"Everything Happens to Me"

 

“I make a date for golf and you can bet your life it rains,

I try to play piano and the guy upstairs complains,

I guess I’ll go through life just catching colds and missing planes,

Everything happens to me…”.  

— Jazz standard song by Matt Dennis/ Tom Adair

 

This was one of my dear friend Fran’s favorite songs to sing when I accompanied her at the Jewish Home for the Aged in her late 80’s. With some slight adjustment of the original lyrics, it speaks to my day ahead. I did have a golf date with someone in my Men’s Group who I had never played with before (I play about once every 5 or 10 years) and we have to cancel because it’s raining. The original verse is “I try to give a party and the guy upstairs complains” and luckily, he doesn’t complain (to me) when I play piano, but we do have a deal that I can’t start until after 10 am and need to stop by 9:00 pm. Fresh from hearing Benny Greene at Yoshi’s Jazz Club last night, I’d love to play now at 8:00 am while I feel inspired, but no go. 

 

Knocking on all available wood, I don’t have a cold and haven’t had one for a long time, but with a plane flight booked for Monday and the delays the damn government shutdown has caused, it’s not clear whether I’ll leave as scheduled. (And written in 1941 when plane travel was not so common, the original verse is “missing trains.”)

 

The punchline of the song is about unrequited love, expressed with great wit in the line, “I’ve telegraphed and phoned, I sent an “Airmail Special” too, your answer was “Goodbye” and there was even postage due (Brilliant!), I fell in love just once and it had to be with you, everything happens to me.”

 

The point of art is that if you have to complain—and we all certainly have our reasons to do so— don’t just whine and moan. Make it artful and in so doing, transform yourself and the others who read or listen or view your art. Stop thinking you’re alone in your complaints or that the world has purposefully marshalled its forces to make you miserable. Enlarge the context of whatever is “happening to you” and understand that it’s how you view and what you do with what is happening. At the end, it all comes down to the great privilege of being alive to deal with it and that alone should put an end to all your complaints.

 

With that in mind, I have a leak in the kitchen from my neighbors above to contend with, a DMV registration renewal that didn’t allow me to pay it by phone or online for no apparent reason, a boxful of paper archives from the local Orff Chapter that they were going to toss that I volunteered to look through, complicated decisions about getting a new distributor for Pentatonic Press, booking flights to Asia in January, a messy desk and so on. Perfect rainy day activities, but none of it promising great joy in the doing. I’d rather be playing Fran’s favorite song. 

 

And after 10am, I believe I will.