A stick; a stone; the end of the road

Águas de março, Jobim's masterpiece evoking the end of the summer, coincides with Lent because it was written in the Southern hemisphere. Maybe it’s a coincidence but it works. The song is a hymn, a kind of knowing nod at the ineffability of life's mystery. The fragments of images; the yearning chords; the gentle insistent passage of time. It always brought tears to my eyes since I heard it as a teenager. I heard it again today and wept. I know more of the words now, and marvel at the faith of Jobim’s setting in English. But I also have a child now, and I think of my dad playing the Getz Gilberto version for me and maybe wondering if I would hear it new, thirty or forty years later. Who knows. Who can know these things. This meditation can't do justice to the song or what it makes me feel. But it’s March now, it’s Lent now, it’s a good time; let me write this small thing, poor as it is, now, while the feeling is fresh. I’ll hear it differently again next year. That too is the promise of life in your heart.