Matthew M Cornett

Tag: new-book

  • “Year of the Cat”

    I’m going to start out this week by making a confession and I don’t care if you laugh. I one hundred percent have a “soft spot” (pun intended) for 1970’s Soft Rock and I know exactly who to both thank and blame. Give me a sappy 70’s love song soaked in pop sentiment and polyester, and I’m right back there in that front room on Northside Drive, sitting in my mother’s lap in that ugly exorcist green chair, listening to her favorite 8 track cassette tapes on a rainy Fall day in 1976. Those kinds of moments probably made me the sappy 53 year old I am now but I’m good with that.

    I’m the youngest of four kids. I was born in 1972 and my sister is two years older than me which means that she started kindergarten in the Fall of 1975. From that moment until I started Kindergarten in the Fall of 1977, it was me and my mom during the day. Those days were spent playing, reading, listening to music, watching The Electric Company, and napping which I hated. Making me sit still was the worst punishment and I think my mom invented “time out.” Thinking back, I couldn’t have had a better childhood. I define my life by the beautiful memories I have and those are the earliest and most self-defining. What a gift my mother gave me. 

    The music that stands out to me from those days comes from artists like The Carpenters and Barry Manilow (again, I already said to go ahead and laugh). Hearing them and basically any mid 70’s Soft Rock song immediately transports me back to those days. To me, those songs feel like a warm cozy blanket on a lazy rainy day. If you don’t get that from some kind of music no matter how corny, I feel sorry for you. I do have a couple of playlists you can check out though so let me know!

    In chapter 6 of my book If We Never Meet Again, I tell the story of Hannah. She had terminal cancer and was only a few years older than me. As I stated early in her story “Hannah was the one patient who changed everything for me. The others before her were powerful experiences that taught me about hospice but Hannah changed me. She imprinted herself on my soul” (41). When I go to patient homes, I always end up looking at the pictures they have around and the older, the better. I’m fascinated with older pictures of times gone by. When I went to Hannah’s house for the first time, I noticed this picture of “Hannah and her sister dancing outdoors at some celebration, each with a gorgeous smile on their faces laughing right at the moment the photo was taken. Hannah was dressed in silk like material that glistened in the camera flash” (42). The photo was a beautiful moment and I don’t think I will ever forget that smile on her face. 

    As fate would have it, somehow I ended up at her house one night so her brother could get some rest out on the couch. I didn’t know it then but she was actively dying and I was there holding her hand:

    “As I tried to settle back in the chair to keep her company while her brother rested, Hannah stared straight up at the ceiling. A tear started out of the corner of her right eye and then she looked over at me. I could see that she was terrified. She opened and turned her right hand toward me. I placed mine in hers and patted her lovingly with my other hand doing my best to give her my most comforting and sympathetic smile. Our eyes were locked onto each other, hers filled with fear, and mine attempting to be strong. “It’s going to be alright Hannah. I’m here with you and I’m not going anywhere. Close your eyes and try to rest.” She never did. We sat there for at least three hours locked in that embrace with her eyes going from mine, to the ceiling, around the room, then back to mine again. Everytime our eyes met I smiled at her trying my best to comfort this woman I did not know (45).”

    When it came time to choose a song from my playlist to represent Hannah, it was an easy choice because of that photo of her. I have always loved Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” from 1976. Al Stewart is a fascinating Scottish born musician. If you get a chance, watch some interviews he has done. He is a genuinely down to earth guy that you could hang out with at a local pub. According to the video “Al Stewart talks Year of the Cat” you can find on Youtube, he grew up wanting to be in rock and roll like Duanne Eddy who inspired him to pick up the guitar but felt his early rock and roll work was awful until Bob Dylan came along and “saved his life.” He says “He (Dylan) couldn’t play and he couldn’t sing either but he could do things with lyrics that were magical.” He set off to be a folk singer and found success in the late 60’s and early 70’s. He was later influenced by Paul Simon as well. He eventually found himself on tour in America supporting Linda Ronstadt. He began work on what would become “Year of the Cat.” He based it off a warm up riff his piano player kept playing. The record company didn’t like his first version about a british comedian who had committed suicide and they asked him to rewrite the lyrics. His girlfriend at the time had a book on Vietnamese Astrology and the page was open to a chapter called “The Year of the Cat.” He thought to himself, “that to me looks like a song title.” Casablanca was on the television and he “started playing with it.” The rest is history. He felt the song wasn’t that great so he made it the last track on the album but the song was a hit and resonated with listeners. 

