There’s a time when you have to say goodbye, and a time when you choose to say goodbye.

For the first time, I chose to say goodbye to my friend Curtis today.

I had to say goodbye when he was ripped away from me in a car accident thirty years ago. And all this time I’ve been resenting that accident.

But recently the song, “Freebird”* by Lynryd Skynyrd has kept echoing in my head. If I heard it on the radio, I would listen for its entirety. I would pull off the road to listen to it. I couldn’t get that song out of my mind.

I had heard it at so many high school dances in the 70’s. It was a classic.

Today I wanted to hear that song. I listened to it over and over on YouTube. I let the song sink in and I cried for a long time. And my heart changed. I needed to hear the words and more important, I needed to feel them.

“If I leave here tomorrow

Would you still remember me?

For I must be traveling on, now,

‘Cause there’s too many places I’ve got to see.

But, if I stayed here with you, girl,

Things just couldn’t be the same.

‘Cause I’m as free as a bird now,

And this bird you cannot change.

Oh… oh… oh… oh…

And the bird you cannot change.

And this bird you cannot change.

Lord knows I can’t change.

Bye, bye, baby it’s been a sweet love,

Though this feeling I can’t change.

But please don’t take it so badly,

‘Cause Lord knows I’m to blame.

But if I stayed here with you girl,

Things just couldn’t be the same.

‘Cause I’m as free as a bird now,

And this bird you cannot change.

Oh… oh… oh… oh…

And the bird you cannot change.

And this bird you cannot change.

Lord knows, I can’t change.

Lord help me, I can’t change.

Lord I can’t change,

Won’t you fly high, free bird, yeah.

I always thought I was the free bird because I’m the fiercely independent one. But today I realized that Curtis was the free bird, and that’s why I love this song so much. It’s imprinted on my mind, like the news of his death and my turmoil after his loss.

Yet, what if he said to me, “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? For I must be traveling on, now, cause there’s too many places I’ve got to see”?

And what if he‘s saying in that song, “Bye, bye, baby it’s been a sweet love…though this feeling I can’t change. ‘Cause I’m as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change.”

I can respect that. I can love him for that. I can thank him for that.

And now I can let him go. On to his travels, and his places to see.

‘Cause I’m as free as a bird now. And this bird you cannot change.

We were together for a little while and forever.

I can be a free bird.

*Song by Ronald W. Van Zant and Allen Collins.

 

Anne Hamilton 2012

Anne Hamilton

Anne Hamilton is an NYC-based freelance dramaturg and the Founder of Hamilton Dramaturgy, an international consultancy. She created Hamilton Dramaturgy’s TheatreNow!, where she hosts and produces an oral history podcast series of important theatre women working in America. Anne has dramaturged for Andrei Serban, Michael Mayer, Lynn Nottage, NYMF, Niegel Smith, Classic Stage Company, and the Great Plains Theatre Festival, among others. She is also an award-winning playwright. Her chapter, “Freelance Dramaturgs in the 21st Century: Journalists, Advocates, and Collaborators” appears in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy. She was a Bogliasco Foundation Fellow, won the Dean’s Prize for Dramaturgy at Columbia University School of the Arts, and holds dual citizenship in Italy and the United States. Anne lost her best friend Curtis in a head-on car accident in 1979, two weeks after his high school graduation. Her emotional life became frozen and she has spent the last thirty-two years exploring all areas of self-expression, particularly through stage plays, poetry, theatre, art, and music. She is currently developing her own chamber-play-with-dance entitled ANOTHER WHITE SHIRT, about the way that grief moves through the body.

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