MOG

Here’s a love song of a different kind, one that satisfies me at so many levels (none of which are carnal). The first time I heard A Minor Incident, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It is a somewhat folky, pop song, the kind of which I actually don’t listen to very often. (Actually, I do... I just don't always admit it).

Being as out of it as I generally am in regards to current music, I hadn’t even heard of Badly Drawn Boy, and only came across this song because it was part of a compilation put together by the author Nick Hornby. The CD was accompanied by a book where he writes about the music. I had not read the book, so decided to go check out what he had to say about this song. It turns out that A Minor Incident is from the movie adaptation of another of Hornby’s books, About a Boy:

"A Minor Incident,” a sweet, heart-felt, acoustic strummer with a wheezy Dylanesque harmonica solo, refers directly to a major incident in the book and the movie: Marcus comes home from a day out to discover his mother Fiona lying comatose on the sofa after an attempt to kill herself… The song is her suicide note to her son."

Hornby goes on to reflect about his relationship with his autistic son, and “the magical coincidences and transferences of creativity” that go along with this song, his book, and his life. After reading that, I went back and listened to the song again, and got all choked up. Years later, I still can’t listen to it without getting emotional.

As a mother who struggles pretty deeply with how to do right by my children, it is really easy to become mired down in the endless of cycle of kid demands and my own self-recrimination about how I am not living up to being the super mama I’d expected that I’d be. During times like this, it can be too easy to focus on the difficulties involved with raising children, and also too easy to miss the joy, magic, and mystery of it all. This song does help to remind me to be a bit more patient with my kids and their wild roller coaster rides of emotion, and with myself as a woman who is working hard at the job of raising her children, but who is also fallible and very human.

Beyond my kids, however, I also started thinking about how all of our relationships are so tenuous when it comes right down to it. There are many, many "magical coincidences" that go into making a life, and no matter what your conception of that magic is -- chance, fate, divine order of things -- it seems that we really have such a short time together. I realized that I want to sit and have a cup of tea, and then go for a long walk, with those that I love and have loved in the past -- to talk, laugh, and appreciate each other's company, and to "shrug off minor incidents" in the time we have left together.

So all that makes this a pretty darn good love song in my opinion.