(This is the text version of the podcast.)

This is from the musical CAROUSEL by Rogers and Hammerstein

Why am I playing Carousel? What does this song and this movie, have to do with my dead husband and my failed romance and marriage? Well, for one thing, Carousel is the story of the death of a not very good man who is allowed to come back from Hell to help his wife and his daughter. If you’ve read my book, that’ll sound very familiar.

Another thing is that I have never been able to completely shake the feeling that the man in my life, who I lived with for 38 years, thought of me as something of a fool.

It’s hard not to have grave doubts about yourself when the person you love and trust turns out to have such a low opinion of you.

And on top of that, to be subjected to all this psychic stuff was something of a trial for me. Sometimes I felt like I must be crazy, and I know a lot of people think anything psychic is crazy.

But, when I watched this movie, whose story was based on an old Hungarian play, it seemed as if maybe I was not the crackbrained idiot that Tom and everyone else seems to think. Maybe going head over heels in love is something very important and powerful, not dumb.

So, a Carousel is a Merry-Go-Round, a contraption that spins dizzily around as you ride up and down, accompanied by a loud organ playing an intoxicating waltz. It’s not only delightful to ride, it’s a charming, romantic, old-fashioned metaphor for life, a piece of carnival theater about going round and round and up and down till the music stops. Life is a Merry-Go-Round in a way.

When someone gave me the Carousel movie DVD, I watched it and it brought back another of those strange, sad memories that have haunted me ever since I knew the truth about my late husband.

This memory of mine is one of those tricks of memory, a deep and distinct feeling that has remained puzzling and disturbing and still unresolved. It’s about the one time Tom and I took our young son to Griffith Park in Los Angeles for a picnic and to ride their famous Merry-Go-Round, a huge, fantastic, gorgeous carousel drenched in turn of the century charm, that every visitor to Los Angeles should ride at least once.

It was built in 1926 and brought to LA in 1937. There are 68, colorful, magical horses, every one of which is a jumper, going up and down as well as merrily circling to the swelling fanfare of the Stinson Band organ, reputed to be the largest carousel organ on the West Coast. It plays 1500 different marches and waltzes at top pitch. It’s a really special carousel and quite an experience to see and ride.

The memory I have is of the bewitching beauty of the carousel and the peaceful, gracious park surrounding it. To have a picnic in a park like this, with a happy child, and give him a thrilling ride on the Merry-Go-round was for me a touchingly romantic and memorable experience.

An afternoon like that with the ones you love is so affecting, such a perfect delight, that not to be at least a little emotionally moved, or to grasp your partner’s hand, to exchange a smile and feel grateful just to be alive is very odd.

And that’s what I remember, even today, so very clearly. Tom did not share my happiness. It did not transport his feelings, it did not bring us emotionally closer, it fell flat. He seemed bored and anxious to leave. Now, I suppose he was probably thinking of his secret life or some other woman.

Nevertheless, the setting, the picnic and the hyper romanticism of the carousel, much like the Rogers and Hammerstein music that I played, is so overpowering that any normal person, even a cheating husband, has to practically be made of stone not to respond at least a little. But Tom’s heart was turned to stone. His response to romance was to shut down emotionally. And I remember so well his blankness, which made me feel alone and cheated. Little did I know, right?

If you’ve read the book, you will know that Tom always cheated. He cheated me and himself every day of our marriage and even before. I can see the close parallels between our story and the musical Carousel.

This musical begins at a carnival carousel, where handsome and charming Billy Bigelow, a cynical carnival barker, is being used by a jealous older woman to huckster in the young women to ride her carousel.

Our heroine rides the Merry-Go-Round and flirts with him, causing him to lose his job. He marries her, though, she, like himself, doesn’t really believe in love, but she falls hard for this no-good roustabout, He gets her pregnant, but won’t get a regular job, so he steals to support her, and is killed.

The movie opens as he is allowed one day to come back from Hell to help the family he betrayed. If he can help them, he gets to go to heaven. Given this DVD as a gift, I watched it and couldn’t help but be struck by how eerily similar it was to my own story.

