Time in a Bottle

It's prom season.  I took my SAT's in a high school gym that had just celebrated prom the night before.  All the decor was intact - the theme being "Time in a Bottle", a bittersweet Jim Croce song.  Oddly, there were bottles suspended from the ceiling by wires, and giant cut-outs of bottles with clocks in them plastered to the walls.  My guess is the prom committee was the usual coterie of literal-minded jocks and jills.  In any case, whenever prom season rolls around, I hearken back to that hot gym and that Jim Croce song.

"Time in a Bottle" was a love song, a lover lamenting that there would never be enough time to love his lover properly.  It became all the more poignant when Croce died in a plane crash at the age of thirty.  His wife Ingrid recently wrote a book about him and their great love.  Great love, frozen in time is the ideal love.  One can flower it up, evading the inevitable ugliness that comes with time in a relationship.  She truly got time in a bottle.  Unlike "Annie's Song" by John Denver.  Annie filled up his senses, like a night in the forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain - until she didn't, and they divorced.  The denouement of their marriage was that he tried to choke her, then, in a final fit of rage, he sawed their marital bed in half with a chainsaw.  True story.

What's my point? (I direct this question to me, as I am writing this blog solely for myself.)

The point is that even a love that spawned such poetry can wind up in tatters.  That Jim Croce's marriage probably would have ended just as badly.  That there's a reason 50th anniversaries make the paper and are crowed about - they are rare.  Even if a couple makes it 50 years, my guess is that they have a nice friendship, and have learned to look the other way, or turn off their ears at certain times.  They are done hurting each other.