The Sounds of Silence

So I was a funny kid.  Funny in an amusing, odd sort of way.  I'm not sure why, but I fancied myself the family comedian and had great aspirations from a very young age of being a creative genius.  And coming from a household that did not have much in the way of music immersion programs (in other words, other than the car, I rarely remember music on in the house) I still managed to find a love for music at an extremely young age.  In fact, I think my love affair with music started about the time my love affair with words began, and come to think of it, the two would become intertwined for most of my life.  When I was six years old I remember saving my allowance and purchasing my first album - an album by my first girl crush ever, Shawn Cassidy, complete with hunky poster and everything.  I begged and cajoled my dad into taking me to purchase it and I will never forget that feeling of accomplishment I had walking out of the store, holding his hand, album swinging from the other.

From there I progressed to Muskrat Love by Captain and Tennile, Going to the Chapel by The Dixie Cups (one that satisfied my dreams of wedlock to my beloved Shawn), and an all around stellar album by Lesley Gore of teenage love and angst that I discovered in my mother's stash (from a very young age I just couldn't wait to be old, but that is another story entirely).  Music became the background for the movie of my life - I laid for hours in the basement where the stereo had been consigned, listening to music and singing at the top of my lungs with the headphones on.  It was on when my barbies fought and when they inevitably made up.  It was on when I wrote.  There was a song for every emotion that I could possibly feel and some that I didn't even know I had yet.  The only time music was really not present was when I was immersed in my books or roller skating (which, admittedly, was at least half the time) but I guarantee, had they invented such things as portable 8-track players, I would have had one strapped on along with my skates.

Music and words have often collided in my world, and I've been known to run around making up new lyrics to songs ala Al Yankovic, highly entertaining myself and, later, my children, if no one else.  I performed in musicals growing up, and dreamed of Broadway.  Music is a vein that travels deep in my soul and so it was with considerable surprise that I found when I started college in the fall of 2010 that I suddenly could not listen to music.  Where music had followed my days from morning to night, there was suddenly silence.  It seemed that there was no space in my head for the things I was learning and the distraction of a melody.  When I drove, it was in silence, with the radio off, the iPod tucked away in a drawer so that equations and cell functions could fill all of those gaps previously occupied by that thing called music.  It seemed the background noise in my head was more than enough. 

And somehow, oddly enough, I was ok with it.  In some way, I suppose, the process of a mathematical equation or the function of a sodium potassium pump are almost melodious in and of themselves, and I began to see the beauty of a new way to immerse myself.  It wasn't until a year later, in August of this past year, that this need for silence passed, as suddenly as it had come.  As my mom lay at home, in the final days of her life, a lifetime's worth of songs played non-stop on the stereo next to her bed - every song she ever loved, the songs that knit the painful moments of our lives together and the songs that celebrated every triumph, issued forth from an iPod meant to give her comfort.  How powerful is it that music can illustrate an entire life, almost like a series of photos, each song attached to a memory?  And even when that memory is gone, the trigger for it seems to remain buried within those melodies.

In the days that followed my mom's death, my need for that trigger, for those memories, surfaced like a tidal wave and the sound of silence was almost too much to bear.  Music came back into my life with a vengeance and my emotions were played out like a symphony in stereo.  It was my voice and my words when I had none of my own.  And it was music that got me through to the place I am right now, to a place that is somewhere between those two extremes.  I don't need to drive in silence anymore - I find that my brain needs the distraction in order to process the information of the day.  But I have learned to savor the stillness deep in my soul when it comes, like tonight, as I sit with only the sound of my fingers clicking on the keyboard and the soft breaths of the dog on the floor beside me.