good times

So, summer is over.  We’ve gone and done it, and now it’s all about adjusting back to the time zone of down-to-business.  It’s as if I’ve arrived home from international travel, I just can’t seem to get myself to bed on time.  I can say with full conviction that I officially “vacated” this summer.  Not from my inner woes, but most definitely from the outer ones.  And honestly, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the return of the daily grind.  It keeps me moving, smiling, chirping.  It keeps me from the cocoon that is myself at times.  I embrace its return like that of a loyal friend, as I struggle to let go of my silence.

I found the time to dig through my old music CDs.   As it turns out, if you can live through the heat and humidity in Kansas City, summer is good for something.  I am now an avid iTunes user, so it’s rare that I make it through my evolving mixes of new music, back to the soundtracks of my youth.  Once there, I found it amazing the breadth of overwhelmingly beautiful and suffocating-ly melancholy songs that carried me through, that stole my heart and earned my adoration, that spoke the language of my soul; Jeff Buckley, Indigo Girls, Storyhill, Bjork, Simon and Garfunkel, and on and on.  I listened eagerly to some of my favorites.  One brings me back to a train car racing through the French country side, another to the dented top of a beat up Buick under a blanket of stars, and so many find me lying on my back on my bedroom floor with the scent of incense and the flickering of candle light in the darkness.  If I close my eyes I can still feel my back and head on the carpet and the cool, dry, MN winter air creeping through my open window.  How nauseously nostalgic it all is.

And slow.  I swear several of the songs took a good 30 seconds just to start the first verse.  Who (other than a 14-year-old wistful young girl) has time to wait 30 seconds to hear the first verse?  It came as a major shocker to me that my taste in music has become so much less about quality and so much more about how much time I’m willing to wait to hear something catchy or sing along.  I’ve no patience left for the symphony of it all.  I have fully embraced the iTunes format, which sells a song in 30 seconds, and steals away the opportunity to fall in love with the slower developing and less popular tracks on an album.  That is, until now.  Now it’s on my list.

You know, the internal list of all the things that a new season, be it a semester, or a year, or just a feeling, holds.   What’s yours in the here-and-now?  Does it have you speeding up, or slowing down, or marching on?  Does it have a soundtrack?  Is it governed by impatient energetic motivation, or is it begrudgingly slow in coming, but beautiful in its fruition?

For me, “fall” twenty ten began with a heart wrenching funeral, getting stranded on the side of the road twice in my ridiculous 1980s convertible, having to make a new class schedule on the third day of school due to cancellations, and lots of first grade nervous tears from my favorite little boy in the world.  And all the while I’ve had buds of peaceful patience in my ears in the form of long intros and melodic rock operas.   All the while I can feel the swaying of a slower time arriving.

I’m off to do it.