No Regrets Coyote
I'm sitting in my living room, sitting in the chair in the corner. It's late. The room is only lit by the little white lights on the little plastic Christmas tree perched on the end table next to me. I was exhausted earlier today, and I was sure that I was headed for an early bedtime, but once again here it is late at night and it's just me and the cat up in the dark living room.
I'm listening to Joni Mitchell's Hejira, reading her bio. She's one of those musicians that I've always felt that I should know better, but I never put in the effort. Hejira is the first album of hers that I've picked up, and maybe it's not the best introduction, but it's good. I'm enjoying it.
I guess I'm most familiar with "River", which you hear a lot this time of year. I first heard it performed at a holiday concert years ago. I didn't even know the song was called "Big Yellow Taxi"-- I assumed it was called "Paved Paradise" or something like that. I remember I first heard those lyrics as part of a spoken word show in college, and later heard the recording.
I remember running across this interview with Mitchell in the L.A. Times:
LAT: As well, you've had experience becoming a character outside yourself [Mitchell caused controversy when she appeared as an African American male on the cover of her 1977 album, "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter"].The folk scene you came out of had fun creating personas. You were born Roberta Joan Anderson, and someone named Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.
JM: Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.
-- It's a Joni Mitchell concert, sans Joni - Page 2 - latimes(http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/22/entertainment/la-et-jonimitchell-20100422/2)
JM: I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it's from outer space, but my health's the best it's been in a while, Two nights ago, I went out for the first time since Dec. 23: I don't look so bad under incandescent light, but I look scary under daylight. Garbo and Dietrich hid away just because people became so upset watching them age, but this is worse. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. But I have a tremendous will to live: I've been through another pandemic — I'm a polio survivor, so I know how conservative the medical body can be. In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as "delusion of parasites," and they send you to a psychiatrist. I'm actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that's owed to them.
-- It's a Joni Mitchell concert, sans Joni - Page 3 - latimes(http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/22/entertainment/la-et-jonimitchell-20100422/3)
Those two bits really stuck with me, and it's neat that I can track them down after all these years. These things have a way of coming back around. My wife just recently performed "River" at a holiday concert, and after the show we went out for a drink with her mother, who'd gone to see the show with me. Over a glass of wine clearly poured by a bartender who worked in a bar where no one ever asks for a glass of wine, my mother-in-law recounted how she had just been talking about "River" with a friend, but she had no idea my wife was going to perform it tonight. And during the pause we took to contemplate the coincidence, the song came on again as the background music for a commercial playing during the football game the bar had plastered all over its many TVs.
But I'm listening to Hejira specifically for "Coyote". Saturday morning I was messing around in the kitchen, making us some fried egg and bacon sandwiches while listening to The Last Waltz, when Joni came on singing this song, and I know I've heard it before, I've listened to this album so many times, but to be honest it is an album that I'll cherry-pick my way through, flipping around to my favorite tracks: "Caravan"; "It Makes No Difference"; "Stagefright". That morning, though, I was cooking, and the album was playing in the background while the bacon sizzled and I emptied from the dishwasher the dishes we'd loaded in the night before, and then Joni came on, singing this song, "Coyote".
I was thinking about something else. While my body was in the kitchen, while my hands were drying dishes and putting them back into the cupboard, my mind was elsewhere. I had been corresponding with an old friend, a dear friend, over email recently, and then she had abruptly cut it off. Over the past few weeks, we had gotten into a huge fight over my autism diagnosis. We had gotten past it, but then something popped up and she decided we shouldn't talk anymore. She had her reasons. I didn't agree with them, but at least she had some.
But I was sad about that loss as I was frying eggs and making toast. And while the fight over autism didn't really have any bearing on why she decided to stop emailing with me, I was still going over things in my head, trying to figure out what had just happened. I should have just told her I was a coyote, I thought. I'd have to explain what I meant a little differently, but I would have gotten there in the end. Coyote was a blanket I wrapped around myself years ago as a way to explain what I really couldn't explain, the difference in me that I didn't have the words for. And that's what I was excited to tell her about. With the diagnosis, I'd found the words.
And then Joni comes on singing this song, singing to "Coyote", and the song is rollicking and rolling, moving along, and it just clicked with me. I had never told my friend about Coyote. She and I had parted ways before I found that identity to wrap myself in. We stitch our personalities together from the materials we have at hand. If I had told her about Coyote, I don't think she would have batted an eye.
In the end we became strangers to each other once more. And now I'm sitting up at night, like I do, with the cat snoring in the couch. I'm in the comfy chair in the corner, the lights of the Christmas tree reflecting off the polished wood floor at my feet. A month ago or so, Joni turned 75. She's not doing so well right now, but they threw her a birthday party in L.A.:
A collective gasp morphed into rapturous applause as Mitchell stood center stage, propped up by a cane and a companion on either side. Right on cue, the crowd serenaded her — “happy birthday, dear Joni” — as a cake was brought over. Mitchell blew out the candles to more cheers.
-- Joni Mitchell gave fans the ultimate gift on her birthday. She graced them with her presence - Los Angeles Times(https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-2018-joni-mitchell-gave-fans-the-ultimate-1541663285-htmlstory.html)
And now her voice is in my earbuds, telling me:
We just come from such different sets of circumstance
It's really a beautiful album, worth a listen in its entirety, here in the comfy chair on a long dark night.