Heat, Sweat and Tears

As summer explodes this April with the sun sizzling down with a vengeance like it's trying to bore past my newly sunscreened skin, I'm not sure if it's the extremity of the weather that's been getting me a tad emotional lately.

Like when I was watching Little Women on TV earlier today. As with most everything that comes on TV, I stumbled onto it halfway through starting with where Jo goes home to find little Beth dying and as the two sisters grapple in their own ways with death, I started tearing up crazily. I'd first read Little Women at boarding school at St Agnes, Haflong, all of 11 years old, and I had loved the story of Jo March and her sisters, and later made it a point to catch hold of the sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys as well. As I write this, I suddenly remember a long-legged crush I had at college whom I'd obliquely refer to as Ted in my diaries after Jo's long-legged son Ted :)

And then the other night after watching Andrew Lloyd Webber night on American Idol and loading my phone anew with Michael Crawford's Music of the Night, and later flipping through my song list looking for another Lloyd Webber favourite Love Changes Everything by the divinely throated Michael Ball, I lay exhaustedly in bed traipsing down memory lane... Barbra Streisand, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot....

I read somewhere once that music is the shortest route down yesteryears or something to that effect, and I couldn't agree more. The association of music and memories is so instant. When I listen to The Eagles' Witchy Woman, I don't just hear the song. I'm transported back to a picnic on a balmy day with a group of friends after we'd just recently come back from a college excursion around the country at the height of summer (early June, to be specific). To this day I can never listen to Witchy Woman without fond recollections of that fun day out.

Friends with who I'd shared the music suddenly become terribly missable, even those I haven't seen or even remembered for ages. The good times, the fun times.... they come crowding back into the mind. Funny but at the time I'd never thought I'd ever look back and miss those times so much one day. Just like a favourite quote from a John Lennon song, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." And Lennon couldn't have imagined himself as he was writing and recording that song that he'd be dead just a few weeks later. And when I was a young wide-eyed college kid, I never ever thought a poem we had in English class would ring so true someday -

Oft in the stilly night
ere slumber's chain has bound me,
fond memory brings the light
of other days around me....