    I have always loved the song. Its opening piano riff that takes its time to build up to the moment is a masterclass in pop musical set up. Modern music with its short attention span desperately trying to catch the listener’s attention within the first 15 seconds could learn from him. When it finally kicks in to the drums, bass, and electric guitar it has a perfect feel and flow. And I have always loved its sound: crisp, clean, and pure. It sounds like a less perfectly engineered Steely Dan recording, which is not a putdown in any way. By the time he sings “On a morning from a Bogart movie” you realize that this is truly something special. But what really gets me is when he says what I think is one of the best lines from any pop song to ever describe a woman:

    She comes out of the sun

    In a silk dress running

    Like a watercolor in the rain

    Don’t bother asking for explanations

    She’ll just tell you that she came

    In the year of the cat 

    That line is mesmerizing. “Out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain.” The alliteration sun and silk…the rhyme of sun and run…the image of a watercolor in the rain. Dang. It’s Shakesperian. It’s as perfect a line as I’ve ever heard in pop music. In my text I wrote “I don’t have any idea who Al Stewart was describing in those lines but it should have been Hannah in that photo” (42). 

    The ladies group at my mom’s church back in Lexington, Ky, read my book for their book club and I had the privilege to go back home there in March for their meeting. One of the women asked me which death was the hardest on me. Without a hesitation I said “Hannah…it was like watching my own sister die.” At the end of the chapter, I wrote:

    People come in and out of our lives for all kinds of reasons. I think Hannah came into mine to truly personalize it for me. When Mr. Miller died, it was simply a culmination of a life well lived and there was comfort in knowing that he was at rest. Hannah wasn’t much older than me; she could have been my sister. Her death felt more tragic. In the world of hospice, you start to see death so much that it just becomes part of the job but even after all this time, I’m still not over her. I hope I never will be. 

    I can honestly say that sitting here writing this, I’m still not over her. Her sister-in-law was right. I would have loved to have known her before the brief time that I did. But I can honestly say that her death was one that influenced me to begin writing these stories. It’s not much, but it is her legacy and that makes me happy. 

  • “Love Untold”

    This week I am skipping ahead a chapter because I messed up. To prepare for my weekly blog, I start out on Monday thinking about the upcoming topic. I spend the week thinking about it off and on and come up with an approach to take. The problem is, I was thinking a chapter ahead to “Love Untold” and have been working it out all week. It’s fine and I’ll backtrack next week starting tomorrow. 


    I have always been a fan of the underdog in life and I spent this week wondering why off and on. Whenever I want to understand something, I think about it, read about it, talk about it, and eventually make sense of it for myself. In the Psychology Today article “Why do we love Underdog Stories? Psychology Weighs In” by Matt Johnson, the author said something interesting that really made me think. Halfway through he argues “The underdog story is one of the most classic storylines with a universal appeal, reliably driving feelings of empathy. They tap into the qualities we like best about ourselves and find most admirable in others.” I have to admit two things here: I am naturally a very empathetic person. I don’t know why but I have always been able to connect with people who are going through something and I promise, it’s genuine. I’m sure people can fake that but I genuinely do feel for people and their experiences so that makes sense to me. But the other issue is even more personal: I guess I have always viewed myself as an underdog too. 

