Red River Shore

Last night, July 31, I awoke at 3 a.m. to a full moon outside my window, above a clear black sky. The moon shone right through onto the bed. I lay there awake just staring up at it, and began thinking of the opening lines of this song,

Some of us turn off the lights and we live In the moonlight shooting by Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark To be where the angels fly

After hundreds of listens over the past four years, I think I understand what it means, now. We go to bed at night and accept the limitations, and troubles, that life (or God) hands us, or we lie awake most nights, forever unsettled about the troubled events and losses in our life, and carry that despair with us until the time of our death.

Years go by. The world keeps spinning, thus ever-changing for those who don’t have the same aching pain inside as Dylan’s writer, or as those of us who have experienced such hurt. Wordsworth once described in “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” about how places stay the same, but, people change. Wordsworth and Dylan are both describing a time period of many years. But, where Wordsworth is speaking of his return to the place of his youth many years later, he observes of himself, “Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first I came among these hills…”, Dylan is speaking about living in the memory of how his character once remembered the girl a long time ago. Years have gone by. Yet, he hasn’t changed, and neither have his memories of the girl. His memories of her are, in essence, the same as our own memories of those who we once knew, because we are all “living in the shadows of a fading past” and “trapped in the fires of time”. He knew the girl for a (possibly) brief period of time. His memories of her are fixed. Though, his recollections of the place where he knew her are no longer there, as places do changed over time. He becomes a “stranger in a strange land”, and no one seems to remember him or the girl. They have become “Rank Strangers” to him, if you will.

Our memories become our perspective. No one else can share the same perspective, especially after the years have faded those memories to the point where revisionist history begins to occur, to some extent.

Nearing the end of his life as the “sun went down on me a long time ago”, but “had to pull back from the door”, he discloses what so many of us also feel as we near the end of our own lives. That is; regret, disappointment, and discontentment with our lives cause us to not be ready to embrace death, as it closes in on us. His one regret is not being able to spend “every hour of my life with the girl from the red river shore”.

Anyone who has ever loved someone deeply, or experienced a profound, unlimited love only to have lost that love without understanding why, would do anything including being brought back to life to be with that person. The writer recalls the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and wonders “I don't know what kind of language he used or if they do that kind of thing anymore”. This makes one come to the sober conclusion that loss is eventual, and that the ones we love are on loan, and our days with them are numbered.

Some of us have a person we once knew, a long time ago, who had graced our lives with such an extreme, intense presence that our experience of that person and our loss of that person causes our memory to remain fixed, forever halted in time. Years go by. The world keeps spinning for everyone else around us. For us, the world stopped the day we lost them. For the writer, the same holds true. Dylan is correct when he states, we are all “living in the shadows of a fading past”, because human beings “move on” and forget the people of our past, who weren’t as important to us. Time and memory, often fade away.

In the end, he comes to the realization that, “Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all, 'cept the girl from the red river shore”, because to everyone else, they were just two people. To the writer, the girl from the red river shore is someone he’ll never ever forget, even upon his death. And even then, he’s wondering if God can bring him back from the dead, so he can continue his quest to be with her.

One more day is another day away From the girl from the red river shore

***This is a song I have listened to so many times, because it reminds me of someone I lost once, and dealing with that loss is a daily struggle, often "scaring myself to death in the dark to be where the angels fly". The "moonlight shooting by" last night was only a memory of how I used to feel prior to the day she was born.