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.