    It’s not because I had a tough life or anything. Sure, we weren’t rich, but we certainly weren’t poor either. I had nothing like that as compared to my father. He grew up genuinely poor. I remember hearing stories about him growing up so poor he and his buddy would hunt for pop bottles to sell so they could buy a school carton of milk to split for lunch. He didn’t want the other kids to know he was poor so he wouldn’t eat the free lunch they gave to the poor kids and thought of that breaks my heart. Nobody expected that poor kid to do anything with his life. He was from the wrong side of town and a true underdog, but that boy grew up, joined the Navy, married the love of his life, made something amazing of himself, and has a family that loves and adores him to this day. How can you not respect that?

    When I was in 5th grade,  The Outsiders movie came out and it changed me as a kid. It cemented what would eventually become my identity. I became obsessed with it. I read the book over and over, watched the movie everytime I could on cable, and even did a book report wearing rolled up jeans, high topped Converse, and a cut off purple sweatshirt just like Ponyboy. I connected with those boys and now that I’m older, I know why. It’s because that’s how I imagined my own father’s experience. In my mind, my old man was born “grease,” and that’s what I was too. No wonder, I loved Elvis and The Outsiders. Heck, by the time I was a Junior in High School, I was greasing my own hair (actually moussing and hair spraying it…go ahead and laugh) and pulling it down in the front. I honestly looked like some scrawny Elvis/Rebel Without a Cause/Cry Baby rip off in the late 80’s but it was my identity and it stuck.

    So I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the kid no one believes in, the kid who had no shot at success, yet somehow overcame those odds. Rocky Balboa, Daniel LaRusso, and Marty McFly…those guys were my heroes. And that love for the underdog even made its way into my musical tastes with one specific band- the greatest band that could have and should have been-The Replacements. They were a bunch of slackers from Minneapolis who formed a band in 1979. The problem for them was that everytime they got close to really breaking out into the “big time” they usually committed some act of self sabotage. Their early stuff was happily loud, obnoxious, and quite drunken. Their music matured by the mid to late 80’s much to the discontent of their early post punk fans. From 1981 to 1990 they made 7 albums and finally broke up in 1991. 

    I wasn’t introduced to them until the Fall of 1990 when I was sitting in ENG 101 class there at the University of KY. My TA’s name was Ben Webb and he was a really cool guy who made a comment about being excited for the new Replacements album (1990’s All Shook Down) which coincidentally was to be their last as a band. I checked it out and fell in love with it. Now some purists would say that doesn’t make me a true Replacements fan because by that time, it was basically a Paul Westerburg solo record and I understand that argument. But for me, I started with that album, then moved back to 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul, and finally to 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me. I loved those three albums and their “Bash and Pop” sound which bassist Tommy Stinson would later call his own band in the early 90’s. Paul was the genius behind that sound and he went on to have an amazing solo career as well. I personally believe that he is one of the finest underdog lyricists of my generation. His ability to write about everyday experiences in such poignant and playful, thoughtful and irreverent ways still blows my mind to this day. He writes about loners and losers, people who never had a chance or blew the ones they had. And he does it all with conviction and self deprecation. 

    A perfect example of this is the song “Love Untold” off of his 1996 album, Eventually. It tells the sweet story of a bashful couple who were supposed to meet but never did. He sings:

    They were gonna meet, on a rocky mountain street

    Two bashful hearts beat in advance

    Their hands were gonna sweat, it was all set

    She ain’t showed up yet, still a good chance

    It’s a love untold

    It’s a love untold

    As he sings the first verse, it’s hopeful and you can imagine these two getting ready with the sweet excitement of that first meeting. But as it develops you find out that it never happens. Ever. For some reason, they never meet or fall in love. By the middle of the song you get a sense that it was doomed from the start with “Games will be played, Excuses will be made, The stupid things they said, In their prayers, All about a love untold.” For whatever reason, it just doesn’t work out. By the end of the song the narrator seems crushed: 

