Wonderful

Throckey inadvertently started a meme with an offhanded comment on one of my posts about something being "easy like Sunday morning."

This got the song "Easy" going in an endless groove in my brain (children, that's a reference to vinyl record albums, which had grooves that the needle rode along in, creating the music we elders listened to in our youth. The double album covers made excellent trays for sorting the seeds from the weed. Open enough double albums in a used-record store and you could probably roll yourself a fine -- though stale -- joint. Though the pot from back then didn't have the most excellent quality that we can get today) and I had to get out the old Commodores CD (another antiquated music format from your parents' era, cutting-edge in the 80's and leading to the unwarranted popularity of Sting's "Dream of the Blue Turtles," not because it was great but because it was the only thing available on CD for three years. Then Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" came out and we all listened to that for another five years until "Achtung Baby" came out) to hear that old funk
classic. If only to hear that old familiar piano intro and sing along to "Why in the world would anybody put chains on me?/I paid my dues to make it/Ev'rybody wants me to be what they want me to be/I'm not happy when I try to fake it."

It also got the comments thread going on the Commodores, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, and led to Paula posting about a single Lionel Richie song that had sad memories for her but doesn't affect her at all now.

Which got me thinking about "Wonderful," by Adam Ant. So I dug out that CD, too, and put it on. (Ok, "dug out" isn't really the right word, since my cd's are alphabetized by artist. I'm a little anal-retentive about that because when I want to hear a specific song, I want to hear it NOW and don't want to have to search through 800 cds for ten minutes until I find it. It also makes DJ nights at my house a whole lot easier.)

Without getting into the whole story, which features Matt deciding at the top of Pike's Peak on Tuesday that he had to get back to me as SOON as was humanly possible, driving like a bat out of hell to do it, and ringing my buzzer at 7am two days later, cut to a few months later to us dancing to the song and him saying, I miss you looking at me like that and I DO want to spend the rest of my life with you, cut again to present day and me playing the CD and thinking, wow, that was AWESOME what he did, and AWESOME what we had, and now I'm teaching myself to play that song, badly but with great enthusiasm, on my crappy Fender that I just restrung.

It's the one really great pop song on a mediocre and unmemorable album, with really great memories attached to it, and it makes me smile to remember them, and him.

But isn't that all life is, really? The occasional moment when someone misses you so much he'll drive all night to get to you, or a really great song that floats by on the sea of ordinary music that is our day-to-day existence? If we don't stop and listen, we might not hear it at all.