Shuffle to Your Past:

I don't know what it is-- the summer weather, a new sense of well-being since I dropped 15 lbs. (so far) on Weight Watchers, or the prospects and opportunities that await us overseas somewhere, but I am so into music right now... in a way I haven't been since I became some one's wife, then mother. Listening to loud music and waxing philosophic is generally reserved for people without a care in the world, rambling across European countrysides in old trains and daydreaming about lost and new found love.

A few days ago, I was driving in my very sensible family station wagon (hopefully soon to be replaced with the even more dreaded minivan... totally my choice too by the way. I care not for what the world thinks... just whether or not I can fit two car seats, two Labrador Retrievers and a week's worth of groceries inside. All you minivan haters out there: talk to me when you're in my shoes. Until then, shhhhh! Minivans rock!). Anyway, I was driving along, with my two gals in the backseat and I decided to turn off NPR and hit shuffle on our Ipod.

I was transported to such long ago times that I was forced to view myself as, um, kinda old. Were my girls a little older, they would have surely had a laugh as I bopped my head and mouthed the words to Cypress Hill's "Cock the Hammer," and reminisced about a time when I walked around the streets of New York, dressed like some kind of faux-hoodlum in baggy jeans and big, gold, dangling hoops. Oh, to be a child of the 90's in Manhattan (for some reference, there was a movie made not to long ago called "The Wackness" that really captured the essence of that time. Also, the movie "Kids" was made while I was living in New York and many of its stars were people whom I regularly ran into-- this is not so much a source of pride, but just a matter of fact).

Cypress Hill soon gave way to Portishead's "How can it Feel So Wrong?". That might not even be the name of the song, but if you ever saw "Stealing Beauty" with Liv Tyler, you know the song I am referring to. The soundtrack to that movie became my own one summer, after high school, when my girlfriend and I toured around France and Italy on trains. One late night, we were riding from Nice, France to Pisa, Italy (a stopover) and just as we had gotten ourselves good and comfy in our cabin, a man joined us from Monte Carlo. He stunk of booze and his tan lines revealed the places where his watch and jewelery were before he'd gambled them all away. He was creepy and kept saying, "Vous le vous coucher avec moi?" so when he got up to use the bathroom (and probably to restore his energy with something illegal), my girlfriend and I gathered up all of our belongings and ran for another cabin. We found two completely deaf Polish students whom we tried desperately to inform that we were running for our lives from a would-be Italian rapist. They were so sweet and confused by our hysterics.

Then it was Bonnie Prince Billy, who took me back to a time when I was living in Big Sky, Montana when I would drive 40 minutes through the most breathtaking canyons to go grocery shopping in West Yellowstone. His somber and sentimental lyrics suited this very lonesome but introspective time in my life. When, soon after I broke my ankle badly enough that I was rendered immobile for almost 6 months, I felt just as somber and melancholy as Bonnie Prince Billy (aka Will Oldham) seemed to.

And finally, since it wasn't such a long ride after all, came Feist's "Mushaboom," which truly was the soundtrack for the most incredible summer of my life, the one when I met my husband on a beautiful, warm, spring day in San Francisco. As I listened to her warbly voice as she sang of snow and crackling fires and watching her as-yet unmade babies grow up, I looked at Stefan and hoped for all the things she sang about... with him.

Music is so amazing and I hope that with all our upcoming adventures, we will have many new songs to attach to them. We found out this morning that we will, in fact, have to wait to hear about our new post until the 154th class is assigned. That's sometime next week. I wonder if there is a good song to capture the anxiety of this time somewhere on that Ipod of mine????