I find out with a little googling that Frank Sinatra hated this song from 1966 that is loved by so many. In 1966, I was listening to Bob Dylan and had no inclination to listen to anything that Frank Sinatra sang. Paradoxically, Bob Dylan was listening to Frank Sinatra and in recent years has recorded three Frank Sinatra cover albums, without ever covering "Strangers in the Night." The only Frank Sinatra song that Bob Dylan covered that truly spoke to me was this one from 1949, the year I was born. Could I have heard it on the radio as a baby?
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I remember my early days living in Washington State in the mid-1970s when there was little I yearned for more than to return to Northern California. There was nothing I liked about Washington State, except the rain. Since then I have grown to love Washington State, both the cool damp western part of the state and the eastern part of the state, to the east of the Cascade Mountain Range. Eastern Washington is much much colder in the winter and hotter in the summer. It's a different landscape, a different world, in all ways. Although I don't love Washington State in the same way that I love Northern California, Washington State is one of my true loves nonetheless.
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"And it has to do with a tree, a singular one, not like these careening and cascading trees all around me here, but one tree that prised open the shell of me, led me out of the enclosing maze, the impasse of the heart, and showed me, yes, I could breathe again, and find love within me, and find that -- which can touch our hearts -- isn't only a person, it can be -- anything really, a sunlit mountain slope, a tree -- it isn't out there that we find love, though it can be some 'out there' being that slides back the shutters and we find the whole landscape of love is within us ..."
(p. 103, Bouyancy of the Craft, by Morelle Smith, who blogs from Scotland and to whom I am deeply grateful for her novel celebrating the life of Annemarie Schwarzenbach)
