June 12, 2024
One of the things I’m most
grateful for in this world is music. And yet, somehow, I’ve managed to let the
music get away from me. Or rather, that connection that I had had for so many
years to music and the healing and the joy that it can bring.
As a young mother, with a practicing
alcoholic for a husband, music was my only escape. Our oldest son slept as
soundly as you could imagine, and there were nights when I would slip into the
downstairs den, and put the music on, full blast. These would be late night,
when only I was awake.
Living out in the countryside
with neighbors a healthy distance away, I was able to lose myself so completely
in that music, that I may have, from time to time, slipped into an alternate
existence, being a performer on a stage, belting out chart toppers like nobody’s
business.
It was nobody’s business but
mine. These days, I credit those many, many nights drowning in sound for the
fact that I have tinnitus. Even as the constant hum annoys me occasionally, I
consider that as having been a fair trade.
The nightly jam sessions ended
about a year after David quit drinking. He’s been sober now for 41 years, so
far.
Other times of stress have reminded
me of my need for music. And while I no longer needed it quite so loud, or
quite so desperately, but there was still something to be said for taking some
time to listen, to float, to let go and just be. During the last few years of
my working outside the home, there was about a thirty-minute drive from my work
to my husband’s, and that was a time for the car radio to play. Not as loud as
in the past, but loud enough.
Over the last few years, just
when one would think I would turn to the music to help me cope with the
stresses of living through a global pandemic and globally uncertain political
times, I have not. Not sure why that is, exactly. I have felt no need to just
sit and listen. No real need to escape. Though maybe that’s not quite true. I
have, over the course of these recent difficult years actually binged watched
something for the first time. Never binged watched anything before, but there
was that space of a couple of months when my brother had had his first stroke, and
our youngest son was having a big toe amputated…
In the last few days, I
realized just how much I do miss the music. Oh, I’ve been watching the Voice,
and even American Idol, but not therapeutically. I haven’t felt that same
driving need to lose myself in music, but I do love it. I love to sing, although
these days that is a challenge. I no longer have the voice I used to have but
have dropped at least an octave. I was getting frustrated, trying to sing along
to beloved songs and my voice kind of breaking up. But it was just a matter of
learning where my register is these days—and either adapting the song of the
moment in my heart to it or finding another one to sing.
I have never been able to name
a favorite song, because there are just so darn many of them. Different songs
with different words and different tunes for different times and different
moods. But when I realized how much I missed just listening to whatever song
struck me, I began a new routine of listening to a couple as the first of two
steps before closing my computer, and myself, down for the night. It’s been
like discovering music all over again.
It occurs to me that I am
somehow progressing on my life’s path as I should be. I had abused music back
in the day, and the why and the wherefore of that meant I really had to give it
a break and redefine what it means to me.
The best surprise, so far, is
that at a time when I can’t remember a name or a place or a word, the songs are
coming back to me. I know the words of songs I haven’t heard in years! I
understand why music is used so often and so well for the treatment of some neurological
and speech disorders.
I don’t even mind the return
of those earworms. Today upon awakening it was “Africa” by Toto. It was a nice
way to begin my morning.
Love,
Morgan
https://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
No comments:
Post a Comment