When I first came to New York City, right after graduation from college, I studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater for two years, and then was fortunate enough to have some pretty immediate success as an actor and then a composer working in the theater on Broadway.

I also sang with a folk group called The Sundowners in the New York clubs where I had the chance to develop my early songwriting skills writing folk songs for the group. In those days I wrote everything on guitar. I even wrote several Broadway scores on guitar—something that has probably rarely been done.

Most of that early work was saved in notebooks, but forgotten and left behind for good reason. It just wasn’t that good. I was still learning my craft. But occasionally, I would get lucky, I guess, and a good song would just pop out all in one piece. There were about 20 or 30 of those occurrences over several decades that I sang in the clubs and then, as my career evolved and I stopped performing, the songs got left behind.

Here’s one of them.

Back in my mid 20s I was in L.A. and had just finished an album at Capital Records when I ran into an old friend from high school who invited me to spend the weekend with her and her family. She had a daughter, Julie, a precocious toddler … I’ll never forget …

Lady In Waiting

Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

I fell in love with Julie
She was only four years old
I felt her look right through me
To the marrow of my soul

And as I brushed the hair away
That kept her eye from me
In a deep and single moment
I saw all there was to see

There’s a woman in there
Full ripe and warm
There’s a lady in waiting
In a baby just born

Oh mother mother
Your daughter has my eye
And I feel like I’m born
Twenty years twenty years
Ahead of my time

She watches me when I’m laughing with her mother
I tuck her into bed every night
She comes on tip toes early every morning
And silently waits
For the opening of my eyes

I fell in love with Julie
With the wonder of her gaze
The consequence of ages
Seemed to vanish in the haze

There’s a lady in waiting
In a baby just born
There’s a lady in waiting
In a baby just born
There’s a lady in waiting
Waiting to be free

Looking back to that time, there was another lady in waiting who was the exact same age named Julie also beginning her own life who I would later meet and marry—Julia Wade.

This song suggests a most intriguing synchronicity in my life that has often brought me smiles of wonderment.