After my grandparents moved to Chetek someone gave them a tape recorder and they’d create audio tapes for family. My grandma had a toy organ and their beagle, Chubby, would sing along with her. Ten years ago I converted one of the tapes to .mp3 files and uploaded them to my Clutch Cargo Lips blog. Here’s Me and My Shadow.
I need to pee and walk into a room containing toilets. Sometimes the toilets are in stalls without doors, but often they are just sitting in the middle of a public place like a department store with people milling around. Other people use the exposed toilets so I do too. I must have this dream at least once a month.
Three songs remind me of growing up in Elgin around Christmastime: Suzy Snowflake, Hardrock, Coco, and Joe, and Frosty the Snowman because they were all played (with accompanying animation) on the local (Chicago) WGN TV station in the days leading up to Christmas. This was back in a time of my life that Christmas was something to look forward to.
Retirement is currently my greatest life-dream. Not that I am wishing away three of the remaining years I have left on Earth, but I no longer love what I do for a living and I don’t feel like changing careers at 62. I look forward to the day when using a computer is something I do for pleasure and not work.
When I discovered Kate Bush’s music, I knew no one else who liked her. It wasn’t until I got online almost 20 years later that I realized how many people not only knew who she was, but loved her music as much as I did. Those first two decades were very lonely, but at least I had her music for comfort.
In my late teens and early twenties I told anyone who would listen that my dream house was a cabin in the woods with chickens for eggs and a cow for milk. I’d grow my own vegetables near the house. It never occurred to me that a wooded lot would be too shady for vegetables. I ended up in suburbia.
There are two pieces of music that stop me in my tracks when I hear them. One is Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and one is Pachelbel’s Canon in D. They both evoke in me strong memories and feelings that must be relived and felt without distractions. I wrote about both on Jeux San Frontieres (previous links).
I can get lost in daydreams if I am not careful so when I feel a daydream coming on when I need to be thinking about something else, I stop and file it away to think about at night when I cannot sleep. I am remarkably good at this, although my daydreams are becoming rarer as I age, which sucks.
Until I really listened to the lyrics to Downtown I never quite understood my mother’s obsession with the downtown of cities I’d visited. She was usually disappointed that I’d not gone downtown, but her idea of downtown was from the song:
So go downtown, things’ll be great when you’re
Downtown, no finer place for sure
Downtown everything’s waiting for you
I have trouble with numbers, I always have; dialing a phone number makes me nervous. That problem has wormed itself into my dreams: I’m desperately trying to dial a phone, but can’t punch in the numbers and I panic. In a relatively recent dream I shouted “Alexa, dial 911” and she unhelpfully replied, “Hmm, I don’t know how to do that.”
As we’ve aged we’ve become more inclined to keep the air conditioning on in the summer. The last few nights it has been cool and dry enough to keep the air conditioning off and the windows open. Last night I realized how much I’d missed the nightsong outside the window. Crickets (even snowy-tree crickets) and katydids. I love their song.
Much of my work is repetitive: Check the code, check the links, check the tags, check the images, check the properties, report my findings, rinse and repeat; so it comes as no surprise that my dreams are frequently repetitive and tiring. I often awake thinking I need to go back to sleep to finish whatever repetitive task I’ve just escaped.
After attending a Tom Chapin concert at the Birchmere in Alexandria I bought a cassette tape of his Moonboat. Once we had kids, his was the only “kids” music we bought and we all sang along in the car to his music. We also abandoned the traditional Happy Birthday song for Tom’s. We still sing it to this day.
After becoming connected to the World Wide Web I began having hyperlink dreams. I’d be in a dream, then touch some object in the dream and be transported to a new dream where I could touch something there and move to another dream. It was a result of “surfing the web”. I don’t “surf” anymore, so those dreams are gone.
By June of 2016 Mom had not said my name for over a year when I visited her in the hospital that month. To keep her cheerful and occupied I decided to play music from the 50s on my phone. I chose The Twist then I twisted and sang along while she watched and laughed, then shouted “Dona! Stop that!”
Although bedridden, Mom arose and went to a window, stood on her tiptoes and looked out, repeating this several times, more excited with each. I reached for her and held her tight. When a zing of electricity entered my body I let her go. She dissolved into sparkles that flew out the windows.
