What's happening here? The husband is in the driveway without his keys, and he's thinking about leaving. He's even thinking about going to some extra trouble just to do it. What happens next is that he flips on the headlights and leaves them on to ensure that the car's battery will die, effectively trapping both celebrants of this anniversary in the same house, and he heads back into the house. Then, in a lyric perhaps tellingly not included in the lyric sheet, he says this:
The night will end in some form of excess:
pants around ankles
too weak to fully undress
Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe it’s just people like me, who’ve stared down a fate they didn’t want and lived to experience the blessed miracle of watching that fate recede from view. Either way, “too weak to undress” doesn’t, I can tell you, refer to alcohol-induced fatigue, or to sleeplessness. It refers to the unique weariness of having come through a firestorm somewhat damaged but intact. And so the song concludes, aptly and gorgeously:
We are far from flowers
Cut and dried
So let us thrive, let us thrive
Let us thrive
Just like the weeds
We curse sometimes
...and all I can do, besides exhale a deeply Freedom Rockesque “yeah,” is think to myself: thank God for my wife. Thank God for this anniversary. Thank God that love is stronger than death, and than things worse than death. Thank God for favors large and small. And thank God for Bill Callahan, whose music is wonderful, and whose eye is keen, who is not afraid to look down into the cool wet darkness and report back on what he saw there.
Love,
John