The Music of Our Times

When I get tired of TV News told over and over again I tune into a station (on the TV) called "Easy Listening." It takes me to a sweet spot in my heart that rests beguilingly between romanticism and nostalgia. I want to write about it but you know, dear reader, exactly what I mean. You may have a more recent collection of songs, the songs of your own tender youth and younger years, but the feeling is the same.

Right now for me it is playing "Tears Get In Your Eyes." I remember the first time hearing it. A senior girl at one of our high school events stood with a mike in her hand down on the gymnasium floor. (We didn't have an auditorium in our small town high school.) She had a beautiful voice and sang it so tenderly I could not hold back the tears in my own eyes.

That girl has gone into the hereafter now as so many of my classmates have. That too brings tears to my eyes. Happy times often take our minds back to earlier years, different scenes, by-gone days. Those were the days when we had hopes and dreams for the future. That future? I don't recall that I ever thought of it as the "single blessedness" I now enjoy or the prospect of having adorable great grandchildren. That future was something almost too sweet to define. It hung on the strains of music we loved. The music of our times.

Recently I visited a charming gift shop and bought a little block of wood with words inscribed on it saying: THE OLDER I GET THE BETTER I WAS. When I saw an old photo of myself the other day I thought to myself, Was that really how good I looked? Now I see myself in photos and want to cut that part of the picture out. I don't recognize me. Why is it I still feel ageless inside? There must be a "me" that only I can see or feel. Thankfully, that inner me is the only one I see on a regular basis. The other one, the outer one, is what others see or I see only in photos. Even the image in the bathroom mirror is better when I get my make-up on in the warm amber light. Once I leave it I leave others to deal with the outer picture and myself with an inner one whose face is hidden but whose heart is laid bare.

Now the music is playing "I Worry and Wonder." Yes, I worry and wonder. Then I step out on my patio on a day like this when the sun falls in filtered light through tree tops and reflects on the creek's ripples in sparkles of gold. I feel good. I think if I knew then I'd "end up" contented with a long life behind and the mystery of the next life somewhere, sometime not too soon, in a place like this with children who love me, grandchildren too, and darling babies and toddlers for great grandies, I might have been happy to know I was going there. Still, I do worry and wonder sometimes. Wherever was that sweet spot when life was absolutely perfect and I didn't know it? When did I pass it by unnoticed because I was reaching out longingly on the strains of the music of my times?