Bob and I were recently listening to Joni Mitchell’s song “California.” In the song, Mitchell sings about her desire to return to California. She wants it so badly that she will “even kiss a sunset pig.” Bob, who lived in Los Angeles at around this time, remarked that she was talking about the policemen who worked the Sunset Strip who had a bad reputation for breaking up protests going on then.

I was stunned. I thought she was talking about an actual pig. As soon as I heard his explanation, I knew I was wrong. I don’t know how I got it wrong because when I was young a lot of my contemporaries called the police pigs. Given that Mitchell wrote her song in 1967 when protests were frequent occurrences with the contingent police confrontations, the police definition makes much more sense than my pig. Somehow I conjured up an image of Mitchell holding a baby pig and attempting to kiss it while it squealed and struggled with her when she wanted me to think about a policeman.

Yet, even though my understanding was wrong, I actually liked the image of her kissing a pig more so than her being so desperate for home that she even would deign to kiss a policeman. The real meaning irritates me. It is a hard and unnecessary jab. My opinion of the song has changed. There is a meanness to it. It’s no longer just a sweet song about a homesick woman. I was perfectly happy with “California” when I thought she was kissing a barnyard animal. Now I am not.

It also makes me painfully aware of how I might misunderstand what other people mean. Even when I get the words right, I can miss the point. How often do I jump to the wrong conclusions because I understood words incorrectly or just differently than the speaker? Probably a lot more than I would like to admit.