The Time John Denver Saved Me…

 I can’t recall the first time there was music around me because it seems to be a thing that was always present, like chickens in the yard, or the horse in the stable, or a crowd in the bed. Music was a norm growing up. Francis was six years older than me and had a guitar in his teens. He practiced and sang on the bed in his room and we could hear him from anywhere in the house and sometimes when we played outside. Larry sang himself to sleep every night as he rocked back and forth in the bed. Eddy had a record player and George Jones and Tammy Wynette were belting out tunes all the time.

When Mom’s cousins Thomas and Catherine Dalton came over to the house, Mom or Dad would wake Barry who was only six or seven at the time so he could sing for them. Mom was a singer too then, she had a lovely voice. Gatherings at the house always included song.

To my chagrin, I was not gifted with the vocal talent, and it has always been a regret that I wasn’t good at it. But it never stopped me from singing in a crowd nor when I was by myself. As young teenagers, my friends and I walked the harbour and sang to the top of our lungs on the nights when our voices carried on the calm molasses ocean.

There is something about God of all Power, Amazing Grace, and How Great Thou Art sang in church, especially at a funeral where tears can be traded for loud voices which makes things just seem to be better. It takes the sting out of sadness, at least for me. Like shouting out the words of a song is akin to hitting something bad with your voice and hugging something good.

Alas, there is no song that has ever in my lifetime brought me more peace than John Denver’s Some Days are Diamonds. I had this record on a 45 and if 45s could be tortured by being played, then this one spent time in a prison camp.

It was a year and two months after the fire that had devastated us and I was thrown into college simply because of my age. I was seventeen.

College was excruciating and I don’t think that is even a powerful enough word to describe what it did to me. Back in the 80s, the left side of the College of Trades and Technology was for girls – hairstylists, secretaries of all flavours (legal, medical, and administrative), nursing assistant, etc., and the right side was for boys – mechanics, bricklayers, and engineers – specifically civil, power, mechanical, and electronic engineers. 

I was going to be a civil engineer because that’s what Francis was when he died. That’s what Mom and Dad wanted me to be. I would never do anything to hurt them more than they already hurt so I went along. I figured surviving the fire the year before was as hard as things could get.

But I underestimated hard and it wasn’t finished with me. You see I turned right every morning at top of the marble steps at the college and into a male’s world. So every day I was pushed and jostled and stopped and tripped and laughed at on the first corridor. But then at the end of that long corridor, I had to go through another more civilized course, the bricklayers and mechanics being more primitive in this case. The engineers were more sophisticated in their habits and did things like covering me with pencil lead. Here I was maligned by teachers and students because I was a woman trying to get into a man’s world. I hope the men who turned left into the “woman’s world” were not treated as unfairly.

If they only knew I was a frightened little girl without a family or home and was still struggling to grieve for that which I couldn’t believe was lost. Every single day after school every bit of me was clenched around my bones. Like a piece of clothing that didn’t feed out through the ringers on the washer but wound round and round the rubber until the washer seized. That was me. Every single day.

How did John Denver ease that? God love him for putting out Some Days are Diamonds. At night when my roommates were in bed, I lay on the moss green nylon piled carpet, my forehead to the red record player beside me, my cheek itching and scratching on the floor, and I’d lift the needle to the beginning. Curled in a fetal position, the bass pulsing through the cool plastic of the player in through my head was lulling and cooing and comforting. I’d sing along in my mind as I silently wept away the overflow of hard into the tentacles of the carpet. Drained, rendered and the coil unwound, tension released to something bearable, I’d stumble into bed to be reset into a new day.

Some nights I played the song ten times or more and some nights it was only three or four depending on how I’d weathered the day. But there was no going to bed without John Denver sang to me. He spoke to me, to my soul. His voice was a badly needed hug.

Some days are diamonds, some days are stones, sometimes the hard times won’t leave me alone. John Denver knew me. He certainly did. He wrote those words for me and helped me get through that first year of college. Even when I hear that song today, I’m conditioned to cry. I wish everyone had a John Denver to make their hard times easier.