— Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Running Down a Dream”
I am the only person in my family who likes car rides. I love to go for a drive through the mountains on the weekend, or toodle around to nearby little towns. And unlike my husband and our kids, I like road trips. Our children get bored, of course, just like I did when I was their age. They just want to get to where we’re going.
But I like the going. I like looking out the window, watching the landscape roll by: a sign of being on the move, of seeing someplace different from our everyday ordinary life. The highway and the passing scenery are a reminder that the world is big and interesting and beautiful.
What makes a road trip even better is good driving music. One of my favorite musicians for driving, especially in spring, is Tom Petty. There’s something free about his music. It makes me feel alive, and it pairs well with watching the landscape roll by through a car window.
It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down
I had the radio on, I was drivin’
On our way to Baltimore, we drove through forests edged with redbud trees that bloomed magenta, farmlands filled with white-blossomed pear trees, passed red barns on green hills in sunlight, saw the first signs of spring green leaves on mountainsides. In the background was Tom Petty, the soundtrack to our drive through the flowering Appalachians.
I had my feet on the dashboard and my eyes on the moving American landscape, and I was happy.
For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Our daughter’s music — Katy Perry, Run-D.M.C. — and our music, especially when we play hard hip hop, make our son cringe. He has specific and limited music tastes. He will tolerate classical, and jazz without singing, but rarely has he said he likes a type of music, and never would he seek any music out.
One day we went to the mall, and as I power walked to whatever store we were destined for, in my hurry to get the shopping over with, our son strolled behind me and said, “I like this music.”
I stopped to listen. It was some horrible generic Muzak whose blandness offended me. I scrunched up my face, one nostril raised, and said, “You do?”
“Yeah,” he said, with his contented Buddha smile. “It’s quiet. And sad.”
He was 10 at the time. And he liked quiet and sad music.
He didn’t seek out or buy Muzak after that, thankfully, but the moment was enlightening to me. A little window into our son’s sensibilities: he did not care about music, as evidenced by his appreciation for Muzak. It just wasn’t his thing.
So when he started requesting a song in the car recently – “Can you play the whale song, Mom? – I was happy to play it for him. Over. And over. Again.
“What is it you like about this song, buddy?” I asked him after the fifth or sixth request.
“I like that it tells a story,” he said. And he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like it.”
“Oh, well maybe you’ll like the rest of this band’s songs then. Most of their songs tell stories.”
“What’s the name of the band?”
“The Decemberists,” I said. “You want to listen to another of their songs?”
Since then, we have put 39 Decemberists songs on his tablet for him. I’ll be folding laundry in the living room and hear, drifting down the stairs,
We are two mariners
Our ship’s sole survivors
In this belly of a whale*
He listens while he does his homework. He listens while he curls up and reads. He listens while he lays in bed and stares at the ceiling, doing nothing at all besides absorbing the stories, and the music.
*From “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” by The Decemberists.
For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
I was planning to run my first bike/run combo today, which is called a “brick” in triathlon lingo, because your legs feel like bricks when you try to run after riding a bike. But when I checked the forecast yesterday, it called for thunderstorms all day today, with an extra special treat of severe weather this afternoon, which here in Minnesota usually means tornadoes.
In the middle of the night, I woke to crashing thunder several times, with lightning flashing through the openings in the curtains, and every time I thought, “Go on weather. Get it out of your system now so I can wake up to clear skies.” I really didn’t want to ride and run in a lightning storm.
And when I woke this morning at 7 AM, this is what I saw through the slats in the blinds:
Blue Sky
You’d better believe I jumped out of bed to take advantage of it. Because what I couldn’t see from my bed was the ring of black sky all around the small patch of blue.
My bike ride was awesome, as bike rides always are, and I was tempted to take it even longer than my training schedule suggested (only 30 minutes – what’s the point in that?). But the sky was darkening back up, and I figured I should get back home and run before my luck ran out.
I dropped my bike off, changed shoes, grabbed my headphones, and took off running. At first I thought, “Bricks? What bricks? My legs feel totally normal. Like I didn’t even ride my bike!” By the end of the block it felt like someone had opened me up and poured lead into my waist. The heaviness seeped down my hamstrings, into my calves, all the way down to my heels and toes. Picking up my feet was like uprooting trees. And I thought, “This sucks.”
