Page 485 of 524

Soundtracking My Life


There was this very nineties television show that Will absolutely  hated and made fun of all the time. I guess that nearly every woman he had ever dated loved that show, and he was quite surprised when I confessed near total ignorance of it’s content beyond what I would read about it on occasion or overhear from the show’s faithful with whom I worked. I do recall though that the main character visited a psychiatrist who believed that a woman should have a theme song and urged this character to adopt a song and play it in her head for inspiration. I was surprised by the reaction this elicited from most of the people I knew who watched the show. They thought it was a funny and bit beyond quirky thing to do. Indeed I believe the doctor was written as a bit of an oddball. I didn’t think her suggestion was weird at all. I have a virtual soundtrack for my life. Songs that can pull me out of time and right back to the circumstances that provoked my adding them to the playlist that is as much a part of me as the books I have read or the movies I have seen or the television shows I can recall in minute detail.

Music is one of the reasons I survived the past several years. My iPod literally saved my sanity during the months that Will was in hospice and the year following his death. One song is particular comes to mind too. The Middle by Jimmy Eats World. The chorus is even now a very powerful influence and it never fails to pick me up or push me onward.

It just takes some time, little girl you’re in the middle of the ride.Everything (everything) will be just fine, 

everything (everything) will be alright (alright).

It was a shared love of Grunge that bridged some of the ten years between Will and I. He introduced me to Metallica and I convinced him that rap and hip-hop were real forms of musical expression although he never learned to like it much. There was one song around the time we were first together that we heard nearly every time we were listening to the radio as we drove from here to there. So incessantly did it dog us that Will was prompted to dub it “our song” though a less likely suspect for a romantic song you couldn’t possibly find it is eerily prophetic in retrospect. The song was What It’s Like by Everlast.

God forbid you ever had to wake up to hear the news

Cause then you really might know what its like to have to lose

Before Rob and I fell in love and were still just internet friends who wrote prolific quantities of email and conducted rather lengthy IM chats, he would send me mP3’s he had essentially liberated from his public library or was introduced to by his girls. Some of the first songs were by tOOL. Jambi and Right in Two were songs he had listened to over and over in the first months after Shelley died. We’ve discovered only recently that we both have the annoying (to other people) habit of playing a track, or tracks, over and over until we have somehow satisfied our souls need of it. I don’t know what Shelley thought of that but it drove Will crazy. I was inspired by these two songs to actually track down the CD and buy it ( I wasn’t corrupted yet) partly as a way to get to know Rob better but also because I knew that Will would have loved this music. I wasn’t as fixated on the lyrics as Rob was. In fact I hardly heard them at first. It was the sound. It brought Will back and at a time when I needed that. Eventually though I came to hear the twisted humor in some of the writer’s songs, particularly those he did with Perfect Circle and I saw the music as Rob.

The first romantic song Rob sent me was Desperately Wanting by Better Than Ezra or was it Got You Where I Want You by the Flies? The first CD he sent was Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits. The first time we made love was to the oddest collection of songs that just happened to be on his laptop at the time. The first time we danced though was to a carefully crafted playlist. 

I couldn’t imagine a life without a musical background. How would you keep your memories in order? Pull them up with perfect recall? Feel the same emotions. I can’t listen to Desperately Wanting and not remember the week before Idaho Falls. Just as I can’t hear Mazzy Starr’s Fade Into You and not remember that Will chose that as our first dance song after hearing it in a movie we watched one night on television. And although it is now rare that I hear the Everlast song, whenever I do it is at a moment when I am wondering about directions or decisions and I always take it as a sign that I am on the right track.

More Packing



I am not packing as much as I am disposing of and giving things away at this point, and you would not believe how difficult it is to give things away. I am speaking of nice things too. The temptation to rent one of those giant dumpsters and toss everything into it that I don’t need grows stronger by the minute. But I just must man up and do this. No more procrastinating. No more whining. A week from today we will be hooking up the moving trailer to the truck and heading for home. It’s been four years since Katy and I have had a real home and not just somewhere we lived.

This morning before I took her to the daycare that has been her second home since she was seven weeks old, Katy made the comment that Rob was eating his breakfast alone. It occurred to me that over this last weekend she finally had a real glimpse into what a family is. From the inside. She was so calm and content. And you know what? So was I. Even moreso than when Rob has been here with us. It’s such a wonderful feeling to know where you belong. To know you are loved and wanted and needed.

I need to get back to my boxes and totes. I can hear them calling from every room in the house. I have a very tired warhorse on his way here, and I want to greet him with less work than he is expecting. 

