May 2, 2016 Free Verse, Original Poetry, The Daily Post
In response to The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: Music
Inheritance
©May 2nd, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
Most days, with the scent of coffee
Came music in the mornings.
My mother’s voice, bright as oranges
Bright as the green of a neem tree, as it
Wove through the morning hours
And filtered into my consciousness
As the Madras coffee dripped
Through its filter, aromatic and charged.
And I was saturated with richness,
As I grew from baby to toddler,
To child, to teenager, to adult,
Unconscious and unaware of what
Was shaping me, and my life.
This, her music, lives in me.
And now, the music of our days
Lives through my love and me,
And filters into our daughter’s
Blood and bones, her daily life.
And this, the music of her days,
Shall live through her, and
Spread like sunshine in a land of fog.
__________________________________________________________________
Tags: #Music, #OriginalPoetrybyVijayaSundaram, #TheDailyPost, #TheDailyPrompt
Mar 28, 2016 Climate Change is Real!, Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings, Uncategorized
Climate Change is Real: Day 8 of my Lone Vigil
© March 28th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
This morning, I actually had some dreams (which means I had about five hours of sleep, instead of four) from which I arose, like a fish jumping out of the sea, water streaming off its fins, before plopping onto an unforgiving shore. Fortunately, that’s where the fish analogy ends, because I evolved quite rapidly, grew legs, and trooped downstairs with dog, to start my coffee.
Dog went out, came back in, settled down, and I left.
I dragged myself to Warren’s Intersection (as I have dubbed it), travel mug in hand, and the “Climate Change is Real” sign on my shoulder. This was a most unusually flavored coffee, for it tasted like French Roast and Ginkgo Clarity tea (because I had accidentally forgotten I was pouring coffee into the travel mug, and had tossed in the ginkgo tea prior to that. Fortunately, I detected it before I left, and fished out the offender). Ever tasted coffee that tastes like ginkgo and other herbal ingredients? I don’t really recommend it, though it wasn’t completely awful.
It was a cloudy, gray morning, with no sign of sun. There was no sign of anything that denoted life, except an endless stream of cars, which, having awakened from their Sunday torpor, sullenly headed towards Boston.
I should have checked the weather (duh, here I am holding a Climate Change sign, and I don’t even remember to check the weather?! Tsk, tsk!). Why? Well, it started to rain, and increased in volume as the hour unrolled – and I’d forgotten to wear rain-proof gear. I mean, my wool-influenced winter coat held off the worst of it, and so did my wool felt hat, but my shoes were getting more wet than I would have liked. So irate and discombobulated was I that I didn’t notice anything much that would have piqued my interest.
So, I drank my coffee grimly, and started up the music, my ear-buds in place, hoping that would dispel my gathering gloom, and it did. More songs in Raga Bhatiyar, a nice tarana (the Indian Classical Music equivalent of scat-singing) that our Guruji had composed that was massively fun and rhythmically thrilling to sing, so much so that I had laughed out loud in delight in our 1994 recording, and laughed out loud today. That cheered me up a little, and took my mind off the weather. I confess I forgot about Climate Change, as well, for a little bit.
So, the cars went by, and there were even a few waves, smiles, thumbs-ups, despite the dreariness of the morning. At one point, someone honked, and I looked up from fiddling with the i-Pod, and a young man waved, held his phone out the car, and took a picture. Hm. (I’m going to be world-famous, folks! Hah!)
The usual vans and trucks advertising various services drove by – plumbing, masonry, water conservation, air purification systems and other environmental services, security systems, communication systems and construction services – the providers of the infrastructure of our modern modes of living. (Sometimes, I wish that Atlas could shrug. That would show us the way to a different world). Apart from that, the usual cars drove by with preoccupied people and their Dunkin Donuts coffee, their i-Phones, their children, their spouses.
When I see all these cars, I make up stories about the people in them, just to pass the time. I have always, always, been curious about every single individual I see, because each person is such a magical mystery tour of sorts, each person’s trajectory is unique, each person’s life is being lived parallel to mine, and I know ONLY mine. And yet, great things happen simultaneously with terrible events, tragedies occur, people are born, people learn, people play, fall in love, get married, get separated, or stay together, and people die. People love and hate, live and give, and take and make, and everyone is moving blindly, or consciously, along the path or her or his life, like a bead on a wire. And we learn from all these experiences, and from our reactions to our setbacks. It’s all we can ever hope to do. And music can steady us as we learn.