I looked at my watch and 4 minutes had gone by. Only 4 minutes? I’ve got to do this for 26 more minutes? What the hell was I thinking of signing up for a triathlon?!
The sky was grey and gloomy. No more blue skies and happy clouds. All I could think of was my friend Liv’s blog post, Three Ways to Make Blogging Suck Less, and how I wanted someone to inform me of three ways to make running suck less. Besides doing more running.
The clouds parted (for real!), I found my stride, and the Runner’s High commenced. My right foot fell on every down beat, in perfect rhythm with the music. I was swift, I was light, I was running, and it didn’t suck! I ran like a track star, like I’d been running all my life, like my legs were feathers. My stride lengthened. My shoulders loosened. My lungs opened. I grinned a stupid grin while I ran.
In short, I kicked ass.
I have no idea what the song is about, because my Spanish is no good, but I do know that that song lifted my feet and lightened my load, and it put me on cruise control for the remaining 20 minutes. The next thing I knew, the run was almost over, and James Brown’s Make it Funky came through to take me home. I feasted on homemade crepes and a perfect cup of coffee with my family as the sky opened up and poured its deluge onto the roads I had just ridden and run.
Originally written May 22, 2011 in Minnesota, when I was training for my first (and only) post-children triathlon, I thought this would be a good fit for this week’s Daily Post photo challenge: Good Morning! Also, Calle 13’s “Pa’l Norte” has this effect on me every time it comes on my iPod when I run. I’m kind of sick of my other workout music though. Do you have any favorite running tunes?
One of the things I miss most about living in a big city (besides the libraries) is access to night clubs. I love to dance. When I’m in a dark club with lights flashing and music thumping, and I become immersed in dancing and everything else goes out of focus, I move into an ecstatic state akin to what snake handlers feel when they catch the spirit. I don’t need alcohol, I just need the music to be loud and the club to be crowded enough that I can become anonymous. If I get into a good groove, and the music moves through me as if I am a part of it, as if my body is the instrument that completes it, I feel like I’m communing with the Universe. There’s a mystery in music that moves me, and for once, I don’t care to analyze it. When I dance, I just want to submit to it. I don’t crave the experience often, especially now that I’m a parent and go to bed at 10 o’clock, but in DC, and Tampa, and Minneapolis, I had access to those clubs for the once or twice a year I felt the urge to slip into that altered state.
Here in small town Virginia, not so much. I don’t think those clubs exist around here. And even if they do, nobody will invite me to one now because they’ll be scared I’ll start speaking in tongues (I won’t!). BUT. Thanks to my good friend, Dee, who invited my daughter and me to free skating lessons on Saturday mornings, I may have found an alternative.
When we skate at the free skate, from 10 AM to noon on Saturdays, they keep the music low and the lights high. Rolling around and around that rink, when the music is just loud enough to sing along and skate in rhythm, and my hair lifts off my neck a tiny bit from gliding across the smooth floor, I want to really get into it. I want them to turn the lights down, and the music up, and I want it dark and fast, with strobe lights flashing. I want the rink to be a moving mass of roller skaters, discoed out and dancing, like a night club, but on wheels. I roll around the rink, holding our daughter’s hand, and think, why did that never catch on?
I mean, who wouldn’t want to get in on that?! I totally would.
Adventure World, the rink in our town that offers free skate on Saturdays, hosts a roller derby team (Dee, we’re going to go watch them race, right?), and even better, my friend said they sometimes have an 80s night. Who needs night clubs when you can have 80s night at the skating rink? Now all I have to do is keep practicing, so I can dance and roll at the same time. Then I’ll start rounding up adults who are willing to strap on roller skates and go disco with me. It might take some time in a small town, but that’s all right. We’ll be here a while.
For readers in the New River Valley (Blacksburg, Christiansburg, southwest Virginia), Adventure World Skate & Fun Center offers free skate lessons from 10AM to noon on Saturdays. The lessons are very free form – our daughter and I mostly just skate around and around by ourselves – but there are very helpful and fun instructors available if we have questions or would like to learn any basic skills.
Flatfoot dancers escaping into music at Floyd Country Store Old Time Music jam
As soon as the caller put his bow to the fiddle strings, and the first notes of mountain music sang out in the warm, dry country store, I was a goner. My eyes teared up as feet tapped, and teeth shined, and white-haired heads bobbed in time with Old Time Appalachian music.