    They were gonna meet on a crummy little street

    It never came to be, I’m told

    Does anyone recall the saddest love of all

    The one that lets you fall, nothing to hold

    It’s the love untold

    It’s the love untold

    Once upon a love untold

    To me, this song illustrates his genius. He takes these nobody characters that nobody cares about and turns their story into a tragedy, using it as almost a warning to us all. I love it and when it came time to pick a song for Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Chapter 7 of my book If We never Meet Again, this song was perfect. If you haven’t read the book, it’s a chapter about a time I lied straight through my teeth to get a saintly woman back into the ER to see her husband one last time. It was right at the beginning of COVID, and she panicked, called 911, and he coded on the way to the hospital. They stabilized him, and put him on life support. I went with her to the hospital but they weren’t about to let her back in there to see him. I took matters into my own hands, and somehow after waiting there for hours well into the night, I talked the doctor into letting me take her back to him. We walked back there and I helped her stand there beside her husband so she could kiss him goodbye. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.

    Let’s face it. Outside of their circle, they were nobodies. No one would ever hear about their love story. No one would ever care. Theirs was merely another story that was destined to be a “love untold.” But just like when they told that sweet woman she couldn’t see her husband, I wasn’t about to let that happen. The chapter ends with:

    “I was glad I didn’t take no for an answer from the hospital, and I am still glad and completely unashamed to this day that I lied to get her into that room to see the love of her life one last time. I have told some big lies before that I truly regret but not that one. I will gladly pay whatever price I owe for it and do it again without hesitation still to this day.”

    It’s one of the best things this underdog has ever done. And I think Westerburg would love that irony.

  • “Long As I Can See the Light”

    When I woke up this morning, I began thinking about what approach I would take to today’s blog entry. I’ve been a fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival for as long as I can remember, but I started thinking about where it all started, which led me to sharing a story with my wife that I have never shared with anyone. I’ve started to put the pieces together and decided to share it here as well.

    I’ve already stated that my musical tastes were shaped initially by my family. When I think about CCR, I think about my older brother Gary. In 1982, I was 10 years old. He was 19, driving a cool 1965 El Camino, and dating the love of his life. He was always a cool, eclectic guy and his musical tastes were no different. When he wasn’t around I would go in his room and raid his cassette tape collection. One that I listened to all the time was his copy of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Creedence Gold. The second side of that tape began with the one song of theirs that I truly loved as a kid: “The Midnight Special.” 

    Honestly, I have no idea why but I loved that song. Maybe I was introduced to it through Twilight Zone: The Movie which came out that year and had the “You wanna see something really scary?” segment that had the song in the background. Or maybe my brother was just playing it randomly…either way I loved it. I remember this one time (here’s the story I told my wife this morning) I took my other brother Drew’s big gray boombox, threw Credence Gold into it, and walked around the neighborhood with the song blasting. My neighbors must have wondered “what is wrong with that kid?” but there I was grooving down the street with my skinny little arms hauling that boombox around blaring “Let the Midnight Special, Shine a light on me!” I played the song for my wife this morning and imitated what I must have looked like as that kid walking down the street. I’m not sure she was impressed and we both agreed I must have been a weird kid.

    As I got older, my love for CCR never went away. When I started buying CD’s in the late 80’s, the first one I bought was The Who’s Who’s Better, Who’s Best (another band whose love I got from my older brother Gary). The second one I ever bought? CCR’s Chronicle: 20 Greatest Hits where I discovered “Long As I Can See the Light” for the first time. It instantly became one of my favorites and found its way to “My Favorite Songs” playlist eventually where it is still there to this day. For me, it’s one of those songs you want played at your funeral. It’s just powerful, at least for me. 

    I do have one memory that made the song stand out to me and came back to me years later when I was driving to a death. When I was an 18 year old kid I had a close group of friends. We didn’t drink, or do drugs but what we did was bond over was driving and listening to music. I think for us that was our drug. We used to head out into the country late at night driving down Bryan Station Road late on a Saturday at 2:00 am blasting out our music. There was something about being out late on a summer night with some of the trippiest music we knew such as “No Quarter” by Led Zeppelin or “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd. The cool summer air, the small two lane country road out in the middle of nowhere. Man. That was it. 