Music has been in my blood and bones, in my voice and in my fingers, and it has helped me always – that is why when Warren speaks about saving music, the traditional music that bridges the past and the future, it resonates deeply with me. Music is the best of who we are. (I wrote a semi-sci-fi story about it three years ago, which I transferred from an old blog of mine to my current one. See: Polaris-Bound – A Short Story.)
We have to preserve our best selves. We have to preserve the planet and its music. Climate Change is Real, true, but music is Real-er (sorry about the grammar, but as a former English teacher, I grant myself a pardon on this one!) – so, sing, and learn the music that sustained you as you grew up. And if it didn’t, find the music that does sustain you. When there’s more beauty, there’s more peace, and more concerted effort to unite. And we can unite on this issue.
____________________________________________________________________
P.S. A nice encounter this afternoon. I was walking Holly in the misty afternoon rain, when a young man came towards me from the opposite direction, and said, “Excuse me, but are you the one who stands with the sign every morning?” When I said I was, he said, “I have to tell you I appreciate what you’re doing, and think that it’s right and true.” Then, he said, “And what happened to that gentleman who held the sign earlier?”
I informed him that “that gentleman” was my husband, and that he was returning on Tuesday, and would be back at the circle. We exchanged names. He had nice words for Holly, and we parted. Gives one hope, doesn’t it?
Tags: #ClimateChangeisReal, #ClimateVigil, #Music, #Original Short Story: Polaris-Bound
Mar 28, 2016 Original Short Story
Polaris-Bound – A Short Story*
March 24th, 2013
©By Vijaya Sundaram
The stars were very bright that night. I looked up, and saw Polaris, and became still. I knew that I had to do something within the hour, because if I didn’t, I would lose the game which had released me as a pawn into the night those many decades ago.
The man stood in his toll booth, counting change. Car after car came by, slowed down, stopped. Anonymous people rolled down windows, spurted out change, exchanged meaningless words, and pushed off into the night, so many flashing streaks of light, released like arrows into the unknown.
The man was alone. There was another, just like him in an adjoining tollbooth, also alone. They did not communicate. They didn’t need to. They were both from different worlds. Each did not exist in the other one’s world. I wasn’t interested in the other one. He seemed dull, dull as a drainpipe filled with leaves.
Loneliness is an absolute thing. It cannot be described. It cannot be reduced to songs, stories, descriptions, but we try, anyway. So, I’ll tell you about this man, because he was lonely, except that he didn’t realize it.
I watched him from the side of the road. I saw him sigh, his shoulders rising, chest filling with air, and falling, air flowing out from him, making little puffs of cold mist that dissipated in all directions. His mouth was the toll booth, and the hot air left him, and it seemed like so many cars coming and going into a cold night.
Crouched in the tall reeds by the side of the road, I watched him calmly, dispassionately. I was trying to get a read on him, you see.
I watched him pull out a thermos, pour himself some coffee, click on an old-fashioned radio.(Where on earth does one get a radio like that these days? I wondered.) He sipped his coffee and drummed his fingers. He looked at his wristwatch (Doesn’t he have a cell-phone? Nobody wears a wristwatch these days!), stepped out of his booth, did a few stretches. He seemed restless as a thirteen-year-old boy in a classroom (I know, because I’d masqueraded as one, once, long ago). Again, his shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
“Can you hear me?” he spoke urgently into the darkness, his head tilted towards the stars. The man in the adjoining tollbooth seemed not to register that he had spoken.
I wondered when I would go up to the first man. My knees were getting stiff, deep in the tall grass by the side of the road where I crouched. I was biding my time, though.
He looked up and down the roads approaching the tollbooth and saw that there were no cars coming up (it was 2:00 a.m.). He seemed to make a decision. He went inside again, reached down, and pulled out a saxophone.
And he began to play.
And the music poured out of his horn like the cry of the accumulated lonely nights of all humankind. It spoke of despair and hope, it spoke of dreams that arose with the dawn and died with the day. It lingered in the air like the smoke from his cigarette, long after it had been crushed underfoot. It poured down the slopes of his being, like an endless waterfall, the kind in which people perish if they step into swirling waters, little knowing the danger down the line. It swirled around like the kind of eddies which sink ships, and leave nothing, except a single suitcase floating on the surface. It spoke about night after night of no one to go home to. It climbed up my spine and shook my brain-stem. It made the air shiver and weep. Or, was it just me?