My parents are in town, stopping through Virginia to see us as they embark on the great adventure of their lives: an RV journey from their home in Georgia, across the US and Canada, to the wilderness of Alaska. Another rainy day in Blacksburg derailed our plans to take them hiking, to show them the spring green of our Appalachian forests. Rather than stare at each other in the confines of our living room while the rain came down, we decided to escape to a different kind of Appalachia before they drive out of these hills: an open jam session at the Floyd Country Store.
Sunday Old Time music jam at Floyd Country Store
Sitting in a circle in folding chairs on the warm wooden planks were eleven musicians, some newcomers, some old timers, all hunched over their strings, their left hands moving up and down fret boards as they played Turkey in the Straw. Their shoulders shrugged in time as they picked banjos and mandolins, twitched bows across fiddles, strummed guitars (pronounced GIH-tahrs), and as one burly, bearded mountain man thumped an upright bass with a meaty hand. All of the instruments were stringed, but the leather sole of a mandolin player’s shoe slapped time on the floor, an unofficial drum. Throughout the four rows of folding chairs behind the bluegrass circle, feet tapped, heads nodded, and shoulders bumped as the audience seat-danced.
The leader of the jam called out, with his chin clamped to the instrument on his shoulder, and his bow racing across fiddle strings, “The floor is open here in the middle.” He tipped his head to the center of the circle. “If anyone wants to dance, it sure helps us out.” I looked at our daughter and raised my eyebrows, “Do you want to dance?” Her eyes got wide as she licked her ice cream cone and she shook her head. No way.
Happy fiddler at Sunday Old Time Music Jam, Floyd Country Store
The group moved into their next song, which was even more irresistible than the first, and as fiddle bows fluttered, the man from behind the counter, who had served me my coffee, stepped into the circle and began dancing. (It turns out he is local flatfooting champion Rick Sutphin). My mom leaned over and said in my ear, “You’re going to have to learn how to buck dance, Andrea!” A silver haired man with pressed, stiff, indigo jeans stepped in after him and began flat foot dancing as well. My eyes teared up again to see the joy on their faces, to see bliss in the smile of the fiddler in front of me. Wrapped up in this music and this Riverdance type jig is the rich Appalachian history of Celtic immigrants climbing into the mountains to find affordable farming land. The banjos and mandolins and slapping feet tell a story of isolation beat back by coming together for country dances, for fiddling, for celebrating the harvest. The twangy sounds, and the rhythm that moves men to buck dance, preserve a rich history, the pulse of which still beats in this mountain music of Virginia. A history that depended on creating community, on participation, for mountain folk to escape the remoteness of their homes in the hills, and that brought a sense of giddiness and joy on the occasions they came together to put their lives into song. How can you not be moved by that?
Apparently it was easy for our nine year old, who was ready to leave just as the silver haired man collapsed into his seat, panting and grinning, and the group moved into a waltz. Our daughter was captivated, though, as was I. I wanted more.
We left reluctantly, and on our way home we asked our daughter, “Do you think you’d like to play an instrument?” She wanders around the house, the campsite, bopping in her booster seat, singing, clapping, dancing little jigs. I crossed my fingers, begging in my heart for a musician in the family.
She thought a minute as she watched at the wet green mountainsides pass by her window. And then she said, “Yes.” She picked at her jeans. “I want to learn the guitar.”
Floyd Country Store in Floyd County, Virginia
The Floyd Country Store broadcasts The Floyd Radio Show from their Friday Night Jamboree, which features gospel music, skits, and dance bands (previous shows available on podcast). Tickets go on sale no earlier than 4:30 on Fridays. On Saturdays they host a free Americana Afternoon starting at noon, followed by an open mic session at 1:30, and on Sundays from 2 to 4 pm, the Floyd Country Store hosts a jam with a local Old Time or Bluegrass band who leads the jam session. The jam session is free. More information on the On Stage page of their website.
If you are interested in Appalachian Music, I highly recommend the movie (and soundtrack) Songcatcher.
This morning, after the kids left for school, and my husband left for work, and I cleared the knives, and the toaster, and the spice rack off the counter so that I could scrub down the kitchen, I had a sudden urge to listen to Blondie.
