Song Memories

Do you have a song that means something to you? You were somewhere, doing something, and that song came on the radio and you will remember forever exactly what was happening in your life at that specific point in time.

I have a few songs like that, songs that really mean something to me. My happiest song memory is Gerry Mulligan's "Disk Jockey Jump." I love jazz and when I was younger all I listened to were Jazz and Big Band. I remember hearing "Disk Jockey Jump" on my cd player, sitting out in the sun outside my middle school on a summer day, all my friends playing jump rope and laying in the sun, being kids. I said to myself at that moment that I needed to remember it, I needed to remember summer and being young, and the way the saxophone sounds in your ears and feels in your soul.

My music teacher died when I was a senior in high school. It was February, there wasn't any snow on the ground that day. It was a bright, beautiful, sunny day. I was sitting in the cafeteria with a bunch of my friends. It was second period and we all had study hall. The principal came on the intercom and told the entire school that our orchestra teacher had died after a terrible battle with lukemia. I walked up to my friends who had been in orchestra with me from the time we were fourth graders, hugged them, cried with them. I took my books and walked down the hall to the music room, and dropped them everywhere when I found my best friend. We hugged and cried in the middle of the hallway. We made it to the music room, where the rest of the orchestra was sobbing, whispering, listening to music, holding one and other.

Eventually I went home, as many of us did. My mother came home and we drove around for the rest of the day, crying, wondering, praying.

He was a great man, with two beautiful children, and brilliant music flowing out of his fingertips.

Whenever I hear "Adam's Song" by Blink 182 I am reminded of the fall day my senior year in high school when the school counselors came to us during orchestra and told us all that our beloved teacher was dying, that he would never be coming back to teach us. I remember the wailing, the tears free flowing, the embraces. I had only recently gotten my driver's license, and I found Rhonda in the parking lot and blasted my iPod all over town. When Adam's Song came on shuffle, I started sobbing. I was sitting at a red light outside of the DQ and shaws on the pike, waiting to drive and drive and drive and get away from the sadness and never look back.

I wish I could get back before these things happened. I wish I was still playing basketball in the backyard, picking blackberries in the summer, rolling down the sanddunes on the cape with my cousins, sitting in orchestra cracking jokes with my teacher.

I just wish it would all slow down. I wish the good came more often then the bad. I wish terrible things didn't happen to brilliant and beautiful people. I wish amazing things happened to everyone, and there were never any fights and never any war and cancer never existed. But that's not life, is it?

And so it goes.