I shivered, and wept.
And I turned back into the tall grass to where I needed to go. I had learned a lot by reading and listening to people in the past several decades. I had paid close attention to all the noise and chatter that poured out of their computers, their phones, their television sets, and I had seen the horrors they had endured through all the hatefulness that seemed to dog the footsteps of their kind. I had seen the ice-caps melting, and their forests dying. I had heard their politicians lie, and their talking heads nod endlessly as they passed on the lies, pocketing the change – different type of tollbooth workers, they seemed to me.) I had seen their dying and their dead. I had seen children reduced to skeletons, hunger big in their eyes and in their bellies. I had been filled with a hopeless rage, and a helpless horror.
But I had also seen their women thrown into the pits of hell and rising again stronger, more determined, despite their pain. I had seen little children picking up the trash that littered the woods around them. I had watched a teenage boy make magic out of wasted bits and pieces of trashed electronics, so that his people could have working radios. I had seen a teenage girl find a way to provide water purification through the power of the sun, and it cost very little, and would help millions. I had seen an emaciated man feeding his emaciated dog before he fed himself, and I knew that there was something here that was not to be denied.
Still, I had been determined to do what I had come there to do. I was not about to lose the game, and go back to my people to face the consequences.
Tonight, however, I saw and heard something that was beyond all that I’d seen. I heard in that music all that I needed to know about this lonely being, and all of the lonely beings on this strange planet. I understood them. I looked up again. The stars blinked back at me, brighter than they had ever been. I sighed.
These people might yet be saved, but I wasn’t the one about to do the saving.
I had lost the game, but I didn’t mind. I was ready to go back and explain why I hadn’t destroyed this tragic, flawed planet, this beautiful, blue pebble that swung around the sun, full of death, full of life, full of music.
And the music followed me all the way to my home, far, far away.
__________________________________________________________________
* This is a story I wrote in 2013, and shared on my now-private first blog V-Hynagogic Logic. I decided to share it on my new blog today.
Tags: #Alien, #Music, #Philosophical Science Fiction, #Saving the Planet, #Science Fiction Short Story
May 9, 2014 Uncategorized
Music in the Present Tense
©May 9th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
The insistent beep of a device somewhere
The punctuations of birdsong
The clack-clack of high heels tripping down the hallways
The voices raised in ritual greeting
The hum of a computer awakening
The whir of an unidentifiable machine
The question from a student
Poking a head in at my door:
Is Poetry Club cancelled for today?
And my strangled “Yes,”
Accompanying a nod,
The high hum of electricity
The shimmer-buzz of fluorescent tubes,
The shuffle of janitorial feet
Jingling keys and all,
The clicking of my fingers on these keys
And the tap-tap of my restless ankle-boots –
All these lead me to this question:
And for what purpose
Is all this work, this tension?
Where’s the music?
The piano at the far end stands
Silent, withdrawn, reserved.
The guitar teeters madly
On the counter where a student
(Or perhaps I) put it,
The hanging-plants overhead grow silently,
Breathing in my carbon-breath,
While I drink in their lovely
Oxygen-rich green exhalation,
So symbiotically symbolic!
The rhythm of inhale-exhale
The music of plant and mammal
In a room full of made things,
The give-and-take of the natural
And unnatural, mediated by
Human intention and action.
I listen intently, and think:
And what’s the purpose?
And, Where’s the music?
I wonder again.
And the music blossoms,
Rose-like and silken
Spiky and molten
Opaquely clear
Before my eyes, my ears,
My breath, my skin.
Right here, amidst all these
Things, these thieves of Time and attention,
These sheaves of paper
And cluster of pens.
Amidst all these four-legged
Quietly triumphant things
On which we sit, and at which
We labor mightily.
But I don’t hear it. I wonder:
Where’s the music? Shall I play some?
And then, I find it, right here, see?
Tight, at my feet, hands, skin, ears.
Still, I’ll play the guitar,
I think, and stop
This, this thing I’m doing.
And I do.
______________________________________________________________________
Tags: #Music, #Original Poetry, classroom, daily noises as music, intention vs. action, sounds, symbiosis, Work
Mar 30, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Essays on Music and Musicians
“Small Blue Thing” by Suzanne Vega
This song blew me away when I first heard it. I wished (and still wish) that I had written it. Her songwriting, guitar-playing, music and tone of voice are (dare I use this word?) perfect.
