36. The Fake Story Behind the Song - One, Harry Nilsson

Welcome to Musing Interruptus. Thank you for clicking, thank you for listening. Today we have a story on our hands. Believe me when I say this, it is inconsequential and completely made up. Trust me. However, hopefully, you will get some nifty idiomatic phrases out of this. What do I get out of this, you ask? What don’t I get out of this… I love doing this. So, pull up a chair or put on your walking shoes, hey - ho, let’s go! As I start writing this, I immediately regret the song selection, too late for cold feet,  no use in crying over spilt milk. It is not like I can go back to the title and start all over again, and nobody would find out. No. That would be dishonest. I’m committed to this song. We are in this together. And this my friends, is a serious business, not monkey business. Here I go… Are you ready? To understand this song, we need to jump back to June 15th, 1941, the day my friend Harry was born. His mother had such a difficult time in childbirth that she decided not to have anymore after Harry. He was an only child, as you will come to appreciate, this made an impression on him. You know, back in the day, childhood didn’t exist. People were just young and strong enough to get to work or war for that matter. By 1942 he was walking and by 1943 his family was sending him off to war with the special short and young people’s brigade. War is messy and not much to be proud of, no matter what side you are on. Sending young ones may have been one of the most brilliantly calculated moves, but never spoken of, on account of the massive loss of young life. To this day, this song is the only real tale of the under 90 Battalion. Under 90 cm that is. Harry was one of the lucky ones. He came back, but was never really able to speak of the horrors he saw. Mostly because at three his vocabulary wasn’t that developed yet. He never forgot those experiences. Being an only child, going to war and being the sole survivor of his battalion. When he started school, his PTSD, undiagnosed, of course, complicated his interaction with the other young people in first grade. Let us recall that post-traumatic stress disorder was recognized as a mental health issue until 1980. As I was saying, Harry would go in and out of  flash-backs with certain triggers. The playground, as I am sure you can empathize with my dear friends, can feel like a battlefield, throw a dodgeball into the mix, and you were sure to have Harry in a state that required the school nurse to coax him down from the apple tree. This happened to be the highest place he could get to. Sometimes he would use the apples as projectiles. This, however, was well received and the young ones would crowd around Harry and cheer. His flashbacks were not swayed by the cheers. The damage had been done. His perception of himself and life as he knew it had been altered. He was alone on the field, surviving and heavens knows what else had gone on during the war. By the time he was 27 - 1968 - still undiagnosed, found solace in songwriting. One is the loneliest number, this is a reminder of how he learned to count while on the battlefield, one short stature, young person left standing. Two can be as bad as one (don’t start singing please, this fake story is not over yet). Learning to count, one, two… there were no more on the field, one left, the last to be picked to play dodgeball on the playground, one in his lonely bedroom, playing with one car, one up a tree throwing apples. Continue Reading