“We are aware that these pictures do not so much fix the face as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens the picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist.” -Jacob Bronowski, “The Ascent of Man, Chapter 11, Knowledge or Certainty.

This Glen Campbell song is a deep favorite of mine ever since I first heard it on the radio back in 1968. I immediately got a 45rpm copy of the song (LPs were too expensive for a kid on an allowance). I still have it in my collection, its groves almost worn smooth with replaying. I was still a kid with zero understanding of how it felt to be in love and I mostly avoided whenever possible any story that had a romance as its main plot point. In retrospect that was because none of them spoke to the gay kid I was growing into. But looking over my tweenage+ collection of 45s I see an abundance of love songs among them. I ignored the lyrics and just grooved to the music, which I better understand now spoke to me in a way the boy-loves-girl lyrics could not.

Wichita Lineman with its evocative melody and background string accompaniment hooked me right away. Campbell’s vocals, and those Jimmy Webb lyrics, spoke to some ache deep inside that probably should not have existed in a 14 year old kid, but which some quiet foreknowledge understood completely. I knew what it was to be solitary. I am an only child, and I liked having my moments of solitude in my own room, or while taking my long walks, often along the railroad tracks near the apartment. When I first heard the song I thought the lineman was working on the railroad tracks looking for trouble spots, and only later understood that he was working on the telephone wires strung across the Oklahoma plains.

He’s a lineman working on the telephone lines strung out in long straight stretches of wire on the empty flat pains. AM Radio stations out there are allowed to use more energy because so much of their listening area is empty and they need more reach. And that AM radio energy can produce the effect of hearing the radio sound coming off the wires. So the song is about a lineman doing his job, and he’s hearing a beautiful woman’s voice on some AM radio program but coming off the wires he’s working on, and he falls in love with that voice.

Many years later I would take road trips across those open plains and see for myself how empty and lonesome the landscape that inspired Jimmy Webb was. It’s one thing to think you know solitude and you’re a teenage boy walking alone along the railroad tracks with suburban sprawl all around you everywhere, and another to have it hit you in the Oklahoma panhandle and you’re standing beside a road that goes straight as an arrow to both horizons and there is nothing else there but you. And then another to realize one day that you’re old and that life partner will never be.

But what I really want to point out here is how the Process of creation worked in the case of this one particular song, and that the song that Webb wrote and Campbell sang was Unfinished. And it is perfect just as it is. I was surprised when I viewed this video about its creation how accidental the process turned out to be. And that is so Right given the nature of the song. It didn’t need the formal structure of pop single tune. It’s as if the song put itself together. There are times I don’t want to know how a favorite work came to be. In this case it makes me appreciate the song even more.

And the Wichita lineman is still on the line…

Mom often asked me growing up if I regretted not having siblings. I never doubted that she loved me, but she told me often about wanting four kids, two of each sex. It didn’t work out that way for her. I always told her I was fine being an only. It was the truth.

I speak often of my brother, who I love very much, but he’s actually my half brother on dad’s side. Mom and dad divorced when I was two, and dad remarried (that one didn’t work out either). So he had two boys by different wives, and we are both first borns, something only half brothers can be. But I chafe at the term half brother. I think of him as simply my brother, who I met once briefly when we were both teenagers, and reconnected with years later as adults. We get along very well, sympatico I would say even, as only two first borns can.

But deep in my core I know that I am temperamentally an only. There are a great many myths about us…that we are self centered and selfish and vain…that we don’t socialize very well…all that. Some of it is false, some of it true but not in the way people think. We’re not so much self centered as self motivated, because there was no sibling competition to deal with in the home. But vanity is something a parent either nurtures or arrests in a child. Having 100 percent of your parent’s attention is a double edged sword, especially in a Baptist household. I got unconditional love, and whenever something bad happened mom always knew who did it because there were no other suspects. We learn to socialize just a tad differently: I had to make friends outside the home just like anyone else. But I had a room of my own all my life. That only child indifference to the herd is often misinterpreted as misanthropy. We love company, but don’t instantly wilt without it. We onlies are almost preternaturally good at keeping ourselves company.

I’m telling you this by way of saying that the mechanizations of big families with lots of kids often mystify me. It’s a life I never had and I’ll be forever on the outside looking in at these families. I know this. And I know when there is trouble among them I need to keep out of it, even when, or especially when, a friend is involved. At the moment the family of a friend of mine is going through a rough patch. A parent is in very dire health, and the kids all love the parent, just not each other.

I know some of the specifics of the trouble between them, and I can’t blame some of them for feeling the way they do about the others. But I wish they could just love each other. And I guess they can’t.

I’m in my 60s now, and I’ve seen many different kinds of families, some that are amazingly tight and others like radioactive material that just doesn’t want to stay together. I understand it and I don’t. Life is short, the universe doesn’t care, we are all we have to care for each other. But humans aren’t very good at that in the aggregate. We evolved on the east African plains and we are a kind of pack/tribe animal deep down inside. But the rational mind needs it’s privacy to function too. We need space to think, and to calm down so we can think. Mom often asked me if I regretted not having siblings and I always said I was fine with being an only. Maybe that was stereotypically selfish of me. But I would absolutely have that life again. A room of your own isn’t only peace and quiet and sanity whenever you need it, I think it allows you to learn how to calm down and let go of it when people are making you angry.