Music and Memories

It took me 27 years, but I have stumbled on a childhood secret.

When I was little, and my young mother and father were divorced, my mom and I traveled cross country in her car a lot.

We all have those cloudy memories of childhood moments, snippets that only last 2 seconds when we try to recall them. But certain things bring them, and the emotions of those moments, into sharper focus. For me these moments of clearer memory recollection have always unexpectedly occurred while shopping in a grocery store, flipping through radio stations while driving, or when pumping gas -- a song comes on, one of the cassette songs my mother would play over and over on those long drives cross deserts and plains, and I am three years old again, sitting in the passenger seat of her car, knowing on some mild level that my dad is gone, and that my mom is sad even though she smiles at me a lot, and I'd get wrapped up in those songs, get utterly lost in the emotions of those melodies. I LOVED those songs. They were full of yearning, and I loved feeling my heart-strings tugged in that exact way at that time. Those songs spoke for my mother and I as we drove in silence for hundreds of miles.

I can't remember ever hearing music before those songs. They were the songs of my childhood, played over and over while driving through the terrains of life.

I have never known the bands, singers, or titles of those songs, but when they pop into my world to say hello from some other sound system, I feel I have never known anything better. Even as a 27 year old, when one of them plays and I sing along, I wonder how I can know the words to a song that is so elusive to me -- I couldn't find it on iTunes if I tried.

Until today.

I was browsing through our iTunes Library to see what we had since of the hundreds of songs downloaded there, I can probably count 20 that I have downloaded -- the rest are Dan's doing. Under "Title" I saw the words "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" and was alerted that it sounded like the lyrics to one of those nostalgic songs. I clicked on it and sure enough, it was one of several in our Library from a band called Air Supply. I clicked through them all and realized something I never knew--my mom was a big Air Supply fan twenty-something years ago. So was I.