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Somebody Special
you look at me
like I’m somebody special
you make me feel needed
and I like that feeling, but
I’m not used to being
looked at that way
so please forgive me
when you see I’m afraid
oh, please forgive me
if I turn away
you treat me like
I was someone important
you make me so thankful
that I got to know you, but
I’m not used to being
treated that way
so give me some time
when you see I have changed
oh, give me some time if I seem
a bit strange
(instrumental)
you talk to me
like I mean the world to you
you tell me your good times
and all of your sorrows, but
I’m not used to being
talked to that way
so please understand me
when the words go away
oh, please understand
when I just don’t know
what to say
Reviews
Great songs. Great voice. Great words. Great to listen to with great meaning. —Rita P.
What a great song Doug. Really enjoyed it. —Barbara G.
Thank you for sharing, both your music and your thoughts. —BJ L.
A sweet song… Thanks for sharing. Anybody I know? —John B.
I like it…….Something most of us have felt…… —Bill R.
Love it — is it a new recording? Because that is “vintage” Doug, vocally! Love the message, because we don‘t know how much it means to a person to be truly “seen.” —Katie C.
This is one of my very favorites of yours, Doug! —Michael K.
Written from your heart and sung directly to the hearts of so many others! —John K.
2020 Notes
I believe friendship is one of the most precious gifts we can ever receive, but being that it does involve human beings, it is not without its challenges.
Two of my favorite authors each had a lot to say on the subject. Ralph Waldo Emerson (the namesake of my great-grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson May) wrote a well-known essay entitled, “Friendship.” Here are some of the portions I underlined long ago, all strung together:
“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me.”
“We overestimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less….Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.”
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.”
“Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart.”
“Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We must not be wilful, we must not provide. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle.”
“It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends instantly the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer….It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.”
C. S. Lewis, in his marvelous book, The Four Loves, gives us another beautiful portrait of friendship. This (philia) of the four loves alone is so exquisitely arbitrary and irresponsible, he says.
“I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
“To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it….few value it because few experience it….On a broad historical view it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.”
And now we come to my poor, little song. It is nothing more than my own experience of one chapter of one friendship story. I don’t hold myself up as an example. On the contrary, although I’ve enjoyed well more than my share of remarkable friendships, I know it but little.
I wrote “Somebody Special” for a friend from college days, as a way to try to explain to him how I felt. He was a great guy, a few years older, and I looked up to him. The weird thing was, he seemed to think I was a great guy, too—which of course made him immediately suspect. (I’m only partially joking.)
I guess I just wasn’t used to having friends who respected and thought as much of me as I did of them. It was a new thing for me, and I didn’t know how to respond. It was wonderful, but mystifying and scary, too. I’ve been on both sides of the equation through the years, as most of you probably have. It’s never easy, whichever side you’re on, but it’s worth it. Friendship always is.
Tragically, my friend was killed some years later, years before his time, and the world has been sadder for the loss. Don, this is for you. Thank you for thinking I was somebody special. You are pretty special yourself, and you must be creating some beautiful music up there in the harmony of heaven. Please pray for us, that we may somehow hear that harmony in the discord around us.
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