Thank You, Joni Mitchell

I’m in an airplane having just made the bumpy ascent through the turbulent clouds and Jimmy leans over to peer out the window. “I love this,” he says, pointing to the view. And I remember.

I am nine years old, on my first plane ride to California with my parents. I’ve rifled through the barf bag and read the Duty-Free catalog, eaten all my snacks and introduced myself to the other passengers. Finally, I settle into my seat and take in the cloudscape, the divots and the rising slopes. I want to know what they feel like. I want to sit on them and run and slide. I can barely get over the fact that these are the same clouds I can see from the ground and for the first time, I’m seeing them from above.

The wonder of it.

Jimmy has never lost that. In his excitement, I let myself feel and wonder. “How can they look so soft, yet cause the airplane to shake so violently?” I ask him. Nearly forty years later, I feel a longing to touch them, just to know what they feel like.

Last night, Joni Mitchell performed “Both Sides Now,” her first Grammy performance ever at 80 years young. My friend Rachel introduced me to Joni in our late teens/early twenties, when we were self-indulgent lovesick dreamers. We listened to “A Case of You” over and over, until her brothers grew very tired of us. That song still crawls up into my soul, telling me things about me I never knew, and about love and hurt and how lovers bleed into each other. Joni gave me a window to see art colored by love’s experience and how heartbreak gives us a glimpse of the hidden soul beneath. That’s where the beauty comes from. I remember that time she taught me “love is touching souls.” She sings, “surely you touched mine ‘cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time.”

What a lesson. Of course, our young ears couldn’t fully process what it all meant, but we knew it was important. I used to tell Rachel, “This is our time. We’re going to look back on right now when we’re old and married and have kids.” Those things seemed so out of reach for the girls were then but look at us now. We both married. She’s a mother of three children. I’m the one of us to divorce.

I can say this blog is me, looking at marriage from both sides, now. The ascent, the turbulence and the wreckage. And I still ask how can something that looks so soft can shake you so hard. Joni taught us to look for the beauty in the wreckage, to try to understand what happens to us from all sides. But I think the best thing she ever did was to give us permission to admit that, even by the time we reach 80, we “really don’t know life at all.”