Desperado

 Week Thirteen: Desperado 


Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?

Come down from your fences, open the gate

It may be rainin’, but there’s a rainbow above you

You better let somebody love you (let somebody love you)

You better let somebody love you before it’s too late.


--The Eagles, Desperado, from the album Desperado


On a beautiful spring day while sitting at a picnic table across from my wife and oldest granddaughter, a local musical artist playing her guitar struck the familiar opening chords of The Eagles’ Desperado. “Oh brother, Granddad’s gonna start cryin’ now,'' my wife told our granddaughter. She wasn’t wrong. That song always prompts my emotional response...for darn good reason.


When I was twenty-one years old, we had been married already for three years; and it took about that long for our commitment to longevity to falter and very nearly fail. Nowadays I’m not entirely sure that things happened exactly like my memory suggests, but at some lonely point when confusion and anger and frustration and resentment and pessimism dominated me I heard the words of Desperado in a way that I had not listened before.


I had convinced myself that I wasn’t loved. And slowly as we tumbled towards divorce, I became convinced that I wasn’t loved because I couldn’t be loved. It’s strange to me that simultaneously I had imagined myself the cause and the victim of its effects. I was doing it to myself. 


I think I can remember the moment I heard...heard and took to heart...the song’s simple advice (you better let somebody love you). To repair the damage between us I first had to allow it, as The Eagles sang, “before (it was) too late”. My parents had taken a group of family members to a seafood restaurant outside of Ocean City, Maryland. The song was playing as background music while I spoke to my mother about my situation. I remember talking about living my life away from my infant daughter, about graduating from college, and about wanting to live in Europe as well as other shattered plans. 


It might be rainin’ but there’s a rainbow above you…


Like an epiphany, I realized at once that as the owner of the problem I also owned the solution. Forty-two years later there I sat next to that same daughter and across from my wife and our precious granddaughter hearing The Eagles remind me of the advice that helped save my life.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVSBqCuco1s&list=PL3AE29A019F22686E

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