Up and Down the Radio Dial

My car’s SiriusXM® satellite radio musically illuminates my long commute to work and back home. 

Every day I’m amazed at its wide variety of music stations; I'm carried like a time-machine to realistic memories which make up the tapestry of my life through the decades. The main lanes are: #70sOn7, #80sOn8, #90sOn9, #OutlawCountry, and #DeepTracks.

Magical alchemy takes place mostly in my sub-conscious; but today it was so startling that I had to write about it. The particular song, and the back-story in memory are too long to tell; but even in the age of the iPod® digital device, a simple car radio still provides emotional feedback on timeless wavelengths, bearing a gift beyond price, almost free:

“All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted;
Not so coldly charted. It’s really just a question of your honesty?”    Lyrics by Lee ©UMPG

I’m allowed the privilege of  sliding up and down the radio dial; virtually placing the needle down on an imaginary spinning vinyl record of a prior age. In the first few seconds of listening, even hearing a few bars or words of the song; narrative prescience of memory recalls exactly where, when, and with whom I associate this tune.

Songwriters have very little time to move toward their chosen endings, structuring parts of the music to match the lyrics. In reality, this confinement means that every song is over before it begins. Wouldn't it be nice if our life stories had the kind of “up” ending that writers hope to bring to their songs? Often the story just doesn't allow the kind of ending we’d secretly hope for.

It is Aristotelian to describe a story (or a life) like this: “A beginning requires nothing to precede it, and an end is what requires nothing to follow it; however the middle requires something both before and after it.”

One of our strongest human desires is that Aristotle’s equation is not true; we want our “middle” to count for something and we know the significance of what came before us and what succeeds. Our lives play like the radio dial I mentioned before: our beginning comes from the histories, biases, character, education and family circumstances.

The big middle, the life we lead, is made of years of lined-up in particular points, like grooves on a record. Set us down in any one of those grooves and the rest of the story plays like music. No specific song is better or worse than any other one; in fact, maybe these musical notes compose all the riffs of one song: our life.

What follows the end? That’s another topic for another post.

“Sing me back home with a song I used to hear,
Make my old memories come alive.
Take me away and turn back the years,
Sing Me Back Home before I die.”
©Merle Haggard

©Mark H. Pillsbury (2015)