"missing the spanish sun" by devi laskar
When we speak, just as when we dream, there is an underlying rhythm to our sentences and thoughts. Sometimes it’s in four-four time, sometimes it’s to iambic pentameter, and sometimes it’s to the beat of a distant police siren or the drum roll of a marching band practicing on a neighboring field.
To stay awake and keep things rolling along, sometimes I switch out the songs that drive my words. I change the playlist. Listen to my daughters’ music, or something off the jazz channel or turn the dial and listen to classical songs.
When I was younger and living in New York, there was so much ambient noise around me: people on the streets, sirens, traffic, arguments, car horns, laughter, some radio in the window blaring out the local pop music, so many words spilling out of all those people’s mouths as they talked and ate and drank and smoked. I could drown out all of that noise while I worked, just by turning on my favorite songs on the tape deck and focusing on the blank page in front of me.
Fast forward seventeen years, eight months, three weeks and today: I’m no longer in New York, and the most common, reoccurring noises I hear are the sounds of the neighbors’ lawn-mower and the herd of teens on their bikes as they ride roughshod over by backyard. It’s been a while since my beloved German shepherd has died and the neighbor’s shih-tzu weak yips don’t have the same impact.
My own kids are in musical revolt — they think my music is “old” and therefore unworthy of their ears. So, we fight over who turns the knob on the car stereo and often R.E.M. before 1990 and U2 from 1987 lose out to Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. It’s enough to make me want to quit driving them around, and move, alone, to a quiet place in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the western side of North Carolina and never be heard from again.
After the shock of listening to that plastic bubblegum pop music, though, I have come to appreciate “my” music even more – and then it occurred to me that sometimes you need to shake things up a bit, in order to get out of the same old routine, and in order to get new appreciation from what you’ve been weaned on, to hear something different. As much as I hate to admit it, I sort of admire my kids for their stubbornness and insistence that we listen to “something new, mom! something that isn’t twice as old as we are!”
But don’t tell them, it’ll make them insufferable.
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan, is working on a couple of novels and has 23 days to go before she finishes the first year of her art-a-day challenge.
🙂