I had been familiar with the movie many years ago and never particularly liked it. The story is based on Lilliom, the Hungarian play by Ferenc Molnar. To me the story in Carousel always seemed to be one of those late Nineteenth Century, depressing European fantasy romances. The kind that make you wonder if anybody in Europe ever had a happy day.

I was familiar with that kind of pessimistic thinking because my St. Louis, German grandparents were very much of that mindset, even though they came to the US as young children in the late Nineteenth Century. I think of it as a sort of peasant stoicism. They came from a long line of working-class Germans whose life was spent 6 days a week, 10 hours a day either deep in the mines or farming for equally long, punishing hours. Trying to wrest a living by the sweat of your brow tends to make people a little depressed and hopeless, not to mention tired.

What has all this got to do with carousels and romance? My grandparents only sporadically attended church, if at all, by the time I know them. I believe they considered God as a luxury in life that poor, struggling people were better off not thinking about. No point in raising useless hopes. God wasn’t likely to ever do anything for them. And Love was also something for rich people. Life was about getting whatever you could and hanging onto it.

But my mother had moved on from their stoic pessimism. She loved the theater, and usually took me with her, since my scientist father had no use for theater or romance. Theater, of course, is intrinsically romantic, since it suspends reality and presents a vision of an imaginary life and world. So, I acquired a strong taste for the romance to be found everywhere in life.

As I watched the movie musical Carousel, it slowly dawned on me that what it’s saying is that there is a very strong, unbreakable bond between romantic love and death, and ultimately to God. But, for most of my life I never had a very strong belief in God.

And though my late husband Tom, as you know if you read the book, watched and responded to some romance movies, he didn’t really believe in love, either. We both were a lot like the cynical characters in the movie.

For many years after I learned of who Tom truly was, I had felt cheated not only on, but of love and romance. I had fallen hopelessly and completely in love with him. And life had offered us many profound and delightful romantic experiences, like that day at the carousel. But, like Billy Bigelow in the movie, Tom tried to cheat at life, not by stealing, but by playing around with other women and hanging onto a secret life.

A month ago, when I had just finished recording the audio version of my book, which I had written several years ago, while the events were still fresh in my mind, I had happened to watch Carousel. And it brought back to me the Griffith Park memory and gave me a new insight into my life.

Here was my story in an old Hungarian romance play, that has been around and very popular for at least a century. It made me reconsider my romance and life and Tom. Maybe I wasn’t a fool and a crazy person. Obviously, many other people felt the truth and power of this story very strongly, strongly enough to make that story into plays, movies and to inspire a memorable musical score by one the all-time great American musical teams, Rogers and Hammerstein.

I think maybe when you live something, you’re too close to it to feel the emotional power and truth of what’s happened to you. At first, it’s too personal. But now, it’s been so many years since I’ve learned the truth, that I think I can accept that I am not the fool that Tom thought me. I can see that, yes, when he despised my love, he did go to Hell. And he was allowed to come back to help us.

I had never realized the deep connection that all real romances have to heaven and hell. Tom coming back and confessing to me proves we did have a little bit of real romance, a romance that was eternal in its own, sad way.

Not the romance I would have chosen, of course, but that spinning carousel of life, music, and love that goes on even beyond death was really all there, it had all the elements of a love story, just not in the happy ending in the way I would have liked.

Still, maybe knowing all this is true is my happy ending. Would I have ever known for sure that love was deathless if this hadn’t happened to me?

More than that, in the end I proved to the man I loved, wherever he is now, that love IS real and IS strong, not just the foolish idea of a naïve woman. The carousel has come full circle. The beautiful painted horses that leap around and around so happily are real…somewhere; and somewhere the organ is playing a waltz, if only we will let ourselves hear it. Maybe Tom did get to go to heaven because he learned to believe in the power of love.

But, an interesting feature of the CAROUSEL plot is the older woman who used Billy Bigelow to keep her business going and even, later in the movie, tried to get him to come back. All that stops him from going back to being her barker is that he finds out his wife Julie is pregnant, so he foolishly and showing his lack of confidence, tried robbery to support them and is killed. Depressed men die young, like Billy Bigelow and like my husband, Tom O’Rourke

In the next podcast, I will discuss depressed men and the mothers who made them that way.