Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings.
This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning
a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“The feelings that hurt most,
the emotions that sting most,
are those that are absurd –
The longing for impossible things,
precisely because they are impossible;
nostalgia for what never was;
the desire for what could have been;
regret over not being someone else;
dissatisfaction with the world’s existence.
All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness
create in us a painful landscape,
an eternal sunset of what we are.”

― Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese poet

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I’m a fan of Broadway musicals, but my favorite musical isn’t one of the lavish shows with big casts, full orchestras, elaborate sets and opulent costumes. My favorite musical is The Fantasticks, with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones. It tells an allegorical story of first love and the loss of innocence, loosely based on the 1903 play Les Romanesques (The Romancers) by Edmond Rostand. It opened on Broadway in 1960, and it ran for a record-breaking 42 years and 17,162 performances.

One of the first gifts my husband ever gave me was a music box, which plays “Try to Remember” the best-known song from the show. It captures what the Brazilians call saudade, “longing for what is absent” which can be a place, a feeling, a person — someone far away, or lost — or something that has only been wished for and may never have existed outside of one’s imagination.

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Try to Remember 

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember and if you remember
then follow
follow.

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember
then follow
follow.

Deep in December it’s nice to remember
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember
Without a hurt the heart will hollow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember
The fire of September that made you mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember and follow
follow.

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Or as Shakespeare put it in Act II, Scene 4 of As you Like It :

. . . And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief . . .

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Sorry to be a downer — the weather here is dreary, and I’m missing my old dog, who crossed the rainbow bridge last week.