The soundtrack of my life

I have been thinking a lot lately about what music has meant to me though my life. Music is so instrumental (lovely pun, isn’t it?) in our lives as the canvas that our lives are painted on. Instantly a song or lyric or even a tv jingle can send us back to a day decades ago as if we never left. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the circumstances. In my case music is what helped me to survive a disrupted childhood. It was where I hid, where I felt safe, and where I poured out emotions and feelings I didn’t even understand and had no way of otherwise expressing. When you are 10 and your life goes sideways, you don’t really have the means of coping with the really crappy decisions adults have made around you, and so you dive head first into whatever you can find. In my case, it was music. So how do I chop this up? By time, buy artist, by location, by event? I think the most relatable approach for you might be to do this by artist or song.  Let’s go.

 America

Their albums “Holiday” and “History”, released in 1974/75 are the defining sound track of me being 10 years old. After my mother left us, I spent time between grandparent’s homes until my dad got us settled. I would spend hours and hours in the basement playing their music on my plastic record player (which I still own). Singing a song like “Lonely People” at 10 years old and crying for all the lonely people – including myself – was so deeply profound. A song like “Glad to See You” was so sweet “God, I’m glad to see you, I thought you left me far away” really hit a solid nerve with an abandoned little girl. The actual context of the songs didn’t matter to me. The fragments that fit into my own brokenness to fill the gaps left by a missing family and absent parents were more important.

Ventura Highway

The emotions brought by hearing the opening bars of this will be difficult to put into words. The hours and hours of sitting with my uncle while he taught himself how to play this – then the hours of hearing him and his best friend play this and sing on stages, at parties, in basements, in backyards, on street parties. This strikes me to the core with memories of abuse and love at the same time. He abused me. He ruined me. He destroyed my innocence. He took from me what can never be given back. And yet I loved him as a dear uncle, my big brother I never had, his talent leaving stars and tears in my eyes. How is it that we can be so broken by someone and yet still love them? Now he’s gone. We never spoke of it. But of course he knew that I knew. Something destroyed him, I don’t know what, perhaps it was our shared hidden history. The saddest part of it all in the end is that he left his faith and died, not in a state of grace. Did he ever confess his abuse? Did he at his last moments repent? I certainly hope so. And so I pray for his soul and for God’s mercy. And when I hear this song my heart breaks and soars at the same time. A shattered ship of history sailing into eternity.

 Steely Dan

For a few months Daddy and I stayed with his best friend in his bachelor condo. Steely Dan was a constant on the turntable at that time and will always remind me of being there. I had a little mattress on the floor in my dad’s room. It was in this room where he took me into his lap and asked me “Do you know what a divorce is?”.  I said “yes”.  “Mommy and I are getting a divorce.”  I curled into his chest and cried – for the first and only time over their divorce, he placed me in my little pallet on the floor, and I fell asleep. My life changed forever.

 Hall and Oates – 70s

She’s Gone couldn’t possibly have been a more relevant song for the two of us after my mom left. All the excellent early H&O music happened in the 70s. Daddy and I lived alone in a little rented house for awhile. He always called me his Paper Moon. A 10 year old little girl who was playing dress up one day with her grandmother’s Chantilly lace wedding veil, and the next scrubbing a bathtub and washing dishes. Telling my friends that I didn’t have a mother, because that was my reality. I listened to their music for hours and hours because that’s what he was listening to. We had our shared yet separate pain. His colored with regret. What a dumb man he was, to cheat on us the way he did. And yet I loved him beyond all words.

 Chicago / Eagles / Funk

Can you even imagine what it must have been like for a 10 year old little girl to have a really talented cover band rehearsing in her basement every night? I was in awe. I grew up with fantastic music around me all the time. Into my 20s and 30s I would go to hear the band play and dance non stop for hours. I would sing, dance, and SCREAM in my brain “REMEMBER THIS!!!!!!! YOU WILL NOT ALWAYS HAVE THIS IN YOUR LIFE!!!!!”   Because I knew that one day it would end – because good things always end at some point. I was right, of course. But I can still hear these songs in my head and feel myself dancing in front of the band on the dance floor like dancing in a dream of heaven. I had one particular dance partner who would tear it up with me. We really knew how to dance together.

 Hall and Oates – 90s

I was so freaking stupid in my 20s. So so so many bad decisions. H&O of the 90s – wow, it’s really too embarrassing to even write. I was pathetically needy and still very pretty – a very toxic combination. By the very grace of God I didn’t become pregnant and ruin my life. I would blast this on my cassette player in the car and scream down the road at speeds that should have killed me and anyone around me, trying to run from my past and my present, only to end up right back at home every time.

I suppose I could go on and on, but that would be boring even for me. These are the highlights. The major points in my life where music has made such an imprint on my life, like a tattoo on my soul, sometimes ugly and faded, sometimes beautifully colored. But there for always, like it or not.