Willie’s 90th

Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration concert is on TV tonight. I’ll be watching. I wouldn’t miss it.

Willie Nelson’s voice is connected to a very rough time in my life. A lot of heartache. A divorce. A boyfriend with a very serious mental illness. A man who left me for Miss Utah. Everything Willie Nelson sang about -screwing up, guessing wrong, and regretting everything – rang true for me. So, I hear Willie Nelson sing and I get nostalgic.

But how is one nostalgic for misery? Like, gee, I really miss the nights I sat in the bathtub for hours, turning on the hot water with my foot, and drinking white wine from a bottle on the bathroom floor. Or, wow, remember the good times sitting up all night looking out the living room window worried about a boyfriend having lost it and coming to find it by storming up my front steps? Or hearing about Miss Utah on the phone at work and putting my head down on my desk, completely covering the yellow legal pad full of census numbers about poverty in Milwaukee?

The man who left me for Miss Utah came to visit many years later, maybe twenty or thirty, and he told me that he followed Willie Nelson around the country, well, not all the time, but he went to his concerts in many different cities and thought of me each time. I nodded but I couldn’t make sense of this. I did know that, for many reasons, Miss Utah had done me a favor. A year or so ago, I searched for the man who left me for Miss Utah and discovered that he’d died just a year prior. I printed out his obituary and put it on a shelf in my office. He had the same look I imagined him having when he told me about Miss Utah. She was his widow.

Several years ago my daughter and I went to a Willie Nelson concert. He was probably 70-something at the time. His habit is to morph every song into the next as if his repertoire is one long letter to the world. It was lovely and redeeming sitting there listening, as if what had begun as a requiem was now an anthem. I guess that’s the nostalgia. Being whole and happy now and knowing that once I was neither of those things.

Anyway, I lived through it all. It’s like Willie Nelson when he tells the story of one of his wives, early on in his life, rolling him up in a bedsheet and that representing a very low and humiliating time of his life. He lived through it. He lived to tell the tale. 90 years old, he is. That’s my plan, too, 90 years old. Plus 10. My goal is to live to 100 and to listen to Willie Nelson in my head while someone is feeding me oatmeal with a small spoon. To listen to Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain and know that was me once but isn’t anymore.