From out of nowhere, I've got a hankering to listen to Blondie.
I rarely listen to music while I clean. Maybe because I’m moving around the house too much and we don’t have a good setup for making music audible from every room. But today I thought I’d be a little wild, tear down the walls of my rigid routine, and blare music from my childhood while I degreased the stove. I seeded a new Pandora station with Blondie, pulled on my purple rubber gloves, and ended up on the beach at Tybee Island, on the living room floor watching MTV, in the basement for Breakfast Club marathons, at the skating rink, and in Athens, Georgia, for every college football season of my childhood.
The Tide is High by Blondie: I am seven, and the sun iss hot on the tops of my shoulders. A fine grit sticks to the back of my little girl legs as I sit at the edge of a tide pool and make drip castles from wet sand. I smell suntan oil – the coconut kind that comes out of those brown Hawaiian Tropic bottles – and salt water and warmth and beer. I listen to the pssfft of pull tabs being pulled off aluminum cans, the swishing of waves at the ocean’s edge, the muffled murmur of my parents talking and laughing with friends while they lie oiled in the sun on those tri fold lounge chairs with the plastic strips that leave stripes on the backs of your legs if you don’t put a towel down first. The grown ups open more beers – pssfft – and then push those curled, sharp metal tabs into the cans so they won’t cut anyone’s feet. Blondie comes on the 95.5 FM and is broadcast across the tan sands of Tybee from the radio sitting on the beach between my parents’ chairs.
Take on Me by A-Ha: I am in lying on my belly in our living room. The living room in the house we lived in when MTV launched. The living room with the fireplace and the carpet and the wood paneled walls where I spent pre-teen summers glued to MTV, watching this video, with the pencil sketch comic that comes to life, pulling a live action woman into it from the diner booth she sits in when she reads the comic. Twenty-five years later, it is impossible for me to hear this song without seeing the animated sketches in my mind, from that summer when I was 12, when our adolescent minds were blown open by the radical merging of music and video.
Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds: I am 13, and I am with the girlfriends I grew up with. The girlfriends that I came of age with, who rode around Savannah together in a robin’s egg blue convertible VW beetle, who smoked cigarettes and drank coffee, who laughed and experimented and wrote and painted and danced and acted. Who penned letters to each other with every heartbreak, every melodrama, every milestone. Who are married and have children now. Who I still get together with once a year for an annual Girls’ Weekend. With whom, at the very beginning of all that growing up, I spent endless slumber parties watching The Breakfast Club, memorizing every word, giggling over how cute Judd Nelson is, singing this song at the top of our lungs.
You Dropped a Bomb on Me by The Gap Band: Strobe lights flashing. Disco ball spinning. Shooting the duck on roller skates, racing as fast as we we can around the oval, adrenaline rushing with the speed as we pick one skate up and cross it in front of the other around the turns. At the snack bar, rolling our skates back and forth while we buy Charleston Chews. Standing against the carpeted wall chewing our candy while we watch cute boys skate backwards fast, hoping one of them will ask us to couple skate the next time Careless Whisper comes on.
We Will Rock You by Queen: Athens, Georgia. September. I am five, and six, and seven, eight, and nine. We leave Grandaddy and Nannie’s house in Eatonton, Georgia, and my Dad honks the “Glory Glory” fight song horn as we drive away. Grandaddy and Nannie wave from the top of the hill. We pick up fried chicken for tailgating as we enter Athens, and once we park, and disembark from the car, we become droplets in a red and black sea of shirts and hats and pants and earrings and cars and trucks. I smell burgers, and beer, cigarette smoke, and perfume. I hear the familiar pssfftt of pull tabs, Southern drawls, laughter and “Go Dawgs!” I hear Queen blaring from a car in the parking lot. Maybe it’s ours. And again, in the stadium, we hear it. At the beginning of the game, or maybe after a touchdown, or maybe just in my memory, we stamp our feet and pump our fists and sing “We Will Rock You” at the top of our lungs.
It’s funny how music and memory can be so tightly woven. Thanks Blondie. This was the funnest (and most memorable) cleaning day I’ve had yet.
I set up a Guestbook for my blog. Stop by and say hi! I love to know where you’re from, what you like to read and write, what brought you here, whether you have a favorite Butterfly Mind entry. Thanks!
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