Honeymoons



“Some of the most memorable honeymoons,” according to K.C. DAVID, author of The Complete Guide to Gay and Lesbian Weddings, “have been spent entirely in a hotel room.” Not in a Hawaiian monastery run by Buddhist nuns, though, would be my guess. Even if it doubles as a bed and breakfast, it is probably not a honeymoon hot-spot. Meditation. Futons. Separate sleeping quarters. Nope. Definitely not. But the islands sound intriguing and you can always go chain hotel at whatever stage of luxury you can afford (or feel like going into debt for as some people do). Now that the wedding is planned and details are checked and crossed off the to do list, talk turns to the honeymoon. The initial plan was St Maarten / St Martin and the timeshare there in September but the summer is already crammed full and kindergarten looms, so even with the lure of a nude beach on the French side of the island, practicality dictates a much further delayed post nuptial trip.

Hawaii initially came up when Rob pointed out that traveling to the Caribbean is not something that Western Canadians usually do because the distance makes the traveling quite expensive. What was more typical was Hawaii. So, a quick google search of hotels and packages one afternoon revealed the usual suspects of chain hotels and postcard friendly vacations that though they looked very nice….were well…very nice. However there is nothing particularly memorable about a hotel that could be anywhere once you were ensconced inside its walls. Another web sweep of b & b’s netted the Buddhist option.

I began to think about the honeymoon trips of people that I know and I realized that the first thing that you need to do is establish a vision for the trip. Or at the very least a purpose. And I know what you are thinking, the purpose of a honeymoon needs no explanation to anyone, but that is when you are working from the assumption that everyone who takes the time to honeymoon (not a verb, I know) is working from the same paradigm. I mean, even my husband to be wants to see more of Hawaii than the inside of a hotel room.

My best friend and her husband went to New York City for their honeymoon. They moved at the speed of sound while they were there, took in every sight and even managed to get on to the segment of the Today Show where people brand themselves tourists by standing behind Al Roker with signs that read “Just Married” which in their case was true, but they had been together for several years, had a child and shared living quarters. Their honeymoon doubled as a vacation. My sister and her SO of fifteen years tied the knot the year after Will and I married. They rented a cabin in the Wisconsin Dells. They never saw the outside of the cabin as the birth of my nephew exactly nine months later can attest. My parents stayed at my dad’s Aunt Anne’s in Detroit one of the first nights of their marriage. They were on their way to Niagara Falls. Give my Dad points for being romantic and then subtract them for being too cheap to spring for another night’s stay in a hotel instead of asking my Mom to spend the night with total strangers. They bunked in an attic bedroom. The fact that she can remember where the room was located and Dad doesn’t even remember stopping there, speaks loudly to the romanticism of the memory and very different expectations.

Will and I drove to Colorado. It was part vacation but it was also a way for him to show me some of the places that were important to him. The zoo in Colorado Springs and Pike’s Peak. By accident I discovered the hotel in Estes Park where Stephen King began writing what would become The Shining. King was Will’s favorite author. Despite being ten years younger than I am, I rarely saw any child-like enthusiasm from him whereas I could summon my inner child with ease in most situations. He was like a kid in a candy store when  we stayed at The Stanley. I had to take pictures of everything. Him holding the mug King drank from and autographed. The infamous fire hoses hanging in the hall. The room where King stayed.

Rob’s honeymoon with Shelley had a similar theme. He took her back to Ontario where he is originally from to show her the places that are a part of who he is. Together they visited one of his childhood homes where he managed to creep out the current owner by taking pictures of the residence without ever introducing himself. He managed to underwhelm his new bride with a side trip into the woods to show her an old homestead where his father had liberated field stones from to build a fireplace in one of the many homes he grew up in. But my favorite of Rob’s honeymoon stories is the night he abandoned Shelley to their tent and crosswords to make acquaintance with campsite neighbors and drink their beer. I don’t think he even made it back to the tent that night; combine that with the story he told me about their first house warming party (an anecdote for another day) and I think Shelley is someone who could have taught even me patience.

Honeymoons, at least in the U.S., are a $12 billion dollar a year industry. 99% of couples who have a traditional wedding will follow it immediately with a honeymoon trip. Honeymoons account for 14% of the wedding budget and the average cost is $3,700 with the typical trip running about 8 days. I am not sure Rob and I fall into the average or even typical range although I was assured by a U.S. customs official this last Monday that Internet/LDR couples are becoming very typical for them. I doubt that we will have the typical honeymoon even if we do something as cliche as Hawaii. As likely as we are to spend a generous amount of time indoors, we are both enjoy exploring and being physical in the less than typical honeymoon way. And as he is coming up on nearly 27 years older and wiser, I don’t think I will be losing my groom to the neighbors no matter how much beer they have in their cooler. Although Rob assures me this would depend on the type of beer.