I had lunch with my friend Rosalind while I was in New York. I moved in with her in 1986, when I migrated to DC. She lived in a big house on Klingle Road, between Cleveland Park and Adams Morgan, and was renting out rooms to help pay the mortgage. Tim moved in a couple of months after I did. We were planning our wedding, and Rosalind helped. We continued to live there for more than half a year after the nuptials.
Rosalind often sang with the Washington Opera Chorus. One of the songs she sang at our wedding was the Robert Burns classic, “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose.”
More than twenty years later, Rosalind doesn’t look any older than the day I met her. She made a Dorian Gray joke, which felt synchronistic, as somehow, during my insomniac thought ramblings the night before, I had been thinking about Dorian Gray and that crazed canvas from the film version. That painting looks like how I feel when I know insomnia has settled in.
I’m back home in my own bed with my own luve, and the insomnia’s gone (of course, so are those pesky nocturnal cats). And I still love this sweet and simple Scottish song. I just wish you could hear Rosalind sing it a capella.
O, my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June.
O, my luve’s like the melodie,
That's sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
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I've used a Dorian Gray reference when I've been told I don't look my age (it used to happen a lot - not so much since I've misplaced my waistline). When someone would exclaim at my true age, I'd say, "Yeah, there's a painting of me growing old in the attic". Very few people seemed to understand the reference, but I kept on saying it anyway.
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