MUSIC IS MAGIC

A couple weekends ago my favorite channel on SiriusXM featured a show with all the hits that made it to #1 during the ‘70s decade.  They repeated the show three different times and one more time the next Wednesday.  I listened to it every time.  It was the best.

I’m pretty sure that my kids, and now my grandkids, or anyone else trapped in my car with me for that matter, inwardly groan at my choice of music but I love the way it makes me feel.  It’s my version of a mood-altering drug.  It’s also my own, personal time machine.

Ever since that weekend I’ve been trying to think of the words to describe how listening to music – especially music from this era – enhances my life even these many years down the road.  It’s hard to express a feeling in language so I went wandering in Google-land for help.  I emerged from that scouting trip an hour or so later having learned in the first five minutes that music improves our moods and our memories (that’s just what I said), and then I backed this information up with listening to some of my favorite mood enhancers for further proof.

People who know me have heard me say that I am 26 years old.  In my head, I am 26.  I don’t know why that’s the magic number, but, on the inside, I’ve never got past that mark.  My mirror keeps reminding me that my outside is not nearly so resilient.

Although I know this “age” of 26 is a silly thing to hold on to, I also know it feels real to me.  And it never feels more real than when there is music playing in the background.  It can be any kind of music but mostly it’s the music of my youth.  It’s like those familiar notes wrap me in happiness for a few minutes, and then releases me again as they fade away.  It leaves me feeling gifted with an eloquent, enduring connection to a much younger me.  It’s not that it ‘takes me back’ so much but that it transcends me to the time and place I first heard it.  There’s a difference.

One of the songs I looked up while on my little adventure in Google-land was Gordon Lightfoot singing Sundown.  I love where it takes me.

If you head straight south of Moose Jaw toward a little town called Willow Bunch the highway you take is #36.  I haven’t been on that road in more years than I care to count but the first time I travelled it was the day we moved there.  There is a spot where you can park at the top of a hill with the road spilling away in front of you in what looks like miles and miles of ribbon candy … undulations of prairie hills and hollows from here to eternity.  You feel like the world has been laid at your feet.

We stopped there to take in that view.  Gordon Lightfoot was singing Sundown on the radio.  We were expecting our first child.  The sun was warm on our shoulders.  The grass was just beginning to green up.  We were full of questions about the coming months.  What would the new job be like?  What new friends would we meet?  The road seemed to be inviting us onward.  

That moment is distilled to perfection in my mind and the sound of Gordon’s voice transports me to that hilltop every time I hear him sing those words.

That’s only one of my magic memories though.  There’s singing Bobby Goldsboro”s Honey with my high school BFF.  Or singing Three Dog Night’s Just An Old-fashioned Love Song with my sister.  Or Jim Croce’s If I Could Save Time In A Bottle.  Or John Denver’s Annie’s Song.  Or Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.  Or every single thing Neil Diamond ever recorded.

The list goes on and on.

Hearing this music suffuses the magic elixir of perpetual youth (or in my case, the age 26) into the very air that I breathe.  I am unaware of grey hair and creaky joints.  I am surprised by the lady who looks back at me from my mirror (who is she, and how did she get in there anyway?)  How can I have so many candles on my birthday cake and yet intuit as a much younger self?

Maybe It’s like I said earlier – it’s hard to put ‘feelings’ into words.  Maybe I have to just leave it as ‘feelings’.  Maybe I don’t feel old because every time I hear one of these favourites I get a fresh dose of youth.

Maybe I don’t feel old because I still know how it feels to be young.

 

RECOGNIZE   HONOR    CELEBRATE

Last week a bunch of us (and by ‘us’ I mean local volunteers) met for a quick noon hour meeting to touch base and share information about what each of our individual groups were planning for the year ahead.  On a practical level the benefits of this are obvious – we can coordinate our efforts and grow the event status for the town (ie: if the Chamber of Commerce knows when things like ball tournaments are on they can add things like sidewalk sales the same day). It just makes sense to pool our energy in promoting our community as a whole.  There is a side effect to these meetings, though, and that is the feeling of camaraderie when people of diverse interests, but common goals, get together.  It’s not all business; it’s good to visit with our peers as well.

One of the many topics that surfaced in this meeting was volunteer appreciation. 

Volunteers are the life blood of everything we try to do.  They are invaluable to our community, and yet while their work is vitally important, the people themselves end up standing in the shadows of what they have accomplished.  It’s not that they are offering their time and talents for glory or fame, but so many times they don’t even hear their names mentioned when the work is done.

As Fate would have it, a day or two after this meeting an email arrived announcing that Volunteer Appreciation Day was coming up on April 20^th.  This letter also offered a whole range of ideas of how to thank volunteers.  The part that caught my attention was that they used the same three words that I had been thinking about: recognize, honor, and celebrate.  This is exactly how we need to show our appreciation to people whose work benefits us all.

I hesitate to use the word ‘work’ though.  It gives volunteerism a bad reputation.  It makes it hard to recruit new members.  Nobody wants to take on more ‘work’.

I am reminded of when I was a kid and doing the dishes was a job that my sisters and I had to do.  It was drudgery.  It took forever.  We argued constantly about who did what.  It was a fight every night (sorry Mom).  But when the extended family got together for a big meal and there were countless more dishes to do, it was the adult women who cleared up and did the dishes.  They did this much larger job with cheerfulness, conversation and cooperation in half the time.  They did it with laughter and light hearts.

How could such an enormous job be turned into something that sounded like fun? I don’t know how old I was when it finally dawned on me that the difference was a simple matter of attitude.

When a group of volunteers are working on a project together this same kind of magic happens.  I’ve said this before many times: “Many hands make light work!”. 

Being a volunteer is a vitally important contribution to the community in which we live.  It’s how we build our community, but it’s also what makes our community worth building.  It’s where we weave our lives together, where friendships blossom and grow, where we build a collective resilience to both weather setbacks, and build on our successes.

A volunteer’s work is so valuable we could never afford to pay them, but our town wouldn’t exist without them.  That’s how important they are.

So, tell them ‘Thank You’.

I know to a large extent that means this means mutual ‘thank yous’ back and forth as so many of us are the very volunteers we wish to honor, but it’s still important that we recognize each other. 

And for once people, don’t be so humble.  When someone thanks you for the work you do, accept the praise – you have earned it! 

Go ahead – celebrate your good deeds!  You are the true Hometown Heroes.