Reminiscing

Every once in a while, a certain mood comes over me, and I just want to sit and reminisce. It's silly because sometimes I look back on something funny or thought provoking that just happened a few days ago. Or I could go really way out and reminisce on my childhood. Usually though, these moments pass without too much fuss. A quick peek into old albums and yearbooks, a 10-minute phone call with an old friend, even a brief chat through IM --- these help satiate the need to reconnect after such reminscing.

My parents recently took pity and gifted me with an iPod. (I know, I'm am a barely visible tail's fleck to the comet's head!) Anyway, being a cheapskate that I am, I just refuse to purchase new music if I can help it. So my only recourse is to dig through the boxes in the basement to look for my old pile of CDs. And boy, what a box of memories I've unearthed!

As I load CD upon CD to my computer, I am likewise assaulted by memories. Good ones. Heartbreaking ones. Funny ones. Even those embarrassing ones. Song upon song, tiny moments of my life flash back before me. There's a song that brings me back to a week at the beach during the summer of my senior high school year (as the rest of my friends were baking in the sun for an altogether different reason). Another song brings me back to singing at the top of my voice in my room with my best friend singing alongside me. Songs that remind me of how very painful that first heartbreak was. Songs that bring me to the moment when I would stay with my mom as she worked on her flower arrangements. There were also songs that enlivened the giddy and notoriously happy feelings that came in early days of courtship with my DH.

I realize I was slowly uploading a sountrack of my life to be transferred to this slim iPod, now a launcher of memories. As I try to organize the tunes, I try to think of how I should arrange them. Should I group them according to how they have impacted moments in my life? Chronologically? Depending on the music's mood? For someone who hasn't been keeping up to date with the musical trends, it's remarkable how much music has still filtered in and colored my life.

As always, my thoughts go back to my kids. What kind of soundtrack am I providing in their early lives? I rarely turn on the radio at home, and I almost never tune in to MTV. My son can sing songs from his favorite TV shows, but none that has a connection to me. He loves his dad's selection of Los Lonely Boys and Norah Jones, but so far, we haven't a musical connection that's exclusively ours. One that I'm hoping will remind him of me when it's his turn to listen back to it three decades from now. What music would I like my children to remind them of me?

Maybe I should let my new iPod randomly pick a tune.