Forever tied to my mother, this song fills my head when I see lilies of the valley. Mom and I used to sing it when they bloomed.
Shortly before my mother died, when she could still talk, but didn’t remember much, I played a recording of this song for her. Her eyes brightened, she smiled and said, “Oh yeah.”
The night Dad died I dreamed he lifted me from one bed and carried me to another. It began as a being-pulled-from-the-bed dream, but I felt his presence doing what he’d done countless times in the past after he’d worked late in his garage. I’d fall asleep next to Mom and he’d carry me down the hallway to my bed.
Creative people everywhere used their craft to cope with the horrors of September 11, 2001, Dan Bern among them. He wrote NYC 911 a few days later and I heard him play it not long after that. It’s not on any released album, but is on several bootlegs I own.
I listen to it once a year on the anniversary of the tragedy.
Friday night I dreamed I met Frank Sinatra. I believe it was the double vesper I drank before dinner and the wine for dinner that brought him to my bed. We had a fine chat and I admitted I didn’t really like his music. Later, telling people I’d met him, they all asked why I didn’t mention his daughter Nancy.
Two slim books of hymns belonging to my father’s mother sit in a pile of “to blog about” items. One has no cover, the other does. But they both, when I hold them, cause church music to play in my head. No particular title, just soaring organ music and out of tune, but determined voices filling my mind with song.
I’m in bed, asleep, and I feel as if I’m being pulled off the bed. Sometimes I feel a presence in the room, sometimes I just feel the tugging on my clothes. I fought this feeling the first few times I had this dream but now I just let it happen because in the dream I know it’s a dream.
My husband always needs music playing in the background. In the car, in the kitchen, in the shower, in his office, on his bike. There are times however, he cannot play music so he whistles instead. Poorly, annoyingly, gratingly. I politely ask him to stop. Once a colleague shouted “Would you please cease that incessant tuneless noise you are making!”
I suddenly discover we’ve sold our house and own another house usually far away, sometimes on the same street. I’m excited at the newness and walk from room to room, exploring. The houses are usually a labyrinth of rooms and hallways, often full of former owner’s items. I never finish touring the house and awake disappointed I didn’t see everything.
My fourth-grade teacher had her class put on a minstrel show every year. Yes, you read that right, blackface and all. We had to audition for a part. She suggested I sing Beautiful Dreamer, so in front of the entire class I tried my best to hit the notes. She told me that I sang terribly and to sit down.
I have not flown in my sleep in decades and I could only fly in my childhood backyard because I needed the back screen door handle to boost me up. I’d hold on to it and kick my legs backward until I was floating, let go of the door handle and swim through the air.
Flight enabling door in background
While I normally like silence, there is one activity that needs music: cleaning. For that I usually request that Alexa stream Motown or more specifically, music from The Big Chill. This music gives me enough energy, both physical and psychological, to deal with whatever cleaning I need to do. Joy To The World, especially, gives me a needed adrenaline surge.
I have not had one in a while but I vividly recall the sick feeling of guilt and dread that even lasted into the next morning when I dreamed I was signed up for a college class and it was near the end of the semester but I’d never gone to class.
The online word counter lied to me. Sixty.
The end of summer song is the song of the cicada. Is it my imagination or does the song become louder in September? Did you know that Dylan wrote a song about cicadas? He got the common name wrong, and he was singing about the periodical cicadas, but still. He did write a song about cicadas.
It’s not on YouTube.
One poem more
Another poem, another blog post
This never-ending month of August
Will hopefully never be repeated
One poem more.
I wrote more before this month
How can I write another poem?
One poem more.
Tomorrow I’ll write about songs
Or maybe I’ll write about dreams
One more day of poetry writing
Will I ever write another poem?
One more day of hating poetry
I was born to not write poems
What a blog post I could have written
Had it not included poems
But Kim chose the topic
One more poem before the month ends
And here I write a parody
Of a song from my favorite musical
I tip my hat to my blogging friends
For their creations the month of August
How I dare to write this parody
Will you accept my apologies?
I’m already thirty-nine words over
The 100 word limit for this month
I’ll leave you with this last thought
This song parody
Is like a segue for next month.
Food falls on the floor
Too lazy to pick it up
Ants are our Roomba.
Cedar Waxwing's 365 