There are some people you will always miss.

Some die. Some leave. Some are kept away. Some change. Some are suborned. Some have surrendered themselves away willingly.

The missing has no rational basis, much less any concrete basis. It simply happens or doesn't happen.

Make a laundry list, because I won't. Did they love you? How loyal? Whither fidelity? Did they make you laugh? Did they make you feel more yourself around them? Did they complete you? Were you already complete and they reset the bar on completeness? Did they hurt you? Did they damage you? Did they disregard you? Trivialize you?

Yeah, go ahead and make that list, because—again—I won't do it.

I'd bet a pretty that no matter how your list totals its plusses and minuses columns of that person you already miss, it won't change your mind one whit.

The missing-of is not related to the deserving-of.

Yesterday I was sitting in a Dutch cafe I found here in San Francisco (at Sutter & Jones, in case you're interested) while chatting to my favorite Marsupial (whom, by the way, is one I miss terribly), an email demi-spam shows up in my email from Ticketmaster. It announced a show by Mary Chapin Carpenter at the Mountain Winery down in Saratoga.

There are exactly three people I miss without qualification who are all dead: my great grandmother, Tekla; my very own Auntie Mame, Julia; and my former partner, Allen. It was Allen who introduced me to Country music, beginning with Mary Chapin Carpenter. The song was Passionate Kisses, a song whose message, in my current despair, I believe far too few people would care very much about. Allen and I got to see MCC at the Paramount Theater in Oakland during a short “busking” pre-tour tour; mostly acoustic sets and stripped down versions of new and old songs. It was two hours of not-a-care-in-the-world, even though he was living with fairly advanced HIV-disease and I was living with and utterly in love with a man disappearing in minute portion daily.

I mentioned to the Possum that I wanted to see her again in concert. Then I realized I had no one to share the experience with. Then I realized that there was no one to share the experience with. Though I own every one of her albums and listen to them quite often, she is a solo pleasure for me now. Consider it a measure of how much I miss the man. My Allen.

There are others I miss to varying degrees, but most of those are still technically available (meaning, not dead). I miss my family intensely, but that is a matter of geography. Some I miss to an extent I am in self-wonderment at how I still go on with each day (that would be Sam, to the uninitiated), some are a now-and-then kind of missing. Some I don't have to miss at all because they are here with me in my life, in my heart, in my trust, in my care. And therein lay the biggest blessing of this life of mine.

Places can be missed, too. I “miss” San Francisco when I am outside it; I “miss” the Low Sky out of another lifetime ago. But places are just places, finally, and it's the people you miss.

What does any of this have to do with Cole Porter? I am only recently discovering the hidden dragons in Cole Porter's lyrics and music, and most of that through John Barrowman's recordings. Apropos of nothing, John Barrowman seems to be everywhere I turn, but that's because I've placed him there. He's a wonder on so many levels and I am attracted to his magic.

Cole Porter is hit and miss for me, though. Sometimes he indulged too much in specifics of words, which date his material and make the music crash to the ground (e.g., “I Happen to Like New York”, “Easy to Love”), but most of his songs veer into dangerously intimate territory while remaining abstract and lovely and universally accessible.

It's the latter songs, of course, which I cannot help but inhabit: more dangerous territory.

Cole Porter is not a one to listen to when you're missing The Missed Ones. Not when you're alone. Not unless you're strong enough to stand firm and hunker down when the tide of longing overtakes your shores as it inevitably would.

I can list any number of Cole Porter's songs that live in this dangerous territory, the ones of brutal candor and risk-taking of the heart, of the solemnity of the confessional, but “In the Still of the Night” is the one that breeches any defenses:

Lyrics alone never do justice to a mood, which is why they add the mellifluous and call it a song. Some may call this avoidance or escapism or coping. Those are merely more words to wrongly disabuse the pure loneliness in missing the magic of an intimacy no longer within one's grasp.

So to all those I miss who—with us or not—are not with me: as I gaze from my window at the moon in its flight, my thoughts all stray to you.

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