Wooden Heart

                                                WOODEN HEART

I like to surf the internet, and the other day I came upon a clip of Elvis Presley, singing an old German song, called “Muss I Denn.” I ‘m not sure what the English translation is, but it was the first line of the song “Wooden Heart” sung by Joe Dowell and Elvis Presley back in the early sixties. It started out, “Can’t you see—I love you. Please don’t break my heart in two. That’s not hard to do, ‘cause I don’t have a wooden heart.” Listening to it brought tears to my eyes because it was our song, way back then, and she was my new-found, little leibchen.

I think, for many of us, there was a song from our courtship days that defined us. A song that, even today, brings back a floodgate of memories—a song that will always be “our song.” I clicked on the lyrics, and turned to watch her face—seated across the room from me—as the music started. She was seemingly asleep, but then a faint smile came to her face—she opened her eyes and turned and asked me. “Where did you find that?” I wanted to go and take her hand, pick her up, and dance to it once more with her, while singing softly in her ear like I did so many times before. But we both remained seated, smiling through our tears. Our dancing days are over, but our unwooden hearts are still intact.

The words in the song, by themselves, are meaningless unless you put special meaning to them, and we had done that so long ago. But for me, today, it asked the question, “Why a song?” What makes music seem like love in search of a word? Why, on the breath of music, are we able to say what we can’t find the words to say otherwise? Gustav Mahler said, “If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he wouldn’t bother trying to say it in music.” Yes, sometimes to me, music is what feelings sound like. I read another quote once that said, “Painters paint their pictures on canvas but musicians paint their pictures on silence.”

Our music has changed so much over the years that, sometimes, I scarce can define it as music. So many singers of my era could melt your heart with their singing, but to many times today, whatever they are yelling into the microphone is drowned out by the din of musical instruments being abused in the background.  What was meant to be music is, simply, unrecognizable noise. The radio is always on in my vehicle and there have been times, in my travels, when the signal has faded. When that happens, I scan the airwaves for something to my taste, and then often give up in frustration. Thank God for CD’s.

 I’m getting off the track here—no pun intended—but back to her and me, and “Wooden Heart.” For the first time in our lives, the words seemed truer and more relevant, and I fear that my heart will really find out what it is made of. “Can’t you see I love you. Please don’t break my heart in-------- ."