PLay me a River (of Tears)

This morning I am immersed in some of the world's greatest female vocalists.  Sade, Aretha, Norah Jones, Roberta Flack,....I confess to having bought more than one album today from Amazon.....Fortunately they were not expensive ones.  I love music so much. The fact that I am losing my hearing makes me sad beyond expression.  What will I do once I have only my own demons to listen to??  I don't think I will be able to bear living like that.

If you know me; you  know that I am Always ALWAYS listening to music...iPod or iHome or YouTube or Spotify....Music transports me. Calms me. Spooks me. Intrigues me.....speaks to me of different times in my life.....My music collection is my photo album and my video library.  They  say that scent is the sense most tightly tied to our memories.  For me it is music. (Music is a sense?? Yes, it must be)....

I used to take my paintings to a spa in NY....They would have an always changing arrangement of my paintings there....and the only thing I really recall about the place is that they were playing Norah Jones on their sound system.  I don't know if they always had her playing or if it was just that first time that I heard those milky tones flowing through the corridors there.  But it forever impressed me....it set the tone and the ambiance for that place...and made it distinctive in my memory.

Similarly, the first time I heard Adele....singing her furious "Rollin' in the Deep" was when the moderator on SZ. com  shared a link to her singing that song.  I was gobsmacked to use an Aussie/Brit term.....I will never forget that night...listening to Adele over and over...and then a few days later, I heard her rollicking tones filling the PlayTogs store in NY....a dumpy place made memorable by the addition of genius.

And now James Taylor is playing.  His smoky sound first met my ears when I was 16 and hospitalized in Columbia Presbyterian in NYC ---a friend had slipped a cassette tape into my hand the night before I went in.  On one side was James Taylor's Greatest Hits and on the other was the Eagles Greatest Hits.  I like the Eagles....but more often then not, I fast forwarded through that side so I could listen to the sweet sadness of  James Taylor.  It was to his songs that tears slid down my cheeks there, alone, young and in hospital: watching the Christmas lights twinkling in the windows of surrounding apartments...

And Sade??  Brings me back to our second apartment in the early 90's...My newborne babe lying in her cradle and Sade's Smooth Operator flowed like a silken scarf might weave its way on a breeze through my living room.. Young wife; new babe....finding comfort in music.

And nothing much has changed now; except everything else.  The only thing that has remained the same is me burying my head in the sands of music...closing my eyes to the ugly in my life; to the sad in my life and allowing these voices to sing my sadness so it doesn't come to rest on me.