The List

I made a list so many years ago…

There’s a little house in west Nashville where I used to live before my current life as married mom-of-two began. I was living alone there, nursing the smashed-up heart my previous divorce had left me with, and trying to figure out what colors to paint the walls and which breakfast to cook for ME, when there was no “someone else” to paint or cook for.

I spent a good five years living the single life in that house. I penned some great songs, recorded my first album and secured my first record deal during that time. And dating was not the slightest bit on my radar. (In fact I was pretty much allergic to the notion of it, since I had set myself up for disaster the first time around.) But then I started to think about putting myself back out there again. The problem, though, was this: there might be a lot of fish in the sea, but how do you find the RIGHT fish? It seemed next to impossible.

So I followed a friend’s advice. “Make a list!” she said. “Write down everything you would want to find in a partner. And be specific! Don’t just make a short little list…write down about 100 things. Make it as if you were ordering someone up off a menu!  Then fold it up and put it away somewhere and forget about it…and watch what the universe does.”

I did more than that: I made two lists! One was a list of what I was looking for in a partner, and one was a list of what I wanted my partner to bring out in me. And then I folded the pages up, put them away, and completely forgot about the whole thing.

But a couple of years later, when I started dating Dave, something started tickling at the back of my mind that made me think, “hmmm…I should look at that list again!” I found it in the back of my bedside drawer, opened it up…and reading it just about knocked me over.

It was Dave. Every little thing about him. So much so that three years later, at our wedding reception, I read the list out loud. (I got a kick out of seeing the stunned looks on everyone’s faces.)

Strangely enough, it never occurred to me to make a song out of all of this until I told the story to co-writers Damhnait Doyle and Stuart Cameron (of the Canadian band The Heartbroken). They said “THAT’S what we need to write today!” Would you like to hear the result? Here’s the secret link where supporters of my Ko-Fi page can hear “The List”.

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