As I sat at my bench working on two flutes that need to be finished this week, I turned toward my I-pod and started to scroll through my playlists. My I-pod sits in it’s speaker cradle on my bench and holds my entire music collection as it existed in 2010, when I ripped all my CDs to mp3s and then swapped them for more CDs on SwapaCD.com. And there it stays, a relic of my past, but still useful! Nowadays, if I want to listen to music I watch YouTube videos on my laptop or (believe it or not) I am back to CDs in the car! Anyway, Simon and Garfunkel caught my eye and so I immersed myself in the The Sounds of Silence while I worked.
All of a sudden I was overtaken by a wave of grief brought on by the music.
When I was a child my mother would play records on Saturday morning while we cleaned the house. As someone who came of age in the sixties, her record collection consisted mostly of Simon and Garfunkel, Peter Paul and Mary, Jim Croce and John Denver. She also had an odd affinity for instrumental music without words like Ferrante and Teicher and Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. I never understood that sixties instrumental music, but a love of folk music grew in my soul from the seed that my mother planted so long ago.
I went on to have my own children and to indoctrinate them with my eccentric musical tastes by continually playing the same playlists over and over. Some of these musical lines were picked up by them and others were rejected as they grew into their own musical tastes.
I have found that different periods of my life have their own soundtrack. When I was young it was my mother’s music, when I was a teenager it was 80’s rock. So, when I am in the grocery store and Bon Jovi comes on I start to sing like I’m back in 1986. I can’t help it - it’s like a flashback - I am 13 again, full of all those emotions and all I want to do is sing it out! Of course, I hold it back because I am in public and I don’t want to embarrass myself - but I still feel it.
So, today, when I hear the lyrical guitar intro to Scarborough Fair I am immediately catapulted back to a Saturday morning in the early 80’s with my mom and sister just cleaning and talking and hanging out listening to music. Those are times that I can never get back and never relive except in my imagination through this timeless music.
It’s been almost 20 years since my mother died at the age of 55 from colon cancer and the sore place in my heart has healed and doesn’t even bother me most days, but today the music spoke to me of emptiness and longing, of missing something I didn’t even know you could miss and I sobbed while tears ran down my face in the midst of my otherwise ordinary busy day. I didn’t even see it coming.
And so, I know that even when I am gone and my children can no longer pick up the phone and hear my calming voice - at least I’ll know that they will remember the music.
Dawn- Thanks so much for sharing this and for the personal reflection on music and mortality. I've always appreciated Simon & Garfunkel's perseverance on creating music rather than noise--something I definitely still have much to learn from. So your writing is a great reminder. I hope you're doing well this week. Cheers, -Thalia