ON MY WAY BACK NOW

I clearly inherited my love of music from my mother. She had been an aspiring songwriter for much of her adult life, composing hundreds of jazz/pop-inspired songs on the piano while working six nights a week as a telephone operator for the local Bell Telephone branch.

Despite a couple of close calls with success, though, she never broke through into the big-time, which was a source of great disappointment for her. She didn’t have to say so; I could tell. Here is some of the sheet music that she scored from those years, which I found in some old boxes several years ago.

While talking to her one day when I was in my twenties, she happened to mention that she played the piano every day while she was pregnant with me all those years earlier. I’m sure that not only accounts for my love of music but probably also wired my brain in a wide variety of other ways, including my writing—but that’s another story.

I wound up being obsessed with the piano throughout my teens and twenties and composed hundreds of musical pieces myself—some instrumental, some regular songs with lyrics. The vast majority of those weren’t very good, but a handful still sound fairly decent to me now. I want to say a little bit about one of those here, though it’s a more recent one, because the backstory on it revolves around a key episode in my life that was deeply painful but also pivotal for me. I’ve told this part of the story in more detail before, so I’ll keep this fairly brief.

Me at 17, playing the family piano while my father read the newspaper. (I’m wearing a plaster cast on my torso beneath my shirt, after a serious back injury I experienced earlier that year.)

At the age of 88 my mom went blind as a result of medical mistake, from an infection acquired during a routine cataract procedure that spread to both eyes. To help her out, I quit my job in 2007 and moved down from Illinois to Florida to take care of her, a situation which lasted for a little under three years.

It would prove to be the most painful and challenging time of my adult life, a predicament I’m sure many other caretakers can relate to. Being both blind and elderly, she needed much attention and I was essentially confined to the condo 24 hours a day, able to venture outside for just a few minutes each day. (The outside help I enlisted a couple of times turned out to not be reliable.) During the daytime, workmen were using jackhammers just outside the front door to renovate the hallways in the complex, and after dark I rarely got good sleep since she needed assistance several times a night. This combination of factors, along with the empathic pain of seeing her suffer like she did, brought me as close to an emotional breakdown as I’ve ever experienced.

There was just one thing during that time which helped me retain some semblance of sanity, and that was creativity—specifically, music. Her piano was adjacent to the room where she laid in bed, and though she would sometimes sit at the keyboard herself, her energy levels approaching 90 weren’t great, and being blind made it hard for her to hit all the right keys as well as she wanted. But she tried, and the result was sometimes beautiful.

But when she wasn’t at the keyboard I would take my turn playing for her, and she obviously loved being entertained like that. I loved doing that as well, since while playing music I could forget my own pain, along with my self-pity. I began pouring myself into the piano for three, sometimes four hours a day. I mainly improvised—sometimes blues, sometimes impressionistic New Agey-style pieces, and sometimes ragtime, which was her favorite.

But then I would sometimes compose formal pieces of my own, like in the old days. During that period at the piano, I wrote two pieces—one of which was a Debussy-esque instrumental intended for harp, the other being a blues-rock song titled “On My Way Back Now.” I’d always had difficulty with lyrics, but this time it almost felt like I was channeling the words from somewhere else. My mental/emotional state was so depleted by this point that I suspect it allowed for some otherwise inaccessible influences to slip through the cracks into the light of day. It certainly felt like my unconscious was doing the composing, not my conscious mind.

It also felt like something was coming full circle in my life throughout this process: from those early months spent in my mother’s womb listening to her create her music, to these months now towards the end of her life creating my own music for her. As it turned out, the same week I put the finishing touches on my song would be the same week in early 2010 that she had her fatal heart attack as I sat there talking to her one afternoon.

I moved back to Illinois, and it was a few years later that I wound up recording that song at a friend’s studio, which I put on Youtube and am posting at the bottom of this page.

When I think back to that time and how close it pushed me to the edge, I seriously question whether I would have survived without that creative outlet. In fact, I don’t know how anyone makes it through tough times without a creative outlet of some sort, even if that’s just playing with children or animals, or hiking in nature, all of which are “creative” acts in their own way. Hard as that period was for me, I’m grateful to have made my mother’s final years slightly easier than they would have been had she been shuffled off to a nursing home, or some such fate. Music can be a great healer, but it turned out to be that for me as much if not more than for her.

Bless you, mom; I’m sure you’re up there composing music of your own these days; perhaps I’ll even get to hear it someday myself.—R.G.

Here are the lyrics to my song (FYI - I laid these out in stanzas of four short lines each, but for some reason Substack will not display them that way.)

ON MY WAY BACK NOW

Without a shield, without a role I stepped onto the empty highway all alone. There was no time, there was no space. There were no worldly reminders in place

I looked across the great divide Out in the clear I saw a mirror on fire I wanna know, who could this be Who leaves no trail of evidence for me?

I’m on my way back now There ain’t no words to tie me down And it’s too late for turning round I’ve got my eyes on the prize, and my feet on the ground

It’s all a dark mystery Without a care for your philosophy It’s like a songbird deep in the night Under the veil of a pale moonlight, all right…

Unlock the door, forget the key There isn’t anyone or anywhere to flee It’s like a kiss within a dream A moving shadow of the harmonies

I’m on my way back now I’ve got no words to tie me down And it’s too late for fooling ‘round I’ve got my eyes on the prize and my feet on the ground

I hear the sound of other worlds Within the voice of this ordinary girl I feel the heat of the sun Within the touch of the loneliest one

It’s in the flower, it’s in the flame It’s even there inside these hurts and these pains It’s in the silence of the soul It’s in these weapons of redemption that I hold It’s in the forest, it’s in the fields These are the workings of the harmonies I see

It’s in the flower, it’s in the flame It’s even there inside these hurts and these pains It’s in the silence of the soul It’s in these weapons of redemption that I hold It’s in the forest, it’s in the fields These are the workings of the harmonies I see.

Postscript: the other work I composed during that period, for harp, is titled “Open Water.” I recorded that one as well, and it can be found on Youtube.

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, including The Waking Dream, Under a Sacred Sky, and An Infinity of Gods. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotographer.com. He has a CD of compositions available on Amazon titled “The Sea Within.”