Friday, May 7, 2010

What If...


Today, my mom would have turned 58 years old. I wonder if, right this minute, instead of writing this, I could be driving to Denison to meet her for dinner and to spend a weekend at home. I wonder if we would have a strawberry cake from Kathleen’s Kitchen. I wonder what things we would talk about at dinner—probably things that had happened in the last week, year, all fictional history of the past 7 years… Maybe we would reminisce that it has already been almost a year since my graduation, and we would laugh about things that, in this reality, did not actually happen. I wonder what I would have gotten her for her birthday, and for Mother’s Day, a mere two days later. We would have gone to church on Sunday for Mother’s Day (a tradition I still carry, only now alone), except I would wear a red flower on my chest instead of a white one.

This weekend I will have a Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper from Sonic in your honor. I will listen to songs on repeat until I drive those around me insane. I will play Backgammon. I will dance and sing without inhibition. I will roll the windows down in the car that you bought me, and I will drive without destination...Into the Mystic.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Thursday, May 6, 2010

#14 Michael Buble


It’s no secret that my mom loved music. Once she fell in love with a song, she would play it on repeat for DAYS. My sister and I still can’t listen to “Truly, Madly, Deeply” by Savage Garden without having vivid flashbacks of wanting to rip out our eardrums.

Sister and I joke about it now, saying that we’ve “pulled a Mom” if we find a song that we just cannot get enough of. This happened to me recently, and more excessively than it ever has before. Of course there have been other contenders to rival my current song obsession, but none other comes close to Michael Buble’s “Everything.”

According to iTunes, I have played this song almost 1500 times since February. That’s an average of 17 times A DAY. Granted, a significant portion of this statistic is from when I would put it on repeat on my iPod at work, and it eventually just became background noise, but I doubt that makes it acceptable.

I think Mom would’ve loved the way Michael Buble croons with his irresistible lounge-singer voice.