Suzanne Vega is probably the most elegant, concentrated, delicate and literate among songwriters, whether female or male.
I am, and will always be, a fan. And I am hard to please.
“Lullaby for an Anxious Child” by Sting
I heard this song a couple of years ago or so. It made me cry. Sting is … my absolute favorite contemporary male songwriter, musician, singer, performer. His imagination and musical taste are impeccable.
Thank you for listening!
Love,
Dreamer of Dreams
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Music, #Suzanne Vega, celebrities, Dreamer of Dreams, lullaby to an anxious child, Music I love, songs, Sting
Mar 28, 2013 Blogs and Bloggers, Essays on Music and Musicians
Weaving Time – Original Composition by Warren Senders, 1994. Performed by Antigravity, in Pune, India, in 1994 at Ishvani Kendra Studios
When We Wove a Tapestry — A Reminiscence
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 28th, 2013
The beautiful composition on the mp3 attachment above is by Warren Senders (photo, center), and it is one of my all-time favorite compositions (and I love all of his music).
We had a lovely time at Ishvani Kendra, in Pune in 1994, towards the end of our year-long stay that year. Every day, we would get there in the morning, and most days, we’d be out at twilight. We’d sit there and play our hearts out, recording take after take. That was a kind of meditation in itself.
Then, after a particularly intense session or two, we would emerge into the heat of the afternoon, just to breathe air that wasn’t musky with concentration. The intensely bright haze of noon would glow gold and red in our eyes, and the beautiful flowering bougainvillea plants vied with each other to create a psychedelic feast of color.
It was truly a marriage of true minds for all of us during that week or so at Ishvani Kendra. All of us loved each other, because our language was that of music — we understood each other perfectly. We practised and recorded Warren’s compositions. We practised and recorded mine. I had been nervous, because I wasn’t sure whether the older gentlemen in the group would accept my direction after having been used to my being their colleague, not the composer/director. I should have known better. There was no question of ego. They gave their best and utmost love and attention to the music composed by Warren and to my music. It was pure and Apollonian. I had never been happier.
This was the context: Warren and I had taken a year off from our lives in the U.S. to go to India for the sole purpose of studying music, and composing / recording our original pieces. Our practice, in general, was to live carefully, save up money for two years and go to India to live for one year. We did it only twice – and the first time we went back to India for a whole year, we didn’t need to save that much, because Warren was awarded an AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) scholarship, which lasted us for that year.
Independent of each other, we composed several pieces that year (mine are on DAT tapes, and are not yet uploaded to this computer, so I’m putting up Warren’s compositions. I promise to do some blog posts which include mine. I hope you enjoy them).
During that year, which was pretty intense, we took Hindustani classical vocal lessons with our Guruji, the late Pt. Shreeram G. Devasthali. By afternoon, evening and night, we’d compose or practise, take walks, prepare dinner or go out to dinner, and then practise again. Most evenings, we’d hang out with our musician friends, and we were as one being. On weekends, we’d visit my grandparents and aunt, and also go for concerts.
In short, that was an idyllic year — for the most part. Like any other year, it also had its frustrations — for example, we searched high and low for a drummer, and finally, towards the end of the year, came across a gem of a player, Nikhil Sohoni, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. There were also unaccountable periods of sadness for me for a few months, early in the year, and I revived only when I did music. I don’t dwell on those as much as on the long, long periods of beautiful music-making, which we did with our teacher, and with our friends in the group which Warren had named and founded years ago: Antigravity.
Before this Antigravity, Warren had formed the American Antigravity in the 1970s, and that group was dynamic, with Phil Scarff on saxophones, Bob Pilkington on trombone, Tom MacDonald on drums, Dee Wood on guitar and Warren on bass.
When Warren had first come to India (to study Hindustani classical vocal music) on an Indo-American Fellowship in 1985, he set about forming his Indian chapter of Antigravity. Although some of the personnel had changed over the years, the core group consisted of the following people since 1986: Ramakant Paranjape, violin; and Ajit Soman (now late), flute; Warren Senders, bass; then, along came Rajeev Devasthali, tabla, then Atul Keskar, dilruba and sitar, and finally, yours truly on guitar. Nikhil Sohoni (percussion) was new to us in the year 1994. As new to the group as him was our friend Caroline Dillon, cellist (missing from the group photograph) — she had had to fly back to the U.S. after her three-month stay in India.
