Life is what happens ...
There’s something nice about the opening day of a legislative session, especially following an election year.
Sometimes you see boutonnieres and corsages and kids a little bit dressed up for mom’s or dad’s swearing in.
The mood? Somebody once asked former major league first baseman (and Hartford resident) Doug Glanville what he and opposing team baserunners were talking about between pitches.
“Well, they’re usually in a good mood because they made it to first,” he answered.
So it is on this day. Everybody there won an election. They all made it to first.
This year, Gov. Ned Lamont used the same quote twice, once in his brief inaugural remarks and again in his longer “State of the State” address.
He attributed to John Lennon the line, “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”
It does appear in a Lennon song (and we’ll get back to that), but it’s at least 23 years older, attributed in 1957 to a comic strip creator named Allen Saunders. Nobody can find it in a strip, but it seems like the kind of thing Mary Worth, one of his characters, might have said.
Lamont used the quote to describe our collision with COVID-19.
But the way Lennon used it is more achingly universal. It’s in his song “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” about his son Sean.
Out on the ocean sailing away
I can hardly wait
To see you come of age But I guess we’ll both just have to be patient ’Cause it’s a long way to go A hard row to hoe
Yes, it’s a long way to go But in the meantime Before you cross the street Take my hand
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans
So much there to break the heart. There’s the acknowledgment of danger. “When you cross the street …” And the anticipation of time. “I can hardly wait to see you come of age.”
When the album with that song on it, “Double Fantasy,” was newly released in 1980, a young man got him to autograph it. A few hours later, the same young man shot John Lennon dead on a New York street. Lennon was 40.
The music from the inaugural party was still hanging in the air when shortly after midnight Quentin Williams, a state representative newly sworn in for his third term, died on his way home in a Route 9 car crash. He was 39.
And suddenly the good mood was replaced by its opposite.
Williams appears to have died in a “wrong-way crash.” These happen when a driver gets on the highway using what is supposed to be an exit. Any state cop or physicist will tell you they’re unusually deadly, as two moving objects collide head-on.
In 2022, the state saw a crazy surge in this specific type of accident. Connecticut’s record for wrong-way crashes was broken in the first six months.
The change was so sudden and dramatic that it was hard to chalk it up to signage and infrastructure problems. It was hard not to think that the stress of the pandemic was leaking out into the roads, with people caring less, drinking more.
One obstacle to studying wrong-way crashes is that the drivers are so rarely around to be interviewed in the aftermath.
Lennon’s song begins:
Close your eyes Have no fear The monster’s gone He’s on the run and your daddy’s here
On Monday night the last thing I learned about was the collapse on the field of the NFL player Damar Hamlin, who was given CPR for many minutes before leaving for the hospital and a medically induced coma. The two teams called off the game. They don’t usually do that.
In the night I had horrible dreams of violence and harm. I remember pushing aside a long, heavy curtain and realizing it was caked in the blood.
Earlier that day, I did one of my occasional radio shows where the callers are encouraged to ask or tell me anything. A young New Haven woman named Iman called to ask me what I would tell a disembodied soul that had not yet been assigned a life. Would I tell it to ask for a human life or some other kind?
I told her human lives seem very hard because we know we’re going to die. Other animals recognize death, but not in that anticipatory way. Tell the soul to be an otter instead, I told Iman.
It’s the hum in the background, and it never stops humming. “White Noise” is a new movie based on an old novel, and both are about people trying to quiet the fear of death.
And so, in a different way, is “The Banshees of Inisheerin,” another new movie about a man, Colm, who suddenly rejects his oldest friend, Padraic.
“I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away on me, Padraic. And I think I need to spend the time I have left thinking and composing. Just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things you have to say for yourself,” Colm says.
Colm thinks he should be writing jigs and reels and laments. Otherwise, “in 12 years, I’ll die with nothin’ to show for it, bar the chats I’ve had with a limited man, is that it?”
The movie shows the two men in equipoise, one believing that warm friendship and good talk is the way to spend our finite time and the other believing in the creation of something that will outlast him.
On Thursday we heard that Hamlin woke up, a little. He wanted to know who won the game.
He did. He made it to first. Not everybody does.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Tuesday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his free newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.