Sometimes we forget about things, like music that catches us off-guard and reaches out deep within our souls. It could just be the music or a gathering, or just our mind taking us away to other places.
The other night I went into the living room where my wife Peggy was watching an ancient concert on TV. I forget why I walked into the room, but I stopped and just let “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” being sung solo by Art Garfunkel without Paul Simon from decades ago just float over my body and relax my mind and my heart. It calmed my entire body. I gave Peggy a goodnight kiss and floated back to bed where the tune joined me and sang me to sleep. Several days later I sat down at my computer to find that concert to hopefully again fill my body with joy, but once I started looking another song came up that caught my attention. It was a concert (Live at Kennedy Center Honors) and Aretha Franklin was sitting down at the piano, which blew Carol King away as she sat in the audience. Aretha began singing Carol King’s “Natural Woman”, which brought tears to King and President Barak Obama as well. The audience went wild.
The music, the joy, and the moments all worked together to deliver a memory. Two of my favorite memories are always close to my heart. One was me as a teenager with my mom, and my father crowded into the front seat of my dad’s Ford Ranchero in the early 1960s. Playing on the radio was a concert featuring Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall. The music was sometimes funny, sometimes romantic, and sometimes just touching.
I can’t leave out my wife. We used to visit Seattle quite a bit and had a favorite three floors of bedrooms Bed & Breakfast on Capitol Hill. We had a room on the second floor. Sometimes Peg’s legs would tingle and ache. Often just eating a banana made the pain go away. If not, then we would dance in each other’s arms until the pain went away. No one ever complained about our midnight dancing . . . it was more like a simple shuffle . . . The pain went away, but the joy remained . . . just like the memories of Art Garfunkel
Harry Belafonte,
and Aretha Franklin, Carol King, and Peggy.
