And honestly I might be stupid to think love is love … but I do

Mr. Harris – by Aimee Mann

Listen here. Have Kleenex ready.

So he’s retired
lives with his sister in a furnished flat
he’s got this suit that
he’ll never wear outside without a hat
his hair is white but he looks half his age
he looks like Jimmy Stewart in his younger days.

and honestly, I might be
stupid to think love is love but I do
and you’ve waited so long and
I’ve waited long enough for you.

My mother’s calling
from where she’s living up in Troy, Vermont
she tries to tell me
a father figure must be what I want
I’ve always thought age made no difference
am I the only one to whom that’s making sense?

And honestly, I might be
stupid to think love is love but I do
and you’ve waited so long and
I’ve waited long enough for you.

The day I met him he was raking leaves
in his tiny yard.

Of course I know that
we’ve only got ten years, or twenty, left
but to be honest
I’m happy with whatever time we get
depending on whichever book you read
sometimes it takes a lifetime to get what you need.

And honestly, I might be
stupid to think love is love but I do
and you’ve waited so long and
I’ve waited long enough for you.

honestly, I might be
stupid to think love is love but I do
and you’ve waited so long and
I’ve waited long enough for you

There’s a story behind this song. There’s always a story.

I first heard it in 2000. I love Aimee Mann but I was unfamiliar with this particular song. I went with my friend Jen to Don’t Tell Mama’s, a cabaret joint in New York, where a friend of Jen’s was performing. It was a week or so before this. That was coming, but it hadn’t arrived yet, and I was still in a state of suspended animation. Looking back, it is obvious now that the storm was coming, it was about to break, but when Jen and I went to Don’t Tell Mama’s, it was still just gathering. I was still holding out hope.

Jen’s friend had about an hour-long set. A lovely clear voice. We sat at a little table in the club, and had a wonderful time. It was an emotional night, I remember. Jen and I were roommates (she makes an appearance in the final moments of that link above), and we were both having an intense time of it. Jen is a singer, too, and she sat there beside me having all kinds of feelings about her own career, her own voice … she was so proud of her friend, but she couldn’t help but reflect on what she wanted, for her own life.

As for me, I was just enjoying the music, yo. I wasn’t sitting there, thinking of a gathering storm, or my hopes, or anything like that.

Until Jen’s friend sang “Mr. Harris”. A song I had never heard.

She said, “You know, I’ve always just loved this song, and wanted to sing it. Aimee Mann’s ‘Mr. Harris.'”

And from the first strains on the piano, I was GONE.

When she started singing, the club itself felt like it contracted. I suddenly was aware of the walls pressing in on me, and my own personal response to the song becoming far too large for that venue. The strain of holding back was so much that I actually felt a white-hot burning go all through me. The way I feel in kick-boxing class at about the 40-minute mark. Things actually burn. I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid to. If I took a deep breath, huge stormy sobs would come out, and I wouldn’t have anywhere to go. The moment was not supposed to be about ME … but i couldn’t help it. The song sliced through the artifice, ripped me open to myself, and the pain that I had been hovering over, fearfully, not going into it yet, was revealed to me. I flew in nervous circles above myself – looking down on the wreckage – that I couldn’t even feel yet. It was like I had been horribly injured, and had flown up out of my body. A bird killed in the street – and its mate flutters over the dead body, flapping its wings in a panic, swooping in, back up, in, back up … like: No, no, no, this cannot be …. I don’t know if I was aware of anything like, “This is what is ahead of you … this is the sadness you are now ignoring, that is going to come to the forefront in a week or so …” That’s not really how it was. It was more primal than that. The brain was not involved, except in the most detached way, disengaging from the white-hot burning, and looking down on it, observing. For the most part, I just listened to that song – and was filled with a hot searing liquid – and I couldn’t breathe – and the club was suddenly too small for my experience. I thought the song would never end.

“Mr. Harris”‘s tune was part of what sliced me open. It’s slow, it lulls you into a feeling of safety, it says, “It’s okay … it’s okay to have yearnings, to be sad, to have hope …”

But the lyrics. My God, the lyrics. At that time, in love as I was with an older man, I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t catch a full breath.

The sadness was so acute that calling it sadness isn’t really accurate. Maybe “grief” is more like it. Or loss. I felt like I was looking at an alternate life, the life where it did work out with this man … and that was the life I wanted to be in. Not the one I was actually in. And how could I ever ever come to peace with that?

I loved him so much.

Finally – finally – the song ended. Tears had been boiling down my face, rolling off and into my lap – but there was a strange stasis inside of me because I couldn’t openly sob (or, I felt I couldn’t). I was drowning. Taking teeny tentative breaths, drenched in tears. “Mr. Harris” was over, and she moved on with her set – and I recovered immediately. There was no hangover. It had been a spell. While the song was going on, I suddenly became my own bird-mate, flapping its wings frantically over the dead body of myself in the street … looking at the guts and crushed bones and thinking, panicked, “No, no, no, no, it can’t be as bad as all that, can it???” No … my sadness isn’t going to be THAT bad, will it? How will I bear it? Oh God, oh God, help me bear it …. And then the song finished, and abracadabra, I was back to myself, back to normal.

Jen and I walked to Port Authority after the show, to take the bus back to our apartment. We stood in line, talking about the night. She told me her experiences sitting there, her feelings about singing, how much she wanted to do it, and do it more (she has a beautiful voice), and how it had been a very intense night for her. I told her about what happened to me during “Mr. Harris”. How I was suddenly on fire from within, and thought I might LOSE it in that very small club. We got home, and Jen actually had the Aimee Mann CD on which “Mr. Harris” appears. She gave it to me. I made a copy immediately.

I listened to it constantly that next week. I didn’t have the same experience to it that I had had that first time at Don’t Tell Mama’s. I no longer felt myself full of molten lava with boiling tears coursing down my face. It still wove a spell, but it was more of a gentle melancholy spell. I suppose I was, somewhere, gearing up. For my trip to Chicago and all that that would entail. I’m no dummy. I knew somewhere what the outcome would be (although I could have had no clue that the trip would end in such a crazy way – see that link above) … and maybe I knew I needed my strength for it. I needed to go into it calm, and open … not grasping and already-sad … and so “Mr. Harris”, with its brief burning realization of the damage that had been done … followed by the gentle melancholy of the subsequent listenings … prepared the ground for me.

It helped me take that deep deep breath before the plunge … the one I had been afraid to take while sitting in Don’t Tell Mama’s.

For years afterwards, when I listened to the song, I thought of that night, yes, at Don’t Tell Mama’s. I also thought of that trip to Chicago the next week, and the complete chaos of my trip home, and the “total dark sublime”. I didn’t have to call the images up, or concentrate … It was a time-traveler. It took me back. Immediately. Some songs are like that.

I have found myself turning to “Mr. Harris” recently.

And it’s funny. Or not so funny. But it is seeming like a different song to me now. I am hearing it in a different way.

Of course I know that
we’ve only got ten years, or twenty, left
but to be honest
I’m happy with whatever time we get
depending on which book you read
sometimes it takes a lifetime to get what you need.

Those lyrics sounded very very different to me when I first heard the song.

Listen to “Mr. Harris” here.