Mood Music

What is there about music that turns me into mush? Me. Me who hasn’t felt purity and naivete—that, in fact, I invented a most virulent form of cynicism on the planet. I’ve been there—I know that Sir Ghalihad has skid marks in his shorts, mothers sometimes wish they could change their name to anything besides mother and that babies grow up to be pets that destroy furniture and people with secrets and hatreds well hidden. But, here I sit listening to The Platters sing The Magic Touch, Only You and I’m mush. I lay my head back, close my eyes and I’m dancing in the darkness of someone’s basement rec room with Ronnie Joe; love of my then 14-year old life. I’m a little scared and feeling so much less everything of everyone else and amazed that this upper classman can like me, braces and all. The tape switches to The Great Pretender, Twilight Time and I remember those first breakups. My heart so swollen from “great pretender” tears that I can feel it still even in the fact of my 50 some years of learning what lasts and what doesn’t. The emptiness begins in my stomach and fills it and moves up into my chest and each breath brings such sorrow that it pushes into my face and eyes, tears welling into those little ducts that have been empty for eons. Well I don’t wash and iron anyone’s shorts anymore; maybe I cheat a little by sinking into the past for a time just to remember my own fiction. Here comes my sweet cat, who for sure won’t let me hug him unless I give him proper respect and a bit of fish from dinner.