Monday, December 24, 2007

Cause you take me to the places that alone I'd never find

Quick! Name that tune.

If you said, "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon, you're right!

Last night I was angry. I had gotten stuck with a little job I didn't really want, & having been upset with Randy the night before for a similar situation, I blamed him once again. I don't want to get into the specifics of the argument, though I don't mind saying that it was one of those typical old married people arguments where one partner feels the other has taken advantage of them, but the fight's over & behind us now, so that's all I'll say about that.

After the argument was over & we'd made peace for the night (because that is very important for me), this song came into my mind while I was mentally reciting the Lord's Prayer.

This song came out just before this time of year in 1984, my senior year of high school. At first I felt like the song was a distraction, because it reminds me of a crush I had at the time, but I suspected that the song was there for a reason, so I let it continue to play in my head. To this day, when I hear the line about "the candle in the window on a cold dark winter night," in my mind's eye I see the single Christmas light in each window of the guy's home, overlooking the lake in my hometown.

The crush began - or at least became obvious to me - on Thanksgiving morning 1984, when I awoke from a very graphic dream about him. Before that, I barely even talked to him, though we had some mutual friends. The crush didn't last a terribly long time, but it changed me.

The guy was a lot like the man I ended up marrying. It's hard to explain, but I think I might not have given Randy a chance if I hadn't liked the other guy first. In my fiction, I also loosely based a boyfriend of one of my favorite characters on the guy & the feelings I had for him.

I thought maybe this song was a reminder to be thankful for those weird situations like a crush on someone I'd never thought about before, because you don't always know what blessings a strange dream might bring. But when, in my mind, I remembered the lyric I used as today's title, I knew why it was there. As aggravating as Randy can be, he takes me to places that alone I'd never find. And I want to do that for him. I want to do that for EVERYBODY who knows me.

Maybe not in the same way, though.

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