    There was this one area that had this dead end off one of those roads. We used to park, hang out, and just enjoy the music. One night I remember leaning against my car and looking way off into the distance where there was this house on a hill with one light in a window. I went back around and switched the CD and listened to the lyrics:

    Put a candle in the window

    Cause I feel I got to move

    Though I’m going, going

    I’ll be coming home soon

    Long as I can see the light

    I loved that song, but that moment gave it new meaning for me. John Fogerty once said that the song was “about the loner in me. Wanting to feel understood, needing those at home to shine a light so that I can make my way back.” For an 18 year old kid about to start college in a couple of months, that song was the perfect moment for me..one that came back to me 30 years later.

    In the third chapter of my book If We Never Meet Again, I talk about my experience with Arthur. He was a very poor patient who lived in the middle of nowhere between Conway, SC, and Georgetown, SC. It’s a very rural area and he lived off of what his wife called a sand road (which I mistakenly called a dirt road). He was my second death ever. I met him a month or so into COVID. Medicare had shut down the volunteer program but the wife still needed to be able to go into town to go grocery shopping once a week. I ended up going every Tuesday at 10:00 am for about six weeks. In the chapter, I talk about how that experience taught me about the mundane life of the caretaker who had to watch their loved one die with no relief at all. Toward the end of the chapter I stated “ I’m glad I did sit there with him for those weeks. It taught me more about the psychology of hospice than I ever could have learned reading or watching training videos. Doing that gave me a glimpse of the loneliness a caregiver must feel while watching someone die.” 

    When he did finally pass, it was in the middle of the night. When I drove down that road it hit me how isolated that place really was. It was pitch black and for a city boy like me, it was a little unnerving. But as the road turned toward their house, off in the distance I saw a single light in the window and I knew where I was. I got to the house, called the funeral home, and waited for them to pick him up. My nurse was inside with the wife and I was out by my truck waiting for the transport service. It was a beautiful, cool night just like those from 30 years ago. I was there in the darkness and could see the brilliance of that single light in the window. When it came time to write Arthur’s chapter, there was only one choice for the title. The lyrics “Pack my bag and let’s get moving, Cause I’m bound to drift a while, Though I’m gone, gone, You don’t have to worry no, Long as I can see the light” belong to Arthur as much as anyone else. Everytime I listen to them, I still think of him. 

  • “A Whiter Shade of Pale”

    “A Whiter Shade of Pale”

    I was truly blessed to grow up in the 1980’s. Although I was born in 1972 and events of the late 70’s impacted me, it was my coming of age in the early, mid, and late 80’s that shaped me into who I was to become. Many aspects of that time period influenced me, but it was probably the movies and the music that shaped me most. They created a love for both that still endures in me to this day.

    The movie soundtrack played a very essential role in helping me to expand my horizons as a kid. While I had MTV and “Casey Kasem’s Top 40,” both of those were designed around what was popular on the charts at the time. The movie soundtrack contained those popular hits also, but the extra tracks took you somewhere else entirely. For example, in the fall of 1986, as a 14 year old kid, I went to Northpark Cinemas in Lexington, Kentucky, one afternoon to see a double feature of Ferrris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty in Pink. What a time to be alive! Ferris had some great music in it but it was Pretty in Pink that introduced me to OMD and The Psychedelic Furs. You never saw them on MTV or heard them on the Top 40. For a kid living in Lexington, KY, this opened up a whole new world of possibilities. But not only them…it also had INXS, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, and The Smiths. I had already liked what we now call the “New Romantic” bands like Duran Duran, The Human League, and A Flock of Seagulls because bands like those were in regular rotation on MTV, but the Pretty in Pink soundtrack and many others like it introduced me to so much more. I remember going to Musicland in Lexington Mall and Camelot Records in Fayette Mall searching for the back catalogs of these bands we had no idea even existed. These albums came to define my experience and still live on fondly in my memories and on my Spotify playlists.