Back to Ishvani Kendra and our insanely long recording sessions. We recorded and practised, ate, chatted, drank endless cups of tea and coffee, laughed, got frustrated at times, laughed again, practised with redoubled concentration, and gave our hearts to the music, which was complex, demanding, difficult and brilliant.
The result? Warren Senders’ CD: Boogie For Hanuman.
Another result? My cassette tape (we didn’t have enough capital for two CD productions that year): Magic Realism.
I look back on that year, and feel a sense of accomplishment. We came back to the U.S. at the start of 1995, and began our work lives again. We also did radio shows (WGHB, Emerson Radio, WBUR, etc.), plus performances of Indian classical vocal music together. We gave concerts with the American Antigravity which featured our own compositions as well.
As the song goes, It was a very good year.
And the time that we wove into it became a beautiful tapestry into which all our lives were woven, a tapestry in which our spirits and imaginations made intricate patterns, and through those complex patterns, love glowed in the music.
I hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for listening!
~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
P.S. Once I upload my own music, I’ll do similar posts for my pieces. Hope you enjoy them!
Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Indo-Jazz Synthesis, Ishvani Kendra, Original Composition by Warren Senders, Recording sessions, Reminiscences about Pune
Mar 17, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Essays on Music and Musicians
Roots Music
(Pune, India, 1994) – An Original Poem
©Vijaya Sundaram, March 17th, 2013
To get to the roots of things,
We dug deep, drenched in song.
At times, things were rich,
Saturated, awash in light.
At others, rocks shouldered through,
Got wrenched out of the way.
That was the year when
Unexplained sorrow burst
Through inexplicable joy,
Escaped, became song.
Sometimes dreams came,
Pursued by demons,
Effaced by the gods.
That was a good year,
Full of magic realism, when
Dreams came on winged backs
And bore me away, and
A three-faced Goddess
Showed me favor,
As I ran, carrying a fish in a jug.
That was the year to rise,
Untrammelled by the mundane.
Above the struggle, we leaped
Into a space of pure spirit.
That was the year we distilled
Our music-minds, mined the ether.
That was the year, when,
Lighter than air, lighter than light,
We rose, embryonic-winged
For we were ruled by spirit,
And our spirits were weightless.
~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Music, #Original Poetry, #Vijaya Sundaram, #Warren Senders, Antigravity, India, Pune
Mar 3, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning
Curiously, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t do much of anything, except to create a sense of dull satisfaction: Yup. I knew my poems didn’t suit their needs, but I sent them off anyway.
Realism, thy name is DreamersOfDreams.
It must be because I’m almost forty-nine — the almost part is crucial.
It must be because I know how long a struggle all this is for most writers. That’s why, I guess, they send stuff off when they’re in their twenties.
I didn’t do that in my twenties. I was too busy struggling to find a footing, instead. Married to an American, and finding myself on American soil for the first time at age twenty-four, I looked for work and found it in an independent record label and distribution company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Working between ten and fourteen hours a day at $4.25 an hour for the first year, standing on concrete floors, pushing a shopping cart from aisle to aisle, picking LPs, cassettes and CDs, packing them, and shipping them via UPS, I got a taste for what it meant to be really low on the totem pole. Forced to listen to strange LPs played by angry young men during work hours, who indulged in mindless vulgarity and obscene epithets strewn carelessly about, I winced in almost-physical pain and went home to practise jazz and Indian classical music with a loving and kind husband.
For that first year, despite the hours of badly recompensed, and mindless, labor during the day, we composed music, played together, saw movies on the weekends at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, and ate out at an Indian restaurant once a week. I wrote short stories, poems and songs. He composed his music. We performed together. I had vivid dreams. I felt newly born, innocent.
We owned hardly anything — just books, instruments, cassettes and LPs, and later, CDs. I wore old clothes, dressed oddly, didn’t much care for the trappings of middle-class modes of dress and manner. My husband and I were in love, we had music, we had a good, rich-in-music, if financially-impoverished life. Music saturated our waking and sleeping hours, and it was beautiful.
