I was introduced to this song by my dear friend, Andie. It was written by one of her favourite songwriters, Hoagy Carmichael - who also wrote the gorgeous "Georgia on My Mind". I'd never heard it before and she had just introduced me to the amazing Nina Simone. She asked me if I'd heard it and when I said no, she leaned in and started speak-singing it to me with a cheeky grin on her face. When I found it a few years back on a big old cheap Nina Simone compilation I remembered Andie's grin and finally got to hear it in its completeness. Such a sad yet funny song.
So, I promised someone that I would write here almost every day this year. It is now the last day of January and I haven't written a thing (okay, now I have). It's not that nothing has been happening. It's just that so much has been happening and time has been spent elsewhere. Today I decided I should write. Something.
Today happens to be a decade to the date that I left Adelaide with the heaviest heart imaginable. Now, though, my heart couldn't be lighter. Well, I'm sure it could, but I'm now more of an optimistic pragmatist, if that's possible. I was such a downer back then. My poor parents. That awful, surly 17 year old in the back of the Magna with her Walkman blaring Sonic Youth's "Sentimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star" the WHOLE way from Adelaide to Darwin. Complete with the view that they had RUINED HER LIFE. I look back on the whole period as a comedy really. There is no other way.
I'm not the kind of person to believe that a New Year can herald the beginning of an era. There has to be a springboard, surely. Some kind of change, which dominos on to more change. I just don't know. What I do know is this last month, starting from the first day of January, has been entirely new to me. I think it's been building up for some time. There are things I've been letting go of. Things I've been coming to terms with. In really small insignificant everyday things. And in saying that it seems it is that very fact, that it has all been to do with small insignificant everyday things, that the rewards of it have surfaced over the last month. Those gentle changes, realisations, acceptances grew into, well, a far more relaxed and receptive Erin. There is so much that I have experienced in the last month that has challenged me in ways I'm not used to. Much is related to my immediate family members. Others are more personal. Things that I'm quite certain I would not have been equipped to deal with six months ago in the way I have now. I couldn't have asked for a better January.
