An odd thing happened to me as I was walking along a mall yesterday. I passed a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and I felt my pace slacken, my head turn, and I thought to myself, “Oh, I would like to go in there to look around.”
Then I thought, why? Why after all these years of indifference to towels, sheets, and the like, do I suddenly want to take time out of my life to browse around amongst them? I don’t need any towels or sheets, and even if I did, up until yesterday I’d have thought it would be one of those errands I kept putting off in hopes it would take care of itself.
A similar thing happened to me with country music. I grew up loathing the genre, and then one day in my early twenties I suddenly liked it. I don’t know why. Nothing about it had changed, so it must be me. I figured it was just an occupational hazard of living in Nebraska: I held out for so long, then it wormed its way around and over my mental block (as Lucy of Peanuts fame once put it).
Or maybe it’s buried in the genes, hidden away until I reach a particular point in my life span when it suddenly manifests itself. At 22 it was country music, at 31 it’s linens. What could possibly be next?
Retirement savings.
You are everyone you ever were and everyone you’ll ever be. So, you have been this sheet-shopping, two-stepping person all along. Even when you were a teenager listening to the Cure, there was a part of you longing to hear Johnny Cash. I think we simply keep parts of us closed, and then for some unknown reason, there are openings. You had a country music opening in your ealry twenties, and because of your location, the music crept in and that was that. If you had gone off to college in France, perhaps that opening would have closed up again without notice. It’s a little like having a craving for something, but you can’t figure out what it is. So, you search and search and usually you stumble upon it. Oh yes, I wanted cake. But, if there were no cake….the feeling would simply pass or switch to something else.
I miss country music on the radio. All we get here is the occasion Shania Twain or Keith Urban…not really country. However, the neighbor downstairs is a big Johnny Cash fan, so sometimes I linger in the hallway to catch a few verses of “I walk the line.” But, it’s not quite the same. Country music needs a setting: a pickup, a tractor, country road, smoky bar, prison…well…maybe not prison. But, it loses something in a city built for Beethoven.
Retirement…yeah, that’s probably about right. But I have another nine or ten years until that kicks in, on the current schedule.
They don’t play much Johnny Cash on the country stations here, either, of course, and a little too much Shania Twain. I remember wishing I could hear some country music on the radio in Israel, because it’s just so much more distinctly American than rock etc. which gets played pretty much everywhere. But they did have some weird country-like music in Hebrew–music is strange there.