"A bottle of white, a bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rosé instead..."
The last stop of the trip was St. James Winery, tucked into the Missouri hills like an old friend waiting for our arrival. The sky was overcast, a dull February afternoon with the promise of rain lingering in the distance. After a weekend away—after seeing Billy Joel live—there was something poetic about pausing here, among the vines stripped bare by winter, where time seemed to slow.
I stepped inside the warm glow of the tasting room, the room a rainbow of bottles. It didn’t take long before I spotted them: a bottle of white, a bottle of red. I didn’t need them, but how could I leave without them? Given the weekend’s soundtrack, they felt less like purchases and more like mementos, souvenirs of a night spent in the company of a man whose music had underscored so many chapters of my life.
"We'll get a table near the street in our old familiar place..."
Some songs you carry with you. They attach themselves to moments, to people, to entire chapters of your life. Scenes from an Italian Restaurant had always been one of my favorites. Maybe it was the way Billy Joel told a story—how he could turn a simple dinner conversation into a three-act play. Maybe it was how the song wasn’t just about Brenda and Eddie, but about all of us, about how love rises and falls, about how time carves through people like a river through stone.
Or maybe it was because, one night, it broke me.
It was after she had moved out. I had been drifting through old pictures on my phone, something I hadn’t been brave enough to do until that moment. A thousand tiny flashes of our life together scrolled past—her smile in the early morning light, the way she danced in the ocean, the trips, the inside jokes, the mundane snapshots of a shared life. I don’t know what I was searching for. Proof, maybe, that it had been real. That we had existed in a way that mattered.
And then the song started playing.
"Bottle of white, bottle of red..."
I hadn’t chosen it. It just… arrived. A cruel coincidence, a song that had always been familiar suddenly becoming something else. Something unbearable.
The first few notes barely registered, but by the time he was singing about Brenda and Eddie, I was gone. The tears came before I could stop them, silent at first, then overwhelming, choking. I don’t remember what song followed—I couldn’t hear anymore. All I could do was weep, the weight of every good and bad memory collapsing on top of me.
"They started to fight when the money got tight, and they just didn't count on the tears..."
I hated that moment for a long time. Hated that a song could undo me like that.
But sitting in the arena, surrounded by thousands of strangers, the song played again—this time, live. The grand piano, the horns, the way Billy still sings it like he means it. And something shifted. I didn’t cry. I just listened. And when he reached the part where Brenda and Eddie went their separate ways, I felt… okay.
Because life does that. It moves on.
And so, at St. James Winery, with my bottle of red and my bottle of white, I stood among the racks of wine and let the memory settle. I no longer resented it. I no longer wished the song away. I just held the bottles, a quiet smile at the corner of my lips.
Because some songs stay with us forever. And maybe that’s the point.
