TheBanyanTree: Star Gazing

[sash]

His face is round and he’s definitely aging.  His hair is, well, let’s
face it – he’s an average-to-dumpy, middle-aged white guy.  If his earring
was a little smaller and his jacket were a lot less purple, he could be
one of the parents I see at school - one that spends a lot of time in a
cubicle.  Not the stuff of daydreams and racing pulses.

Why am I completely transfixed by his image?

I have watched this DVD set about 10 times, all 4 DVD’s, since Christmas. 
And I can’t just listen from the other room either.  I have to stop and
actually watch – his face and hands
  I can’t focus on anything else while
he’s singing.

It’s weird.  I’ve never been a particular fan.  For my generation, his
music has always been there.  I did roller-disco to Pinball Wizard and
lighted candles to Empty Garden.    But I never had his poster on my wall,
or stood in line for an album release.  Circle of Life echoed that little
heartbeat growing in my womb and Candle in the Wind led me through grief
that I didn’t expect or understand.  If I flipped by a channel and he was
there, I would stop, but I didn’t save back issues of TV Guide if his
picture was on the cover.

Even receiving this DVD was a fluke.  The panic of shopping on “the Eve of
Christmas Eve” and some steering from my 11-year-old son led my husband to
Best Buy.  Ned remembered the ad we saw on TV.  He said, “That’s the guy
from the Muppet show.”  I said, “That would be fun.  All my Elton John
music is on vinyl.”  (See what I mean?  I like his music, but I don’t own
a single CD.  Oh, except for the Lion King.  That came out the year my
sister went to Africa and our own little cub was born.  It was more a
tribute to synchronicity – and the singing warthog – that kept that CD in
the minivan for months and months.)

I saw Elton John in concert once.  It was amazing and his charisma and
presence did fill the Rose Garden.  The “concert energy” was incredible
and the crowd was super charged.  I screamed and laughed until I couldn’t
even talk.  His encore of “Do you feel the love tonight” with video
effects from the Lion King had me weeping, but I always love life
performances.  I feel excited and alive and passionately in love with
music.

I also remember an interview he did once – was it Barbara Walters?  There
was some stir in one group of my friends because of a picture hanging on
the wall of his flat, but I remember most how he spoke so clearly and
eloquently.  I wish I had written it all down at the time.  I listened to
him talk about relationships and love and sex and labels and society and
perceptions and limits, he spoke directly to my heart – as if the words
and thoughts were my own.  That’s something that has never happened – not
before or really since then – when someone else has seemed to ‘understand’
the world, or a little slice of it, in exactly the same way it all seemed
to me.  There was no hesitating or pausing after questions – just a
clarity that pointed right into my heart and named my truth the way
someone might casually point at a wildflower and say, “That’s a trillium”
and it is.

Now I’m forty years old and after decades of his music, I am touched in a
way that I cannot comprehend.  Even songs that have never really been that
special to me – Little Jeanie or The Club at the End of the Street – I
can’t stop watching and my heart is just filled by his presence on the
screen.

A duet of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, sung with Billy Joel, and I’m
sobbing.  I kept scanning backwards – the little smile they shared after
singing “should have listened to my old man”.  The perfect balance in
their piano playing and the way their distinctive voices blended into
something new, but so comfortable and achingly familiar.  I am overwhelmed
by love for these two men and I feel a deep joy to see that they are
friends.

There is some sort of intensity in each of them that just makes the screen
vibrate.  It’s not just charisma or star-power.  It’s something solid and
real and compelling.

Perhaps it is the touch of grey on the edge of such integrity and passion.
 He is no longer the Entertainment Tonight story or the glasses and glitz.
 Transcending the training, the glamour, and the gossip is a man.  A man
who sings and plays his music with every bit of his being.

If someone were to write the soundtrack of my life, it would have to be
Elton John.  Watching him this way, with the decades blending together and
the drama falling away, something happens inside me.  I just wish that I
could find a way to express it.  It’s as if a little window is opened into
an area of pure, intense, concentrated LIFE and just watching it makes me
more worthy – more alive.

And that IS the stuff of daydreams and racing pulses.

-sash
14 january 2005