Amy Winehouse

Since singer Amy Winehouse’s shocking but not surprising death last week, I have been puzzling over why I mourn her so much.

Given only surface considerations, I should not have been so affected by her. We had little in common, other than gender, etymologically close first names, western culture, and, I learned today, Jewish roots. I rarely listen to music recreationally. I am a middle-aged mother and professor. I no longer drink alcohol; have never tried an illegal drug. My talents and my arts overlap only a bit, and none of them will bring me the kind of acclaim that was rightly hers. She was none of those things.

But she caught my attention. About two years ago, I asked my husband about who this Amy Winehouse was, the one who I kept reading about in the newspaper (see how old fashioned and square I am? The actual newspaper!). He explained about her music. I remember vividly that he said that people were wondering “how all that soul got into a tiny little white girl.”

So, off I ran to Youtube to watch her music. Rehab caught me completely. I watched it over and over again, mystified by its appeal but stuck on it nonetheless. Content-wise, there is nothing in it that I can relate to. But musically, I had to keep coming back to it. I even bought Back to Black, which is remarkable given that in any given year I buy only one or two CDs (yes, CDs; forget about downloading music onto some portable machine).

Here is where I have come to this week: I can’t get over Rehab because it is great art. My experience of listening brings to mind the chills I got the first time I heard Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe or how I can hear Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah over and over again without getting tired of it (and, in fact, once again picking through its meaning and arguing in my head with the minister who got it mostly wrong). Or why Mozart’s Dies Irae is my all-time favorite piece of music. Great music, I think today, transcends the meaning of its words and makes the audience pay attention whatever the mismatch of values between musician and auditor.

Thank you, Amy Winehouse, for giving me the opportunity to understand this. I regret the rest of the music you will never create.

Living the Dream

Every summer, my husband and I go to see the financial planner. I hate it. For me, it's like going to the dentist. Except for in my life as a busy mother, going to the dentist is a nice little vacation--I get to sit still with my eyes closed and no expectations that I say or produce anything for half an hour.

One thing I particularly loathe at the financial planner's office is the "Dream Wall," a cloud painted wall decorated with clients' dreams for themselves and their futures. It's the kind of thing that you would expect...early retirement, open a bed and breakfast, sail around the world. I've always reacted viscerally against the Dream Wall, and every year the financial planner asks me again if I'd like to share my dream on the wall.

As I anticipate with dread our next visit to the planner this summer, I am starting to discern why I hate the Dream Wall so much. I'm not opposed to dreams. But, there are two problems.

1. I am already living my dream life. I really can't ask for more than I already have: meaningful work, a solid, fascinating, and basically happy family, a good church community, and, most days, the chance to swim.

2. Money, which is what the financial planner is positioned to work on, can't buy me what I dream of. I want more rest, more time each day to read novels, more time to do the work of my soul, more time to get exercise, more time to enjoy my children.

My problem is that I can't always remember that I am already living out my dreams. I get so wound up in the daily problems that I forget--as a friend was kind enough to remind me this morning--that my joy resides in my daily activities, the intriguing and confused comment of my child, her excitement about a new idea, the chance to go to sleep in a house that has so much space I can't possibly keep up with the labor of tidying, much less cleaning it.


The financial planner would probably say that the purpose of the Dream Wall is to help me realize how much of my dream I already have, and how to put aside money for the other things I might want in the future, like retirement, or a college education for my kids. But those things aren't dreams for me. They are icing. My dream is the day, not the night.