After at least five years in the Focus with no working music, I now have a cd player and radio again. I don't know what broke on the original system, but the speakers worked and the system did not. The girls had some cassette with a wire on it that they could hook up to their iPods and play music that way, but most of the time they just put their iPods on their heads and left me in peace.
About the time the music broke, they were listening to junk. I had no motivation to fix it. In fact, I might have broken it faster had I realized the peace and quiet I was going to get once that occurred.
Today was strange in some ways, especially driving around with music blasting away. I started to think at first that I really had been in silence too long because I didn't recognize (but liked) three songs in a row. However, my hearing is shot and I couldn't tell what the words were. Finally I did know some of the words, and I figured out I had tuned in a Christian rock station. So I listened to a little country and then some classic rock.
I am big on the classic rock. I grew up with Boston and Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller Band, Eagles. I love Fleetwood Mac especially. I like a lot of music. Foreigner might be my favorite. Hard to say. I caught Layla by Eric Clapton today. Not my favorite song, but it was just so good to have music. So naturally I will be burning cds of Sing to Jehovah this weekend. That's the best music.
And I sure need to practice. I had a lot of bronchitis this past winter and my singing is not where I want it to be.
The first time the DJ was talking (I hit scan almost immediately but this time he got a few words in on me) and he said Pennsylvania and the call letters beginning with W, I nearly fainted. All my life radio stations began with the letter K. Who likes W better than K? The only W I like is the WDVE on the building in Pittsburgh because it looks like the abbreviation for Wildeve, the surname of a fictional witness family I adore in the books of Thea Phipps, one of my best sisters in Arkansas. (If you are a reader, check her out on Amazon.)
Who do you want to meet in the resurrection? I do want to meet Bathsheba and Abigail. Got a thing for Ruth too. For a guy though, I would say Jubal and David. Jubal was the founder of pipes, and his name is the root for a favorite word of mine: jubilation. David, as you know, was a harpist. Like, you may think of him primarily as King, adulterer, shepherd, all kinds of roles, but I always picture him first as a musician. The main thing I want to do in the new world is hear all the Israelite music by the Israelites. I want the real thing. I have fantasies that we'll have music conventions in the new world just to have music all day long. Why talk if you can sing?
So today I had music in my life. I was wondering who I am anymore. I don't recognize myself a lot lately. I have gained weight here during these hibernational winters. I have been depressed or sad or something over my job being stupid and the climate being frozen. I am going to try and get back where I was, but it isn't just that. I'm missing music, and I just haven't been myself. I don't feel right. I never have felt like I had my feet back under me from moving. Today, I thought I might find me again, that I'm getting closer.
Last year, I was thinking about a brother here and that I liked him enough to think about eternity with him. One time we were talking on the phone and I said, as crazy as it might sound, that I liked to make meatloaf not so much for meatloaf for dinner but for cold meatloaf sandwiches for breakfast the next morning, and he said oh me too. Every time I mentioned liking some 80's rock, he had it and burned a CD for me.
There's a poem by Cornelius Eady that I have always loved. It's called "I'm a Fool to Love You" and it is the story of how the poet's mother chooses his father after having first been with a no-account man, how that first love was so bad it made his father look like "an island in the middle of a stormy sea. He made my father look like a rock." And she ended up with this man even though he was cruel, and that is how the blues work their sorry wonder. The poem ends by saying the blues make trouble look like a feather bed, makes the wrong man's kisses a healing.
If your whole life is about a father who is messed up, a few guys who will say anything to use you, and a husband who thinks you ain't got half a brain, then maybe a decent brother comes along and his kisses would feel like a healing. One of my friends wrote me after one of these posts and says her father was messed up in some different ways, verbally abusive, emotionally manipulative, and he was a brother. My mother used to say that she would not trade my father in for about half the brothers in our congregation.
I don't want a worldly man, but there are a few in the truth I couldn't abide either. One time I actually told a brother in Arkansas that the way he walked into the hall ten minutes before his wife entered (she was getting the baby in the baby seat and the toddler out of the toddler seat and carrying a book bag and a diaper bag) was a disgrace, that it set a bad example for my daughters. He laughed.
I don't know why his wife put up with that either, except I do know as hard as it is to change yourself, it's even harder to get someone else motivated. And by the time you have two babies with a man, you are so invested in them, that you don't really count sometimes, or at least you can't afford to let yourself count.
Today I was listening to music, what I wanted to hear. What I wanted mattered. I realized that the worst part about figuring out last year that I was on a one way street of romantic interest was that for a little while, I entertained the idea that I mattered to someone, and really, I didn't. Not much. Ain't even got the kisses of the wrong man. At the meetings, sometimes he shows up in the same color I'm wearing. Oh, if it's green it doesn't mean anything because I wear green all the time. But I hardly ever wear purple, and then if we show up both in purple, I want it to matter, but it doesn't. I'm being superstitious or something else equally disapproved.
One Thursday night about a month ago, we both showed up after meeting to get gas at the local Get Go. He was on one side of the building and I was on the other. We had driven through the Rambler for ice cream cones in Windber, so we sat there and finished them before I got out and pumped gas in Johnstown. I didn't want to see him. Sometimes I feel so stupid and it rises up like lava and I think bring it on, overflow and melt me down into oblivion so I die from this and I never have to hurt again.
I'm getting better. I spoke to him after the last meeting, and he spent most of the meeting behind my right shoulder holding a microphone. I didn't listen for the sound of his breathing and I didn't care that my book didn't look studied. I've gotten into the habit of reading the material on my computer and doing the Bible reading in my office, so the book doesn't get underlined a lot on these summer Thursdays. I didn't care if he thought I studied or not.
Today on the radio, they played I've Been Waiting for a Girl Like You. This is one of my favorite songs to sing, but of course I change it to Guy like you. I ruined the song for myself by singing it karaoke to a brother named Harley in 2005, he of the eight hands I had to keep pushing off, which was difficult having only two hands myself. It was on one of the cd's I got burned last year. I realized he was never waiting for me. It doesn't make him a rotten scoundrel. I have never been able to think of him in those terms. I still respect him and care what happens to him. And I was happy to realize I'm not waiting anymore. I'm ready to go on and live my life. I'm going to matter to me.
The next song on my car radio was Sweet Love Hangover which goes not only do I have a sweet love hangover but I don't want to get over. Don't want the cure for this. I always liked that song (Diana Ross) because it was written by two women. Why do men think they can write songs for women to sing? Maybe the problem is there is no cure, that whole and your craving will be for your husband, and he will dominate you, and he will think he can write songs for you and you will be so grateful you will make meatloaf whenever he asks and welcome his eight hands and he can pick the music on the car radio.
Still, I do not plan on wearing purple to the meetings anytime soon. Maybe when I get to Saipan and the coast is clear.
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