January 5, 2025
I’ve seen your picture, your name in lights above it.
This is your big debut, it’s like a dream come true.
— Steely Dan
While Frank was driving through the mountains, the song “Peg” by Steely Dan came on the radio. He hadn’t heard it in years. “Peg, it will come back to you … Peg it will come back to you…”
Listening to the song took him back 45 years to the day he bought the album Aja as soon as it came out. He brought it home and couldn’t wait to put it on the stereo. When the song came on, he and his cousin Hope began dancing like two senseless fools. Life was a lot simpler then, and they were a lot younger. He never remembered seeing her so happy.
That song forever reminded him of Hope. When she was 7, her mother died, and a few years later her father committed suicide because the loneliness was too much for him to endure.
Life just never seemed easy, so much pain. She eventually married and found herself in and out of hospitals because of mental illness and depression.
Her life seemed to drift along from crisis to crisis. Years later, after her brother killed himself, she couldn’t recover. Some people are just too fragile for this world. At her funeral, Frank prayed that she finally found a better place with her brother, her mother and father.
He wondered how a woman named Hope, could be denied it. That one happy afternoon dancing to Peg was hardly enough to compensate for the sadness.
Frank couldn’t get the song “Peg” out of his head. Two nights later, Hope appeared to him in a dream. She said nothing, but then as she turned to leave, she smiled.
Hear Steely Dan sing “Peg,” (https://youtu.be/ZwyTrWJ7Djw?si=hBiTl-6P6tA-isNU)
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