Time in a Bottle

Time in a Bottle

The name of my blog, the Old Lone Ranger is taken from Jim Croce’s song, You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, which was his third studio album, but his first real successful album. It spent 93 weeks on the charts and spanned the time before and after his tragic death in a small airplane crash. In fact, the album was ranked #1 on the charts for five weeks in early 1974 due mostly to the huge success of the single, Time in a Bottle, which was released after his death due to its ethereal theme. The single was #1 for two weeks and then the album took off. And hence, everyone knows from that album release that you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind and you never, never pull the mask off the Old Lone Ranger.

The song has a last stanza that was intended to be quite contrary. It’s starts by advising you not to mess around with Jim, who was a pool hall hustler on 42nd Street back in the bad old days of Times Square in the 70’s. But it ends by advising the listener not to mess around with Slim since Slim McCoy cut, stabbed and shot his way to the top of the heap, leaving Big Jim Walker slumped on the floor with cuts everywhere but the soles of his feet.

The short and “bottle rocket” life of Jim Croce remains very memorable to people of my generation. I was a naive college student at an Ivy League University during the years when Jim Croce (a graduate himself of Villanova) was trying to make things work for him in the tough music business. We liked hearing about Jim and Bad Bad Leroy Brown, but none of us had come within a mile of a barroom brawl. We had started with Rod Stewart and Maggie May who was causing Rod to leave school and make a living out of playing pool. Jim Croce was just making it in the music business when his southern road trip caught him short. He had a wife and a young son, who, strangely enough, came out here to San Diego to live and carry on after his demise. The boy went on in his father’s musical footsteps with the mother becoming a restauranteur.

The song Time in Bottle was written for Jim’s wife Ingrid after the birth of their son, A.J., so it is fair to say that Jim Croce left something memorable to them both in just that song, the lyrics of which were thought to speak to eternal love. The notion of saving time in a bottle is a mixed metaphor. Time usually passes through an hourglass and that imagery is one of the fleeting nature of time. It all passes too quickly through the hourglass. “Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives,” was the opening line from the popular soap opera, Days of Our Lives. Alfred Edward Houseman wrote a famous poem called To An Athlete Dying Young that was made famous in popular culture as the poem Meryl Streep says over the grave of Robert Redford’s Denys Finch-Hatton.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose….

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Jim Croce died at the age of thirty, considerably younger than Denys Finch-Hatton.

The other half of the mixed metaphor is the notion of putting a message in a bottle. That is a very complex metaphor in that bottled messages can be things of hope and romance and yet also things of desperation. Messages in bottles are cast randomly into the whims of nature in the faint and sometimes feint hope of having the message conveyed to someone who gives a damn. The song was thought to be a love song, but on reading the lyrics closely, “If words could make wishes come true, I’d save every day like a treasure,” would seem somewhere between hopeful and wistful. The confusion continues in the lyrics, “If I had a box just for wishes and dreams that had never come true, the box would be empty except for the memory of how they were answered by you.” Jim Croce may have wanted to say he wanted to go through time with Ingrid and indeed a posthumous letter received by her after his death would imply that he was ready to settle down and change his honky-tonk lifestyle. But life has a way of sending messages in bottles to places in the ozone or to be dashed on distant rocks, and so it would seem were Jim Croce’s bottle of wishes.

As we spend our time these days whiling away the hours at home in splendid self-isolation, we have put time in a bottle. We are either very much alone as is the case with several of my friends or we are fortunate as I am to be sequestered with the person I love most in all the world. It is actually a gift, this time in a bottle, if we can see clear from our routines and dalliances to understand that the most valuable thing any of us has is our time. And the time we never seem to have to enjoy the quiet and soothing things in life is exactly what we all have now if only we can learn to appreciate it.

Jim Croce used a harpsichord along with a guitar to create his haunting song. It was written fifty years ago and as much as I enjoyed it during those days a half-century ago, I can’t say that I have listened to it very often since. I thought of it today for some reason as I languished in the afternoon with too much time and too little to fill the time (there are always things to do, so I should say I wasn’t feeling like doing whatever I had to do). It occurred to me that like Jim Croce all those years ago, I too had looked around enough to know, that Kim’s the one I want to go through time with whether its time in a bottle or sands in an hourglass.