deeper water

A morning at home, cooking, ironing, vacuuming, music all through the house.

National treasure Paul Kelly sings Deeper water and a tear leaks down my right cheek. Gets me every time, hundreds of times, the bastard. A psychologist might say that the song resonates with me. Resonates be fucked: it hits me smack in my core.  

It’s the simple story of a boy becoming a man and a father. The mother dies, and finally

On a distant beach lonely and wild
At a later time see a man and a child
And the man takes the child up into his arms
Takes her over the breakers
To where the water is calm
Deeper water, deeper water,
Deeper water, calling them on

Every Kelly song has a back story. I’ve no clue what’s behind this one. Neither is it my story: I’ve not lost a wife, been groped by a knowing young woman in the back of a car. But I am that father alone on the that beach for 18 years, taking two children over the breakers. Now the deeper water calls them on, my daughter to a second child, my son to life with Katie from Christchurch.

Today I rejoice, a religiously-fraught word for an atheist. I rejoice because it would seem that my good woman and I have come through. I can’t name what we’ve come through, or how we did it, but the anguish and the pain are over. The journey we thought is over is not.

Earlier doing the housework, it’s Roxette’s Listen to your heart. More resonating. My good woman and I built a love but that love fell apart. I wondered if it was all worthwhile, the precious moments all lost in the tide. I don't know where I went, and I don't know why, but I listened to my heart and couldn’t tell her goodbye.

We listened to a couples counsellor, to friends, no doubt, to ourselves telling of our confusion and our pain. In the end we seem to have listened to our hearts. Now deeper water is calling us on.

Rock on.