by Shawn Colvin
Dedication
To Caledonia, Mimi, and Papa
Epigraph
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
—Anne Sexton
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1 Light the Sky
2 A Vengeance
3 She Opened a Book
4 Get the Kids
5 Small Repairs
6 Walking on a Wire
7 Out There on Her Own
8 Dry Is Good
9 Wind Is Better
10 Go On and Do It
11 A Mission
12 She’s All Right
13 Days Go By
14 You Always Knew It
15 Sunny Came Home
16 Hold on Tight
17 A List of Names
18 Bring a Sweater
19 I’m Hypnotized
20 Out of My Mind
21 Her Favorite Room
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
Permissions
About the Publisher
Prologue
Who doesn’t have a bit of pyromania in them? There’s something thrilling about making fire—it’s primal, right? As a kid in rural South Dakota, I remember wandering one day out onto a vast, grassy field wielding a pack of matches from my father’s pipe drawer, with the express purpose of burning something. It seemed so inviting to light a fire or two. Almost as good as burning up an ant by letting the sun shine onto it through a magnifying glass. I made small piles of grass, set them ablaze, and stomped them out. Eventually, I couldn’t resist making multiple piles and my tiny fires, with the help of some wind, suddenly turned into one big one. I stomped for all I was worth, but it was no use, I had me a fire, and I went running to the house to tell my father, swearing with big wide eyes that I’d just found it, I didn’t know how it happened. He didn’t believe me, of course, but as parents will do at times when they know you’ve just gone through a rite of passage, like saying the dog ate your homework, my dad let it go and extinguished the fire.
Having learned nothing from this experience, I went on as an adult to continue setting fires. It’s true. Twice I’ve burned up memorabilia from relationships with fools who have broken up with me. One of them, a long-distance affair, quit me over the phone with the line, “I’ve got cats to feed.” In all fairness, this very short-lived “relationship” was mostly an illusion on my part, born of the simple desire to have a boyfriend. I’d met him at a gig somewhere and was smitten immediately. Adorable in a totally nerdy way, he played this card to great effect by wearing glasses he didn’t need, and I’m a sucker for that professorial–cum–Dennis the Menace look. He’d seen a video of mine and thought I had nice legs. Game on! He didn’t know what he wanted, but I did. Okay, so he still lived with his parents. And he was younger than me. I wanted a boyfriend. My philosophy tends to be that in the absence of a genuine relationship I am only too happy to invent one. Didn’t the simple desire to be with someone, in addition to mutual attraction, make it a fait accompli? Uh, no. There were literal and figurative miles between us, and try as I might, I could not make the thing fly.
In short order I wore him out by demanding attention he couldn’t provide, and he needed to feed the cats, of course. I decided to lay it all to rest by incinerating whatever I could find that reminded me of him. There was virtually nothing to burn—a few photographs and a cashed check I’d written him so he could come see me once. I set out a small cookie tin on the living-room rug of my apartment and lit my funeral pyre.
Just like when I was a kid, there was trouble. My carpet was made of synthetic fibers, and when the heat hit it, it started to melt. The rug was new, a remnant I got cheap at ABC Carpet and Home (the holy grail of decor), the color of the Caribbean, which I felt was a strong choice, especially with my pumpkin velveteen sofa. Very Renaissance. In horror, I caught the unmistakable odor of burning plastic, and with some oven mitts picked up the blazing tin as my rug seared and bubbled. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but no.
The next time I set fire to keepsakes from a lover was fairly recently. He drifted from place to place, which was romantic but hardly practical. On top of this there were children (both of us), an ex-wife (his), two ex-husbands (delicate cough), and midlife crises and stalled careers (across the board). But in my never-say-die fashion, I hung on. By God, I wanted a boyfriend. I was entitled to a boyfriend. It’s just as well if they live far away, because I can’t live with anyone. Another subject altogether. Anyhow, two years down that ever-challenging long-distance road—and let’s not forget I tour half the year as well—it was all over.
This having been a longer affair than that other one, I had plenty of things to burn up. Cards, letters, photos, locks of hair (not paper and stinky when burned, FYI). The jewelry I kept. Fortunate enough to have a fireplace this time, I was all set as far as the carpet problem went. The only remedy for my anguish was to torch the offending items. I tossed them into the fireplace, lit a match, and let the healing begin. Of course the flue was shut. Of course I couldn’t open it, since I depend on boyfriends for things like that. The house started to fill up with smoke. It happened to be the morning of my daughter’s eighth birthday, and we were going to have a party, so I frantically threw open all the windows and went running around trying to find fans. It was July, and later, at the party, no one could understand why the house smelled like Christmas.
All my fires backfired. But Sunny’s didn’t. Sunny is the arsonist in what is probably my best-known song, “Sunny Came Home,” and I’ve been asked more than a few times what was she building in her kitchen with her tools, what did she set fire to, and why? First of all, Sunny is me. Everything I write is through me, through my perspective. That realization is what helped me write songs in the first place. There’s nothing under the sun that hasn’t been said before, but no one can say what I have to say except me. Both Sunny and I went through a lot, I suppose, and came out the other side (at least I like to think Sunny was acquitted). She may have gone overboard a tad, but we are both of us survivors. I think it’s safe to say she was pretty pissed and burned the house down. Why? We may never know. But I may be able to offer some clues.
