him. I ached also for the scenes of my childhood, realizing the door was closing on some part of me and I might not be allowed to open it again.

The next Christmas Dave and I spent in our little house in Provo Utah. I was working at 7-11 and they would not give me any time off for the holidays. We bought a stubby little evergreen and placed it in the corner of the living room. I covered it with red bows and little puff ball ornaments and ceramic figures I had made at the BYU Craft Center. I remembered lying on the couch in the living room, listening to an 8 track tape of Nat King Cole’s Christmas album, longing for the people I love, aching in the middle place just below the heart and above the belly. They were gathered without me, and though I longed to fill it, there was indeed and empty chair at their table.

We rarely realize, when we are in the middle of life, how sacred and rare the every-day is. We come to cherish the good and simple things because they repeat. Repetition is essential in this human existence. There is something very eternal about it. We repeat what matters to us; and by looking at what we have repeated in our lives we can tell, in retrospect, what mattered to us. Every writer knows the value of repetition. So does God. We repeat the sacrament, we pray always, we forgive 70 times 7. When I hear the ring of a Salvation Army bell I try to dig in my pocket and find some money. Anything. We tend to use credit cards so much these days that I am afraid they will soon do away with the bell ringer outside the grocery store. I feed the bucket in an attempt to keep the repetition going. I tried to incorporate that feeling of repetition in the opening guitar lines of Sleepy Little Town. The bass line alternates with a bit of discord on the second chord. That’s intentional…it reminds me of the ding dong of a church bell, without being too obvious.

This is a love song for my hometown, Pleasant Hills, PA. It is also a love song for the town of my children’s memory, Farmington UT. Wherever your home is, you are blessed, as I am, to have any sweet memories of Christmas past. Of course we love the people who mean so much to us. But I thank the Lord, also, for the places that wrap themselves around us as we journey back Home.

Sleepy Little Town

Sleepy little town,
Strung with Christmas lights
Wrap your love around the one
Who’s missing you tonight
There’s and empty chair
At your table now
If God would grant me just one prayer
I would be there somehow

But miles and miles of winter white
Keep me from my home tonight
And this Christmas we’re apart
But visions of you warm my heart

At the Five and Dime
That I know so well
Twinkle lights keep rhythm with
The Salvation Army bell

And outside City Hall
Past the manger bed
Families gather, children wait
For the man in Christmas red

And all these miles of winter white
Keep me from your arms tonight
Though this Christmas we’re apart
I hold you here within my heart

The high school choir will sing again
O Little Town of Bethlehem
I didn’t know when I sang there too
I’d be missing you like I’m missing you

Sleepy Little Town…Sleepy Little Town…
My Sleepy Little Town

By the way, the photographs in the insert to the album Sleepy Little Town are of my family.  The cover photo was taken before I was born, in the room above the drug store in Shelley, Idaho.  My two oldest sisters, Sherry and Sue, are in that photo. Inside are pictures of myself and all my siblings and my children, as well as a photo of my mother-in-law, Helen. My friend Doug Wintch once told me a music album is like a photo album of your life at the moment. I was concerned that by the time a recording was done I could to the songs better.  He told me to let go and leave it be...it represents a portion of my life, just like a photo album would. Wise man, that Doug, and a darn good songwriter.

IS IT SNOWING TONIGHT

There is a picture, in our drawer full of pictures, which always tugs at my heart when I see it. John and Sarah are 2 and 3 years old. They stand leaning against the legs of their grandparents, Don and Helen Connors. The grandparents’ arms fall down over their little loves’ hearts. They are standing near the jet way in the Pittsburgh Airport. Minutes later we boarded the plane and took their only grandchildren 2,000 miles away; permanently.

I have ached ever since, for them…for us…for these kids. It took a lot of planning and a lot of money and a chunk of time to get to see each other from that point forward. The casual comfort of repetition was taken from Don and Helen when we decided to move to Utah from Pittsburgh. We were NEVER going to live in Utah. We were NEVER going to be numbered among typical “Utah Mormons”. Eeek, indeed! And then the phone call came offering Dave a job with a Wall Street law firm, only he could have that practice and not have to work in Manhattan. It was what he had dreamed of professionally. When LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & McRae decided to open a Salt Lake City office, they searched BYU and U of U law school archives for graduates with particular training. Ideally they wanted someone with Ivy League training (Dave graduated from Yale); major law firm training (he had practiced with renowned and well respected Pittsburgh firms); and the cherry of a federal clerkship (2nd District Court of Appeals…based in NYC)…they found Dave’s name. I still remember the phone call, listening as I stood at the kitchen counter to one side of a strange conversation.

