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Saturday, February 2, 2008

Runnin’ Down A Dream

I just finished watching a documentary on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was like a trip down memory lane, each album he made book marking a part of my life; from sex and drugs and rock n roll to motherhood, marriage, back to school, a new career, the end of marriage, raising teenagers, death and taxes. It was all there for me to remember, for hours I was mesmerized by the music that has been with me through 30 years of my life. Tom and Stevie, she was there too through it all, sometimes the music was the only things carrying me through days I couldn’t face alone. So why have I abandoned this comfort. I guess I know why, because one day a few months ago I caught myself singing to the radio in the car on the way to the office. And I looked up and said “See, I’m going to be okay.” And the guilt was overwhelming, even as I recognized that I shouldn’t go down that road there I was trudging along, pulling myself back from that moment of joy as if I had been burned. There was another moment not so long ago where we caught a performance of Styx on the new HDNET channel playing with the Cleveland Contemporary Youth Orchestra back in 2006 and they were doing
I am the Walrus and the violins just swept me away, and the joy of the kids playing the music reached in and grabbed my heart and held it tight, the notes screaming at me ‘where have you been’ and filling me until I could barely breath my body so full of the sound and emotion.

So back to this morning, I was lying in bed waiting for the house to warm up, flipping through channels on the TV (that shouldn’t even be in the bedroom, I know…) when I saw the words Runnin’ Down A Dream and the song was immediately in my head and I hit enter on the remote. Four hours later here I am wondering how I have lived without the comfort of music these past couple of years. I began learning guitar back as a teenager, inspired by my
Uncle Guy and the wonderful music he brought to family gatherings. I started lessons at a community center program, learning folk songs and finger picking, then on to high school where I learned to read notes and gained confidence. Next it was on to a music college where I began to study classical guitar and penned my first original score. There are many stories, leading like steps from there to here, none of them a good explanation for why my guitar (the same one my parents gave me in my teens) is packed away in a hard case under my dresser in the bedroom right now. I used to play in my twenties with friends after work, and later for my children when they were young, but I can’t remember the last time I pulled it out and dusted it off. I think that not having a voice had something to do with it, I married into a family who could sing, I mean really sing, where I was always a little flat. Now here I am, living with a man who loves the guitar and every so often asks me about playing. He has … let me go count…a dozen electric guitars that I can see, four of them out of their cases on stands, most of them Fenders, tucked away into this tiny 1100 square foot house. (don't even ask me to count amps)Some of them he means to sell; acquired in his hunt for the perfect guitar he loved finding them, taking them apart, replacing the worn parts, putting them back together with pristine strings and polishing them until they gleamed only to discover that the certain magic he was looking for was absent. It is so quiet here when he is on the road as he is this week, gone are the rifts he practices over and over as he watches TV, plays computer games and voraciously reads online. (He is a multi tasker who can’t seem to get an empty bottle from the countertop in the kitchen to the recycle bin under the sink, I mean, there aren’t even steps involved.) But I digress. I need to welcome music back into my life. I have become addicted to audio books, the words following me from the car, to the kitchen, and then out for a bike ride or a walk. They are with me as I fold laundry or do dishes, and I only silence them when I am reading, writing or watching TV. I try and try to meditate, but Heaven forbid I should allow myself anytime for complete silence and thought, which usually leads to pain. I have known for some time that this is me hiding and ... and ... and having written even that much I freeze, my fingers refusing to finish the sentence. Because even the idea of moving from denial to acceptance in the ‘stages of grief’ is beyond my comprehension, there is just no way to accept my son is gone. There has to be a differnt path than acceptance. So this morning I am thinking that music might be a way to fight back, and maybe I will go get my guitar out; if I can do this, maybe I can create a chink in my armor and find my own way out of this impossible situation.

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