They gave me Dilaudid. They had to give me something. I was on a gurney in South Austin Hospital with a kidney stone, a broken heart, and an unrelenting, treatment-resistant depression. At least they had something for the kidney stone. Dilaudid, or pharmaceutical heroin. It was good stuff. One shot of it wasn’t enough to kill the pain, so they gave me two. Being a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, I now understood with new clarity why it had been such a blessing that I’d never tried heroin. Not only did the Dilaudid take away the physical pain, it made me euphoric. What depression? What heartbreak? I was high, of course.
Still, I held on to the possibility that maybe the Dilaudid would allow me to turn a corner and launch me into a state of emotional well-being as if by magic. Like the old theory that hypothesized if one got hit on the head and developed amnesia, then perhaps another blow to the head would reverse it. Like the way we attempt to fix the television’s lousy reception by banging our fist on top of it.
Maybe this last kick while I was down, after being dumped, after sinking into the black hole, maybe this would be my salvation. Maybe the agony from the kidney stone and the sweet relief of the Dilaudid were a metaphor for the absolute bottom of the pit I’d been in, maybe the Dilaudid would miraculously heal my heart, fill it up and over, nudge the neurotransmitters in my brain back into rhythm, jolt them out of their amnesia,
make them remember how to work again, so that when I woke up the next day, my very being would be rebooted. Restored to its original settings.
1
Light the Sky
South Dakota, 1960
It’s like ten miles of two-lane
On a South Dakota wheat plain.
I was born on the prairie, in southeastern South Dakota. If you want wide-open spaces to throw your imagination at, the Great Plains are the place to be. When I was ten, my father decided we should live out in the country (as opposed to Vermillion, our bustling town of six thousand back then), and I used to walk the fields out there for literally hours in my Beatle boots and my mother’s black leather jacket and pretend I was a Beatle. I guess I see my life as pretty much starting when I heard the Beatles. It was in this house I listened to “Not a Second Time” over and over on my record player until my father begged me to stop. Even then I was sophisticated enough to go for the deep tracks.
I had a very, very best friend named Ruth Noble, and we were misfits together, considering ourselves a little superior in our quirkiness. We didn’t care about dolls or horses; we liked puzzles and junior church choir and Mr. Wizard. Her older sister, Jane, was the keeper of the Beatles albums, so Ruth’s house was better, but you couldn’t just grab a record and play it. Permission was required, and often denied, and I always had one eye out for Jane and the possibility of listening to the Beatles. I just lived for it.
It wasn’t as though we were immune to the pop-idol syndrome—those moptops were awfully cute. But it was the new sound that got to me. Up till then I had heard only church music and my parents’ record collection, which consisted of things like the Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, and sound tracks for Porgy and Bess and The Sound of Music. There was a novelty song called “Wolverton Mountain,” which was just insipid and silly, and my folks played it to death. If we could get Top 40 radio, I didn’t know about it. However, we did have television—and we watched Ed Sullivan. Enough said.
So, as a Beatle, I would tromp around the fields as if I owned them, and maybe I did. The plains coaxed my dreams and fantasies with their bleak nothingness. The unending earth and sky were like a blank canvas, inviting any idea to be outlined and filled in. And the storms of the Midwest are like nothing else. The Wizard of Oz had it right. You can watch them come in from far away, even see the clear definition of receding blue pushed up against gigantic blackness, and wait for the first wind as the dark clouds pass over, bringing wild rain and thunder and lightning. These storms frightened me as a kid, and I’ll never forget my father, loving them as he did, taking us out on the porch during those fantastic midwestern tempests and telling us about the different storms he remembered, from his youth right up through being in the army. And so I began to love storms, too.
Vermillion was not a town of diversity. I saw only white people for eleven years. We went to school, went to church, rode bikes, and pretended. My daughter goes to theater troupe and therapy (a chip off the old block), while her friends go to soccer practice, voice lessons, and the Shambala Center, and summers consist of all manner of camps. There was none of that. We were not overscheduled, because there was nothing to do. We were not overprotected, because there was nothing to fear. We walked and biked to and from school and the pool and one another’s houses and played tag until we were called in after dark. During the winter we stayed in or sledded down some pitiful hill or skated on the river. Our Main Street sported Jacobsen’s Bakery, the Tip Top Café, and the Piggly Wiggly. To get to our house, you turned right at the bowling alley.
The two-hour drive to my grandmother’s in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, which had one paved road, was the general extent of my travels for a very long time. On the way there, you could pass through Mitchell, home of the Corn Palace, also referred to as the world’s largest bird feeder. This was as far out of Vermillion as I got. I honestly cannot remember the first time I saw an ocean, and the very first plane ride I took was when I was twelve and we were moving to London, Ontario, Canada.
A very big day could involve driving the thirty minutes to Sioux City, Iowa, where we might buy fabric or see a movie and eat at Bishop’s Cafeteria, where I would be overwhelmed by the array of choices and breathless knowing that at the end of the line I would be allowed to get chocolate cream pie with shavings of chocolate on top, a rare delicacy.
