TreeHouseView

Music means everything to me–a life source, actually. It is ths soundtrack to all of my days and I seem to have passed that trait on to my son, which gives me endless joy.

I also have a penchant for listening to songs that I like on repeat when I first hear them. Over and over and over and over until I hear every single note, beat, harmony, melody, lyric, nuance…and I know that no matter how much I hear the song, I will never hear all of it.

This trait also seems to have trickled down to my son as I found out one day when we were driving back from Seattle to our home in Spokane after spending a Mother’s Day weekend having some fun on the west side of the state, just the two of us. Max was about twelve, on the cusp of coming into his own and learning what he liked and making things his own.

He might have had his own device to listen to music on, or he might have had my phone, I don’t actually remember, but what I do recall is the song he landed on. “The Best Day Of My Life” by American Authors. I remember the title being apropos to the weekend we had just shared without any interruptions from the other members of the family, as one on one time was extra special and increasingly rare in our blended family of six. three of whom were the same age and one of those was Max.

Max sat in the backseat for the majority of the four-plus hour drive across the state with that song on repeat. He had a smile on his face the entire time, even when he wasn’t smiling. IYKYK.

Music takes you away. It’s a time machine. It’s a painkiller. It’s a truth seeker–the Veritaserum that pulls the ugly and honest from your twilight deep and cloaks it in Belladonna’s velvety dresses to dance the night into the dawn.

I don’t think at twelve years of age he was battling the demons that I know he’s facing now as a young adult of twenty. but I could see in those moments he was already deep in the music and had found the Sweet Spot that I know so well. The groove you sink into by putting that needle onto the track and hearing it over and over and the itch that it scratches in your brain. It’s like a drug that calms something that is almost indescribable–a bit like a lullaby soothing a sleepless baby into slumber like no other.

I remember asking Max what he was listening to early on in that drive and being pleased about his song choice, as the tune itself is upbeat and positive in its front-facihg messaging but also has some darker undertones which start to become more and more evident the more you listen and piece the puzzle together. The longer he listened, the more I imagined he might be drawing out from the deeper meaning that can be inferred from the song.

The backseat minivan vibes that day were as pure as they can be and I’m still riding high all these years later on the resonance that was flowing from the picture tattooed in my mind of my 12 year old whom I got to witness experiencing the synchronicity of song in front of my eyes.