I realized that all my ambitions of my early college years had taken a back seat to all this creative sweetness. It was enough to do music, practise voice and guitar, get better at singing and song-writing and take long walks, after a rough day at the warehouse. It was enough to be content.
I used to be ambitious. It had all vanished.
This is not to say there weren’t troubles in our life. Somehow, anything that smacked of trouble in my life simply rolled off my back. People use the phrase, “water off a duck’s back.” I prefer my mother’s beautiful image in Tamil — “water off the petals of a lotus.” That was what she’s been like all her life. Troubles, terrible troubles, financial and medical, happened to her and my father. She withstood it all, and seems to grow every year into a more beautiful, complete person.
We had our troubles too. I don’t remember them, not much, anyway.
Over the years, my husband and I grew in music. We went back twice for a year at a time to study with our beloved Indian classical vocal teacher, Pandit S.G. Devasthali (now “late,” to use the classic phrase used by Indians as well as Batswana people, like the fictional Mma Ramotswe). We performed Hindustani classical vocal together. I wrote many songs, composed surreal music, arranged them for sax, ‘bone, bass, guitar and drums (my husband’s ensemble, Antigravity), and later for sitar, dilruba, flute, Indian violin (with our dear friends playing those instruments, in the Indian version of Antigravity). I played my songs in coffeehouses and the streets of Harvard Square, as well as the subways and made grocery money. We slept on a futon bed and used milk-crates with cushions as chairs in the living room. Drank a lot of black coffee. Ate veggie-lentils and rice. One can do that in one’s twenties.
I continued to work at the company. Rose in wages, rose on the totem pole, not dramatically, just steadily. Then, came the urge to get settled –that dreaded phrase, which smacks of middle-class ambition and morality. The urge to become a teacher had become paramount. I enrolled in an M.Ed. program at Lesley College, now Lesley University, got my degree, worked as Teaching Assistant in a Cambridge School, while doing my college courses in the evening, got my license, got a job at a nearby school (while finishing the last of my graduate courses and graduated), and have been at that suburban school ever since.
Then, came the house and the grinding work of rebuilding a wreck of a place, while living in it, dust and all. Then, came our daughter. Now, it’s all about teaching, being domestic and homeschooling. I love it all.
And I also miss all that music and creative writing that I used to do.
Ambition is making a comeback, rather late in my life. I’m not crazy-ambitious, just enough to want to publish my three plays, all those short stories I’ve written, all those poems I’ve poured out, and at least one novel before I die.
I want to write, just write. I don’t want to do much else, sometimes. However, I also love to teach. I love singing and playing music. I love bringing up my daughter.
So, I’ll try and fashion a life in which all these strands are inter-woven, and they’ll create a tapestry which will make sense for me.
And I won’t let any rejections get in my way.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Cambridge, Harvard Square, looking back, Massachusetts, Rejection letters, Rounder Records, Writing
Feb 18, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
With songs and lines from poems jostling each other to get off, or get in.
I find myself singing a song, then interrupt myself rudely with lines from another song, with no idea that I just did that! So, how do I know? My alert, interested, attentive, bemused, flatteringly fascinated daughter tells me!
Mom, she says, Did you know you just switched in the middle of the song you were just singing to this other song? Surprised and startled, I look up from the mundane task I am doing. I can hear the ghost of the previous song lingering longingly in the the air near my ears — and I laugh.
It’s true, I say, I did just do that –switched to another song right in the middle of this one! And I stop to think in the middle of the song which I just interrupted with another song.
I have this romantic notion that when I am on the point of death, all those songs will come tumbling out of me, winging out into the world, and letting the air take them into the sun, where they belong.
And they will make for me a pillow of song, and I will be borne along on them, higher and higher into the ether, scattering birds and planes, as I turn and turn, spiraling forever upwards into the sun, where they belong, where I belong.
And the crowded bus of song will be transformed into a thing of wings and updrafts, scattering birds and planes, as it lifts itself into the sea of melodies high above the earth, making the spheres hum in their orbits. Not a bad way to go, I think.
First, however, I must make a mental note to arrange for that to happen. I have to find my way to a thought so as to record it in the midst of this unceasing singing in my head.
Sigh! Too late. Another song comes impertinently down the aisle and knocks the thought over, and it falls out of the bus. Still, I can remember it. Quick! Don’t let it be run over. I leap down and give it a helping hand. The songs press back, a little ashamed and mortified. The thought salutes, and goes into the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~