“What was THAT?” I asked.

“A New York firm, opening an office in Salt Lake City. They want to talk to me”

“I didn’t hear you say yes, did I?”

M-Hm. Yes. I had heard him say yes. “I just think we should consider all options,” he said, all full of that blasted Dave Connors logic.

We had already decided to move to Washington DC, McLean VA to be exact. We had just one week earlier made a trip and found the house we wanted. Kirkpatrick Lockhart, the firm with which he practiced in Pgh, was opening a branch there.

Best laid plans.

So we ended up coming to Utah, which in retrospect was a gift of a decision, but in the process we ripped the only grandchildren of Dave’s parents away from them. And to make matters worse, it seemed to slap the face of family religious tradition for them. They never, ever said as much, but I felt it through my own imagination. Dave came from centuries of faithful Catholics. He attended Catholic school until high school. He was an altar boy. His dad was president of the local diocesan school board. He was a good boy, as he is a good man, and there was a time when he actually considered entering the priesthood of the Catholic Church. So imagine how it must have felt for his parents to hear him say, “I’d like to join the Mormon Church.” It had that strange cult-like reputation there and then, as I suppose it still has. So I imagine it wasn’t thrilling for them, in their truest deepest place, when he returned from his mission, (he had graduated from Yale the week before he left for Italy) and went to BYU law school. Less thrilling, I suspect, when he called and said he was going to marry an 18 year old freshman Mormon girl, in the temple. The only positive thing must have been that I was from Pittsburgh, too.

Moving to “Zion” felt like joining the cult. I love it now, but I did not then.

IS IT SNOWING TONIGHT was written on an August night, truth be known. I was watching our kids play in the yard and I got to pondering Dave’s family and how sad I felt that they were missing seeing their grandkids grow up. I thought, too, how sad that these kids would not know their grandparents in the day-to-day comfortable sort of way I would have preferred. In the pondering, images of Dave’s home came to mind. He grew up in a rock house that rests on the border of South Park, a beautiful state park in south-west PA. Deep, wooded acreage was Dave’s playground. Deer visited regularly. Of course Helen did not help matters because she set food out for them. “They look so pretty in the snow, and so hungry.” On a snowy winter morning Helen would open the window in the dining room and toss birdseed out onto the roof of the porch by the pool in their back yard. Stunningly beautiful cardinals came to feast, then nestled in the trees for a while. Their plump deep red breasts looked like Christmas berries against the white of the snow and the green of the pine trees. In recalling these images, this Christmas tune came bubbling up. I wanted our kids to think about their grandparents who lived all those miles away. I wanted them to see the images of their world. We never visited in the winter, what with school and all, so they did not know the beauty of that season there. I tried to paint it for them, and in the effort I became homesick.

Home in the hills of West Pennsylvania…wishing it wasn’t so far.

Once, years after this song was written, I was singing it at a gig with Merlyn. We performed almost nightly at Christmastime. Sometimes twice in one night. We were singing this song and I started to giggle. I caught myself before I ruined the song, but Merlyn asked afterward what that was about. I told her I had never considered the fact that Dave’s dad was named Don.

“And…?” Merlyn asked.

“Well, it sort of changes the meaning of the line: Do the redbirds still come for the food you toss from the window at dawn (Don).” I pictured Helen opening the window and tossing out a plate of eggs and bacon, with a side of buttered toast.

When I am really missing them, the missing being more permanent these days, that image helps pull me out of the sorrow which overwhelms the performance.

Some other family owns that beautiful back yard now, and the rock house in front of it. The setting is left in the memory box. Mom and Dad are both gone.

I wonder if it snows in Heaven?

IS IT SNOWING TONIGHT

Is it snowing tonight where you are
Are the evergreens covered in white
Are you warming your love by the fire
As you gather together tonight
There are presents surrounding my tree
And I’m dreaming and longing to be
Home in the hills of west Pennsylvania
Wishing it wasn’t so far
Is it snowing tonight where you are?

Is it peaceful and still in the wood
Has the doe come to feed with her fawn
Do the redbirds still come for the food
You toss from the window at dawn
I am here in my miles away world
Telling my boy and my girls
Of home in the hills of west Pennsylvania
Under the same sacred star
Is it snowing tonight where you are?

Ah, home in the hills of west Pennsylvania
Wishing you weren’t so far
Is it snowing tonight where you are?