Sam and I borrowed my parents' van this morning to pick up our new dining table (goodbye, Tony Danza). Without Sam's satellite radio, I surfed through various commercial channels, and after less than 20 minutes, we heard Rihanna's "Only Girl in the World" three times on three different stations. Though I always knew I was grateful for the Broadway channel, I never knew just how much so until I was assaulted repeatedly with the auto-tuned warblings of, "Baby, take me high,
high. . .".
The table came in two pieces, which we easily unloaded when I got to the curb of our house. And by this, I mean Sam unloaded while I surfed the radio to find a song I could sing along to while unloading. By the time I realized nothing could be found, Sam had already taken both pieces into the building. Since he seemed to be handling everything just fine, I decided to scrounge around the various pockets and compartments hoping to find a CD or something for the drive back to my parents' house. I managed to find the soundtrack case for Mamma Mia! in the glove compartment, but alas, no Mamma Mia! soundtrack. Instead, there was an unlabelled CD, the kind I used to buy from Rite-Aid when I lived across the street from one in Davis. Well, at least I knew it was mine, but the contents were a mystery. It felt like an unexpected birthday present had arrived in the mail.
The first song was Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," and all of a sudden, I was a junior in college again, living in an apartment over the summer that faced the merciless afternoon sun with no circulating air and, on hindsight, probably a serious silverfish infestation. I had a fridge stocked full of canned fruit cocktails and a freezer full of T-shirts.
Depeche Mode's "Somebody," and I was riding in Lee's car after a day of shopping at Arden Fair Mall together, buying matching Abercrombie and Fitch jackets. I carried his bag on our way to Starbuck's, taking the long way as I tried to come out to my new, aggressively straight (yet simultaneously ambiguous) friend, to summon the courage just to say, 'OK,' knowing that the rest would follow afterwards like an avalanche.
Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line," and Scott and I were wrestling with snow chains on the side of Interstate 80 en route to Tahoe for our anniversary. Ryan Cabrera's "True," and I was squeezing through chairs and stools to get to the stage at Faces, a gay bar that held karaoke nights on Monday.
Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me," Whitney Houston, Gin Blossoms, and I really felt like I was 20 again. The olfactory sense is said to be tied most closely to memory, but music, hearing what I had not listened to in years, does even better. These songs were like a time machine, and if I closed my eyes, I could almost be right back to when I first heard them, when I was with the people who introduced me to them, and the moment I decided to put them on this CD. Unlike memories, though, these were snapshots of only good times, times when there were only smiles.
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