Song written for Dorian ...

a very long time ago. Maybe not so much for her, but about her.

Orange-Magenta

Verse:

 
I'm here at my easel as I've been for days
my hand is so eager -- my mind in a maze
I find no beginning -- my canvas is bare
I'd say to my colors (if I thought they might hear)

Chorus:

Lavender, rose, pink, you're twilight and dawning
blue, please help me bring the sea!
green slash with yellow my hillside's spring morning
brush please help my finger see!
black cry my sorrow, purple my longing
white breathe my ecstasy!
orange-magenta, you come without reason,

crimson, you're for love to see.

black cry my sorrow
purple my longing
white breathe my ecstasy!

all of my rainbow so vibrant before me
would that I, too, could be
orange-magenta and be without reason,

crimson just for love to see
crimson just for love and me ....

Might be better understood if I told you that Dorrie was born severely brain-damaged and functions in the retarded range. In many ways she's a success story, using everything she has to work with and in some amazing ways, and with a puzzling ability to display flashes of intelligence that has always fascinated me and kept alive the possibility that -- if I could just "crack the code" -- there just may be some way to reach inside and diddle with the wiring ...

But that is not to be, and I've always known that, of course. Instead of living always with the "what ifs," we've found a way to create a relationship that is a combination of mom and best friend that works for us both most of the time.

At the time that this song was written she must have been four or five. We lived out in the valley in a lovely home on a wooded acre with a creek running through. I was a very lonely young mother with four kids and a very busy husband who left us to our own devices most of the time while he ran the small but (at that time) successful business that supported us well.

He was a good man. He had a troubled wife and he surely didn't know it.

When I wrote this song, the problems (that later led to divorce) had deepened, and I was feeling envious of my blithely innocent little daughter. Feeling unfulfilled in my personal life, yet enjoying all of the trappings of a successful marriage was tearing me apart. Living with conflicting truths is the more troubling when one is surrounded by a world of those for whom that concept is inconceivable.

I believe that it was about that time that I began to have a sense of just how much there was yet to be known, and of how far away from even temporarily sustaining answers I was. Maybe that's where adulthood begins ...

Dorian was/is orange-magenta. She was a beautiful child who had no "reason," and needn't be concerned about it. I knew that I would spend my life preparing her for being left behind to live in an unsympathetic world. The thought of that was overwhelming. It still is.