Foreigner

The Complete Greatest Hits of Foreigner album has remained on Billboard's Top Ten bestsellers of all time since shortly after its debut.  It has all the songs of my teen-hood.  I listened to a lot of music, but Foreigner made my top ten list too.

I always felt like some kind of foreigner in my life.  Like I never really belonged anywhere, to anyone.  The truth is the only place I've ever been happy at all.  The only real place - the other places are in books and being in music.

I didn't leave the truth for a guy.  I left it for music.  Oh Satan, thou art filled with crafty acts!  I grew up in a podunk town and the only music I ever heard live was in the band hall at the school.  The first time two girls at work dragged me into a bar, I nearly fainted when the first few bars sounded from the stage.  They had been asking me to go out with them for a long time and I kept saying no.  But that night, there was a band playing and I had their albums.  I couldn't resist going to hear them.

Within six weeks, I was missing all kinds of meetings to spend my life in bars because I was singing and playing guitar with a country group called Wheat Straw.  I drifted to a rock band called Fever after that, and on my nights off I sang in a piano bar at a swanky hotel.  In the country band I covered songs by Crystal Gayle and Charley McClain  ~ Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue & Sleeping with the Radio On.  With the rock band, I covered a lot of Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac.  In the piano bar, it was the real good stuff.  Nat King Cole's That's All, Neil Sedaka's remake (the slow version) of Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.  Carole King, Helen Reddy, Carly Simon That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.

I could sit here all night entertaining myself with a list of songs running through my head but I already know them and you might not be interested.

We drove home from Altoona the other day and I finally got around to locating my CDs and loading them in the car to go with my new car stereo.  I have an iPod and most of my music is on that and my computer, thus no big cd collection.  Anyhow, I have four or five that Abel burned for me last year.  He did a great job.  He burned the label onto the cds themselves somehow, and I don't mean a label glued on, but the computer etched it on somehow.  I have Phil Collins, Lynyrd Skynrd, The Who, a few others, and finally, Foreigner.  When he gave them to me, they were all in green neoprene sleeves.

Green is my favorite color, in case you haven't figured that out by noticing my blog graphics.

So the songs were playing and it got to I want to know what love is.  I want you to show me, and I felt like sputtering, felt like being angry and being vile and saying what a jerk and I'm so much better off without a man.  And I may be better off.  Paul recommended it, but historians record that Paul was notoriously ugly and even the temple prostitutes wouldn't serve him in the old days when he was Saul.  I don't know if that is true or not, but the historical/secular record does say this.

I tried to figure out if there was something there and I blew it somehow.  And I remembered a time when we had just moved into our new house last year, and we were getting ready to go to Ocean City the following week, and Abel loaned us his Outer Banks beach gear to use.  There are just some things us land-locked prairie girls did not know about the world, but Abel clued us in and offered us the use of an umbrella and chairs that do not sink in sand.

The day he dropped the stuff off, the girls' father was here, in the recliner barefoot, having just finished a three-hour marathon session of doing things for us like reassembling furniture and rearranging stuff and hanging pictures and other manly things the girls needed doing.  I introduced Abel to David and it went okay.  I thought so.

But a few years ago in Arkansas. there was a brother who told my best friend he had been thinking about me that way but I was too involved with my ex for his tastes.  It's only fair to point out that both Abel and Jared had horrible divorces and nothing good to say about their exes.

I can say plenty of horrible things, but I have two babies with this man, and for my daughters' sake, I am not going to say anything bad about the man in public.  And even privately, I am selective in what I say to whom.  Suffice it to say that while there were marital issues obviously, I never once had any issues with this man as a father.  He would always put his last dime towards the girls, always ate the leftovers and saved the best portions for them.

I cannot say that about all the fathers I know, but I can say it about him.

Then again, I probably am just too fat for Abel's tastes and am over analyzing things again.  But here is what I thought about.  Once, Abel told me his ex was awful, and I said yes, she did you wrong, but still, she gave you two babies.  She took your 23 chromosomes not once, but twice, and gave you the fruit of her uterus, 18 months of her body.  And isn't it stupid to consider it nine months?  Like your body goes back to normal the next day or something?  Because it never goes back to before, and it is several months before it gets to a new normal even.  Especially if you breastfeed.

Abel loves his children.  I admire dedicated paternity in men, and he shares that quality with my ex.

That's what I decided on that drive home from Altoona, that Abel did show me one kind of love.  Because although nothing worked out between us, and I still think he didn't give his ex enough credit, enough acknowledgement, of her contribution to making his babies, and I would like to say he's a moron for not wanting moi, still, I have to say that he's a nice guy.  He burned some great music for me and put it in green sleeves.  Not wanting me does not make him a bad guy, does not cancel out the good things he did.  Still, the irony strikes me sadly that the best cd he gave me was by Foreigner, and most of my life that's what I feel like, even now, with him.

Paul should have tried bringing music to the temple.