5 Days of Thanks

Today I am thankful for music. Music of all kinds is essential to life, for me. When we got married we had a lamp, an ironing board, a car, a motorcycle, and 150 record albums. Oh, and Cool Guy also had a stereo system with which to play the records. We graduated to cassette tapes and finally CD's, and now everything is on-line or IPOD. Sigh. We have the soundtrack of our life in so many formats...Once when he was deployed overseas to a very bad place, he'd been gone for months and it was starting to wear on us both. You lose track of reality and start to forget what the other person's voice sounds like, or what they smell like. (I used to bury my nose in his motorcycle jacket, but finally it just started smelling like the rest of the house.) One day I got a letter from him (this was before the internet) and it was just five pages of hand-written song lyrics, nothing else. As I read the lyrics, I knew that he remembered me and I could remember him and everything felt okay again for awhile. The last page was this song. That is what is so awesome about music. It transcends physics: I can be any age, be in any place, or be with anyone I want to, just by listening to a song. Music stirs memory so vividly that every detail is there. We've been separated several more times for long stretches because of work but I just remember that the rainbow will always be there and we cope.