Like candy to my soul
I was sitting at a stoplight when 'Crash' by the Dave Matthews Band came on the radio. I heard this song for the first time on a mix tape a high school friend made for me - she was a freshman in college, I was a high school senior, and we were hanging out over Christmas break. Also on this mix tape: the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Sinead O'Connor... it was a very influential mix tape.
The light changed and I realized I was hearing the lyrics for the first time. I know the words, like a lot of people Of My Era, but I hadn't really heard them and I found myself thinking my my Dave, you're making me blush.
And for some reason I flashed back to the moment a few years ago when I happened to be standing next to Dave Matthews at a church-sponsored toddler gym morning while he chatted with a friend of mine. Out of context (though what would the right context be? A CD cover?) he looked to be just another exhausted parent wrangling a two- or three-year-old, a person to be pitied just like the rest of us. But I heard the whisperings of the other moms, realized exactly who it was talking to my friend, and became tongue tied. You are famous, I thought. I am a stranger to you, but you are not a stranger to me.
Listening to this song was now intimate, almost uncomfortable. The Dave Matthews at the toddler gym had struck me as quiet and unassuming, and here he was crooning these innuendo-ish things over my car radio. And I wondered if he knew, if he ever thought about it. Does he walk into a grocery store and feel known? Does he visit a toddler play gym and understand the moms there will have heard his deepest thoughts? How does that make him feel? When he drives his car and hears his own music on the radio, does he look into the cars passing by and wonders if his own heartbreak touches them in some way? I thought these things as I drove, and in those moments I felt that Dave Matthews was a very brave soul.
But lately, and who knows why, I am consumed with wanting to be Dave Matthews. I am drawn to what he does, what all artists do. I feel called to it, like I am not living my whole life, I am not fully who God made me to be, unless I also reveal a truth in some highly vulnerable, highly public way. And then I think get over yourself, Maggie and go on with the rest of my day, making food and cleaning up spills and changing diapers and wishing for Phillip to get home.
I have a great fear that I will never get my truths out. I don't even know what these truths are. But I don't intend to sing or paint or dance them, they need to be written out and (this is important) read. I dread that part and crave it at the same time. This is just a vague floaty feeling inside me, the nebulous gas of whatever it is I should be doing with this life.
