You can't spell Yearn without Enya
Not using all of the letters, and in a different order, but still.
Audio version of this post:
A week or so ago, sparked by some urge I cannot now recall but which was certainly random and a result of the avoidance of doing something productive, I Googled Irish new-age music legend Enya.
As a side note, saying such a thing reminds me of the “new age” we live in, where a need for information can be quickly met with a web search or a command to our digital servants overlords assistants. I guess in the past I had to hope I was sitting next to someone who knew about Enya so I could turn to them and say “tell me about Enya” or “enya, music person, information, alive?”
Or I had to have someone I could call, someone whose number I knew by heart and who I could ring up like a lifeline in that game show hosted by that guy from that other show Regis and Kathie Lee (darn it if his name doesn’t escape me).
Dark times those were, for sure.
Anyway, back to the well-lighted present. In the brief amount of time that I dedicate to reading about musical superstar Enya, mostly on Wikipedia, I learn some interesting tidbits. For instance, her real name is not Enya (it’s Eithne, pronounced “Eth-na”), and she came from a musically prolific family (sort of like the BeeGees but with flutes). I am also blown away to find out that she married fellow new age artist Yanni, and together they have a superstar child they named YanEnya, who now writes musical ear worms for pharmaceutical commercials!
Ok, that last part is probably not true, but how awesome would that be?!
Having quenched a minor thirst for Enya-related knowledge, I next turn to that repository of all things musical, Spotify, to listen to some of her songs for the first time in years. As the hits (”Caribbean Blue” and “Orinoco Flow”) give way to some of the deeper cuts (”There’s a cheeky little elf in the garden” might be one?), I am transported in mind and spirit to decades past when I would listen to these same songs from a tape playing through the headphones of my Walkman. I was at that impressionable age when the emotions and hormones of youth mingled with music and pop culture, leaving an imprint. When it came to music, I consumed everything from Def Leopard to LL Cool J to (apparently) Enya.
As a slight side-diversion, I may grumble that my own kids seem to be perpetually pinned to their personal walls of sound, with their connected devices and AirPods and general disregard for the actual sky, but I wonder how much different it was when I was their age when it came to becoming lost in the music. I seem to remember a LOT of music. To be fair, my kids’ delivery system of ‘tap here for instant stream’ makes it easier to consume mass quantities of music as compared to our delivery system of ‘hope this song comes on the radio soon so I can record it on this tape, and I hope the DJ shuts up for once!’.
Meanwhile in the year 2025, scrolling through lists and clicking on different tracks, years fade and it suddenly seems strange that I should be sitting in this mortgaged living room, staring out onto a wintry lawn that will soon be overgrown and need some attention so as not to get out of control yet again. Feels off that moments earlier I was worried about the heating bill or stressing over whether I would ever again have a cordial relationship with any of my kids. The sounds I am hearing, the tones that the artist formally known as Eithne played and sang into a recording device decades ago, are telling me that the world is a big, sometimes scary, but ultimately exciting place, and that I have some agency to become what I was made to become.
Sitting in my decidedly adult recliner, back and joints aching from the simple act of living in a 47 year old body, the music tells me it is actually the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that all I should be concerned with the “It” girl who I would sacrifice at least one eye for if she would just say she was my “girlfriend”, as well as the certainty that if I did not have Taco Bell within the next 23 minutes I would literally starve to death.
The music is a time machine, if it is only my brain which has made the journey.
I’ve woken up recently in the middle of the night, almost in tears due to dreams where I’ve realized how long my wife and I have been married. I know that sounds odd, and it has nothing to do with sadness at the fact that I’ve been wed to this wonderful woman for so long. It’s more the sense of impossibility that it has been so long, at all the things that have happened in those two plus decades, the wonderful things and the heartbreaking things, the holidays and sick days and low bank accounts and cold rainy winter seasons - it all seems like the literal and proverbial blur.
In those early morning waking moments, there is certainly an appreciation for the good gifts that I have been given. But there is also a yearning, of sorts, for some things that have been lost. For the moments that will never be again. For lost opportunity and for opportunities well-enjoyed which are never to be repeated, at least not in the same way, at least not in this life.
In the present, and into my much older ears, Enya’s classic hit “Only Time” plays. It is about the future, not so much the past. But there is also a note of longing for things lost and time’s role in how we deal with those losses. “Who can say when your heart cries when your love lies?”, she sings, and then punctuat
es the thought with a penultimate question/response. “Who knows? Only time.”
Twenty-five years on, the track stands as a strange self-fulfillment, as the lyrics of the song address nostalgia that the song itself dredges up.
My musical reverie in the here and now does not last long, as there are kids to transport and dishes to wash and reports to write. But the moment is nice and melancholy and telling. I need to take such trips more often, or at least give my brain the permission to travel more (before it takes off for good without leaving a forwarding address).
As the heralded musician once crooned: Who can say where the road goes?
If I remember correctly, the answer is either “Time” OR “the cheeky garden elf”.
Could be both.
Who knows?
(Regis! That was his name. That was going to drive me crazy!)
Thanks for reading! If you know anyone who might enjoy reading about an aging man wrestling with the nuances of time, please feel free to forward this to them!
An enjoyable read, Phil! It provided just the right level of the peaceful melancholy you were describing. ~Ed.