We couldn’t afford vacations, and my father adored the outdoors, so he purchased a pop-up camper trailer, which we would haul to various destinations and camp. One of our favorite places was Lewis and Clark Lake near Yankton, South Dakota, about half an hour from Vermillion. We’d swim all day and play cards by lantern at night, falling into exhausted, dreamless sleep in our beds, all of us cozily together in our little camper, waking up to crisp mornings of campfire bacon and eggs and toast.
Before my younger brother and sister were born, it was easier to take car trips. The four of us—my brother, myself, and Mom and Dad—made a number of journeys in our bronze Rambler. Of course, one of them had to have been to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore and the Badlands of South Dakota in the western part of our state, a world away from flat Vermillion in the southeast corner. These car trips could’ve been long, arduous, and thankless exercises in getting from one place to the next, but my parents made them into fun and games for Geoff and me, and I remember them dearly.
When we were quite young, we were introduced to the car game called Zitz. I think my mother or father must’ve made it up—“Zitz” was code for “cows,” and when one spotted cattle, one was to loudly cry, “Zitz!” It was a pretty ingenious game for little kids, since there was no shortage of cows in South Dakota. Eventually we graduated to the more sophisticated Stinky Pinky, a game that required actual thought. To play Stinky Pinky, you thought of an adjective and a noun that rhymed, hence the name “Stinky Pinky,” and described the thing without rhyming in order to challenge the other players to guess your Stinky Pinky. You started out simply; a “farm animal’s sea vessel” would naturally be a “goat boat,” and so forth, although single-syllable answers were called “Stink Pinks,” two-syllables “Stinky Pinkys,” and of course three-syllable rhymes were “Stinkity Pinkitys.” One of my father’s favorite words to rhyme was “gherkin,” as in “pickle.” Dad thought of a loitering pickle—a “lurkin’ gherkin”—a saucy pickle—a “smirkin’ gherkin”—a busy pickle—a “workin’ gherkin.”
Sign Alphabet Race was my mother’s game contribution. You had to go through the alphabet, finding each letter from a word on a road sign that began with that letter, so for A you might see a sign that read “Alfalfa Farm Ahead,” and there was your A. License plates didn’t count. Q’s and X’s and Z’s created a frenzy, and we learned to look for “Quality,” “X-tra,” and “Zoo” whenever possible. The first person to finish the alphabet was the winner.
Dad mostly drove, Mom sat shotgun, and Geoff and I took the backseat, no seat belts, and I sometimes slouched down and shoved my knees up against the back of the driver’s seat and drifted off into daydreams about the Beatles, and further down into motion induced sleep, waking up that much nearer to our destination. My parents called it “racking off the miles.”
When we weren’t playing games or sleeping on these car trips, we were singing. We had a perfect little quartet. You’ve perhaps heard the song “Daddy Sang Bass (Mama sang tenor, / Me and little brother would join right in there …),” and really, that was us. For some reason, no matter what time of year it was (and it was nearly always summer, which was vacation time), we sang Christmas carols. All of us having sung in the church choir, I suppose this was the material we were not only the most familiar with but had the most sophistication at as a group. The Gloria refrain of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” for example, included not only harmony but counterpoint melody, which I proudly provided. Mother sang lead, Geoff alto, Daddy did sing bass, and I sang a third above Mother.
Even though both my parents were big music lovers and had talent, neither of them purs
ued it professionally. We came from a place where that just wasn’t done. We were not Hollywood or New York; we were practical midwesterners. But I take pride in the fact that both my parents challenged themselves academically after we children were born, Mother especially. At forty-four she got a master’s degree in education. And then she went to law school a year later. With her law degree, she worked as the assistant state’s attorney in the D.A.’s office before starting her own successful family-law practice. Mom was a great defense attorney and an even finer prosecutor, and for this my father nicknamed her “Killer Barb.”
Mother graduating from law school, 1973
My mother made our clothes because her mother made her clothes, and she loved sewing, actually, and the economy in it. She made us matching mother-daughter dresses. One that I remember was a coral cotton print with a repeating Parisian cityscape and a tight bodice with a full circle skirt, fifties style. Another was made of navy and white dotted swiss. My mother made beautiful clothes, and it’s her fault that I have a clothes fetish. When I finally needed a training bra, we were forced to shop. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was rack after rack of ready-made clothes—and I couldn’t have any of them. That night I dreamed I got up one morning and all the exquisite things I had seen at the store were draped over my bed, on chairs, from hangers, a cornucopia of new-with-tags, honest-to-goodness store-bought clothes. This is probably the earliest sign of the retail maniac I would someday become.
Mother grew up in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, born to Esther and Homer Croson. She was one of eight children in a three-room house in a one-horse town. Her father was a mailman. Her mother raised the children and baked the bread and sewed the clothing, and these things anchored my mother, because at twenty years old she gave up college and her dreams of singing and writing poetry to marry my father and have children. Like her mother, she baked bread and sewed our clothes and cleaned house and took us to church on Sundays.