A Hundred Years
In 2002 I composed this piece for my sweetheart, called A Hundred Years. I wanted to get her attention, and it worked. We were married in 2005.
It began as a poem:
Down the steps of that airplane and into your game
In Paradise we played by the edge of our hearts
Noticing no great echoes we spoke our small parts.
On the language of Nature and what it all meant
But slowly we understood what it spoke of
And at last found the courage to say the word "love."
Sure in our playing we dared not go higher
But love is old as the mountains and the sky
It will wait for us Peggy until we dare try.
2. Nothing has changed but it's all different –
I made no decision but still one was sent,
I asked for no new light but a light fills the sky …
Should I deny the new dawn? Oh no, girl, not I.
We will understand loving, so weak and so strong,
We'll know all the hundred ways that love can climb
to the heart's empty windows to settle and shine.
Caught in the door of this gift by our fears
Half-hoping it closes so we can be free
When we know I am for you, and you are for me.
I built that into music, and played and sang it for her, with the desired effect. The instrumental version of it for solo guitar, preserved here, was recorded on September 12, 2008, about a month after I improvised Pillow Talk. It was the first of ten pieces I recorded between September 12 and 22, 2008: a “data dump” of seven pieces I had memorized at the moment, and three more improvisations.