Some kind of blue.

As I mentioned previously, I love jazz.  There is something I like about nearly all music I’ve encountered.  Over time, I’ve learned that I must guard myself when I listen to music.  I’m very influenced by it.  My mood and perspective follows accordingly.  Composers who write movie scores would love me, I think.  I feel all the things I’m supposed to feel and possibly more, and I’m overwhelmed by those emotions occasionally.  I play certain instrumental pieces to wake my children up and certain pieces to help them sleep.  When my heart is broken but I can’t let myself cry, particular melodies will help me let go and soon my face is wet while I wash dishes or scrub the shower.  I intentionally wear no makeup to any symphony concert or musical theater performance.  It is highly likely that I will sob.  I saw Miss Saigon when I was in junior high and the guests sitting in front of me turned around with tissues after the standing ovation to tell me that my crying made the show perfect.  To this day, I don’t know whether they really meant that or whether they were being sarcastic.  Hearing Appalachian Spring while watching the sun rise during a bus ride home from a high school trip- I’m not sure I can articulate what that did to me.  Everyone else was asleep, at least that I know of.  Just me, the bus driver, Aaron Copland and the sun.  I couldn’t have slept even if I wanted to, because I was alive.  I think one of my sons may feel music like I do.  A favorite show of ours used three of Holst’s Planets to score a dream: Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.  A young dog is dreaming about being away from her pack, losing her favorite stuffie, and being cold.  In the end, she wakes up, realizing she really can sleep through the night.  By the credits, I was whimpering and my youngest was running out of the room.  He was so mad that he was overwhelmed and furious with the show for making him feel such big things he couldn’t name.  He didn’t want me to hold him either, because it would make him feel all those things “bigger”.  Unsurprisingly, that just made me cry more.  In an afternoon I hope I never forget, my husband picked up my youngest and comforted him while my oldest son found me crying in his and his brother’s bunk bed, after his brother had run away from me, displeased that I followed to check on him.  My eldest curled up in the bed beside me and asked if he could hold my hand and then he waited.  I have no idea how long I cried, but he never stopped holding my hand.  Once I stopped crying, he said something about how some days are just “feeling days” and was I ready for a hug now.  Williams helps me dream of wizards and dinosaurs.  Newman brings me orchard house and clownfish.  Debussy offers up a mirror of me in a world before my time, and Davis writes the words I can’t find into some kind of blue that I know is mine.