Boom Box

So I am painting the nursery today and I found an old cassette tape. It was labeled with my name and looked pretty beat up. I found the boom box (Question: Do people still refer to these as such and do other families own the token beat up one from college still?) and listened...Oh my god! There was amazing old songs and bands that I forgot I loved once...like Camper Van Beethoven and some old Depeche Mode and even a little Jimi Hendrix...And I could hear the distinct click between each song as I had lovingly handcrafted this mix tape from scratch with a dual deck boom box. But, Suzanne Vega caught me off guard.. I loved her. I loved her so much and this particular song...gypsy...Wow. I mean I was transported back to being a young girl.

You come from far away With pictures in your eyes Of coffee shops and morning
streets In the blue and silent sunrise But night is the cathedral Where we
recognized the sign We strangers know each other now As part of the whole
design Oh, hold me like a baby That will not fall asleep Curl me up inside you And
let me hear you through the heat You are the jester of this courtyard With a smile
like a girl's Distracted by the women With the dimples and the curls By the pretty
and the mischievous By the timid and the blessed By the blowing skirts of
ladies Who promise to gather you to their breast Oh, hold me like a baby...You
have hands of raining water And that earring in your ear The wisdom on your
face Denies the number of your years With the fingers of the potter And the
laughing tale of the fool The arranger of disorder With your strange and simple
rules Yes now I've met me another spinner Of strange and gauzy threads With a long
and slender body And a bump upon the head Oh, hold me like a baby...With a long
and slender body And the sweetest softest hands And we'll blow away forever
soon And go on to different lands And please do not ever look for me But with me
you will stay And you will hear yourself in song Blowing by one day Oh, hold me
like a baby...

I had this memory of me listening to this song and feeling bittersweet. I am a weirdo though, I would not allow myself to reach too deep into the mind field that is my romantic memory and retrieve from the frontal lobes. It was almost sweeter just to think about the surface of those feelings than to tack it onto particular age or man. I might feel pathetic now if it had been a memory enveloped by a wanker.

I only know that it was a very visceral response from me

while on a ladder

painting

trim

I love the way music can shake you up though. I love the instant teleport. I like it almost the same way I like the olfactory system and memory. Now if I would have been painting and heard Gypsy and smelled Salon Selectives old school green apple... I would have fallen.