"More Than This" Roxy Music

I bought a handful of music the other day from the Port Orchard Friends of the Library. One of the pieces I picked up was a nifty Starbuck compilation of New Wave music. Whenever I find the stuff I buy it. It's infectious stuff, New Wave. The boy and I listened to a couple of Rhino compilations in the car yesterday and now this morning, least ways, at the outset of the five disc cycle, a bit more of the same. Good get up off your butt Sunday morning music.

Funny to say that considering what I'm doing right now, but I digress.

What got me, M, was the first tune out of the box. Was I looking for it? Did I know it was coming? No in both cases. "More Than This". Roxy Music. I had to sit down. Not that we ever sat around and listened to Roxy Music, but that song was part of the summer of '05 saga. "Why is that?" you might ask, so let me tell you.

Remember that dusty J high track over by the library? We would walk that track after work on occassion, but one weekday afternoon you came down around lunch time and we sat on the edge of it under a shade tree, ate strawberries and talked about movies. You had sent me a couple different emails earlier on saying how much you and your sisters enjoyed Spanglish and how I ought to watch it. So I did. Somehow I came across a film Lost in Translation with Bill Murray, and then I told you how important it was for you to watch that film in light of what I had just seen in Spanglish. Hence our lunchtime get together.

Now, place two movies starring similarly weighted comedic actors side by side on my living room table and you might expect to find nice evening's worth date movies on your hands. But I think both Murray and Sandler are trying to expand their acting territory and it showed with those two flicks. Both took on the topic of marriages in trouble, added a small humoruous twist and then went for the high serious note. In both cases the boy doesn't get the girl, but that's where those movies part. I think we liked the movies that we picked out because they spoke to us, both emotional and morally.

Darn those pesky morals.

So Sandler watches the girl walk away because she doesn't want to get in the way of his troubled but salvageable for the sake of the kid marriage. Bill Murray starts to head off towards Tokyo International in a cab but jumps out last moment when he sees the girl that "saved" him wandering about on a Tokyo street (what are the odds?). They embrace and then whisper something to each other that the audience can't hear, then he jumps back into the cab and off he goes towards an unknown ending. Does he go back and leave the wife? Does he stay and "do the right thing" for the sake of the remodeling job?

So, I wonder, whenever I hear that song, about the ending of those movies. Did we take the moral high ground like that gal did in Spanglish, stay with the conventional system we were engaged in for the sake of the kids? Or did we, as late as last June, walk away with a mysterious message still fresh on our lips? Can you walk away with I love you written all over your face and still tell the world that your life is as squared away as you're pretending it to be? Can you turn and look at me one last time out of the corner of your car window and honestly tell me that you are embracing your marriage for all it is worth?

I have to wonder.

Bill Murray warbled that song for all he was worth in that movie. I hear that song these days and know that what we talked about under that shade tree that August afternoon was more than movie reviews. We were already talking, a year in advance, about the state of our particular nation, as if we already had a blueprint for the end of our saga written write there in the dusty red dirt of that track.

But did we? Have we seen the end of this saga? Not with I love you, too's on our lips. Not by a long shot.

Yeah, our life. Fade out. Here come the credits. But from what we've seen, what we have left to do, what we need to do, is much, much more than this.

Your WHMB