"My One and Only Love"

I woke up thinking of love songs, probably because of hearing a few iconic ones on Sunday at the concert of classic rock-n-roll.

Somebody should write a book about the messages seeded in our impressionable young heads and hearts via music.

Any story set to music is more potent (more dangerous?) than the same story without voices, drums and saxophones--though I love hearing some of them as much as the next person.  They stir nostalgia for the fantasies of yore and make me sentimental about being young enough to believe them.

At the risk of sounding bitter, I'll just ask it: How many people get to have and be another human being's "one and only love" as the lyrics describe, always, til death do they part?  When I start counting these lucky souls, it doesn't take all my fingers.

Don't we all, deep down, want to be somebody's "one and only"?  Don't we want to be known and cherished, forever, no sharing, by one other person?

As we danced on school cafeteria and gymnasium floors, didn't we imagine that the lyrics were being channeled right into our hearts by the man "who held us tight"? Those beautiful, unforgettable, unshakable, awful songs!  They snuck in under the Radar of Real and landed like paint balls on our baby blank slate minds.

"For your love, I would do anything," for example.  Sung just right, that song still makes me teary, even though I can't say I've experienced this in the real world. A more accurate version might be: "For your love, I would do quite a few things for a week or a year or until I find someone else."

The Platters' "Only You" was my anthem of falling in love the first time:

Only you can make all this world seem right
Only you can make the darkness bright
Only you and you alone can thrill me like you do
And fill my heart with love for only you

At fourteen, what a seductive power trip it was to believe that "only me" (Who me?  Little ole Me?) could make somebody's darkness bright!  At fourteen, or forty, or sixty four, who doesn't wish to be somebody's giant light bulb and thrill-maker?

Hopes for romantic paradise are often dashed early in life when the truth of personal experience trumps nostalgia and sentimental tropes.  Mine were.  He might have been the giver of the Platters' records, he may have wished the words were true, but he wasn't channeling them as I thought.  That was the work of my imagination!

Maybe I'm just not the "one and only" type--though I suspect I was wired to be.