    When I turned 16, I got a job working at the Lexington Mall Cinemas and had the time of my young life. I remember waiting on the film credits to end so I could quickly clean up the theater before the next showing. As those credits rolled, there was always music playing. In 1989 we had When Harry Met Sally and by the time that film left I knew every one of the classics that Harry Connick Jr. performed. I remember picking up empty popcorn buckets and singing “It Had to Be You” as loudly as I wanted. I eventually picked up the soundtrack cd and am still a Harry Connick Jr. fan to this day. Not to mention, it led me to Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, all of whom are still in regular rotation for me as well. Don’t discount the power of a great soundtrack.

    That same year, there was a film called New York Stories. It consisted of three stories that revolved around New York City at the time. The segment directed by Martin Scorsese was the one that stands out to me because of one song: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harem. The segment was about an artist played by Nick Nolte. As I remember, the opening had him painting and listening to the song. I have no idea why, but that song entranced me. It was beautiful. I really don’t remember much about the movie, but that song found its way onto “My Favorite Songs” playlist that I have been making for the last 20 years. 

    The band released the song in 1967. Rock music was changing at that time into much more of an art form. The Beatles and The Beach Boys had been going back and forth creating masterpiece after masterpiece, each of them pushing things forward.The Beatles started it with Rubber Soul in 1965. That album pushed Brian Wilson to create Pet Sounds in 1966, which in turn pushed the Beatles to create Revolver. By October of 1966, Wilson released “Good Vibrations” and in 1967 The Beatles released Sgt. Peppers. And none of that even begins to acknowledge what Dylan, the Stones, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, and Simon and Garfunkel were also doing at that time. Rock music was being pushed into a whole new realm and Procol Harum were part of it as well.

    They considered themselves a “blues band with classical influences.” In fact, the melody of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was created when organist Gary Brooker was trying to play J. S. Bach’s “Orchestral Suite No 3.” He started on the right note then couldn’t remember the rest. Brooker once said “it does a bar or two of Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ before it veers off. That spark was all it took. I wasn’t consciously combining rock with classical, it’s just that Bach’s music was in me.” The lyrics are vague, seemingly about a drunken party, a “seasick” protagonist, and a girl with a “ghostly” face that “turned a whiter shade of pale.” Whatever the song is about, for me it has always been the feel of it with that beautiful organ melody. 

    When I was writing the second chapter to my book If We Never Meet Again, there was never a question as to which song on my playlist would anchor it. The chapter is about the first death I ever experienced in the world of hospice. In that chapter, I refer to it as my initiation:

    “My first death was quite the experience. Now you have to remember, the only place I had ever seen a dead body was at a funeral home all dressed up and on display. I certainly had never touched a dead body. As a teacher I had seen my share of crazy moments. I broke up fights, managed students during emergency drills, and dealt with my share of crazy parents. But this was different. Seriously, you don’t have to make up what happened to me” (11).

    He was my first death and nothing had prepared me for it. In the chapter, I describe the horror of the moment. The wife was screaming, the coroner was cussing me out and it was a truly dizzying moment:

    “I walked in the house, turned the corner, and there was Albert laid out on the floor, eyes wide open in a look of complete disbelief, naked, with arms and legs opened wide. He still had a tube coming out of his mouth where they had intubated him with blood splattered across the floor. I had never seen anything like that moment. It was a scene out of a horror movie to me, or a bloody picture from a crime scene. He looked terrible and it was certainly not the way I would want to go out” (13-14).

    Still to this day, I cannot think of him without seeing that look on his face. It was horrible. I later stated that the experience was my “trial by fire into the world of hospice; none of the online training I had completed remotely prepared me for such insanity.” Later, I continued “The memory of Bert splayed out there on the floor with that terrified look in his eyes…I don’t think I’ll ever shake it. It’s still just as vivid to me as the morning it happened.”

    I guess that for me the “Whiter Shade of Pale” line initially applied to the look on his poor face, but honestly, it could have been and probably was on mine the whole time.