{72} I did this to myself

When you ask friends for prompts, you get what you (did not) pay for…

I asked for prompts via a facebook post, and got 11 responses, both thought provoking and, uh, off beat. In the spirit of sportsmanship, I will use one a day, in order.

The first one, from Martha, is very broad: “Music…in our lives…”

Hard to pin that down, music is really a subjective experience, in that it plays a different role depending on your relationship to it. I know professional musicians and amateur musicians and groupies and fangirls and emo snobs, and it’s just different for everyone.

I will say this: when I was married, I had music-less in-laws and it was bizarre. My husband’s parents never listened to music. Not the radio, not CDs or vinyl albums or anything. No music. Anywhere. They were also Jehovah’s Witnesses and music is not really a big part of that religion’s practices.

Being in their house was odd for me at first, because I thought maybe they turned the music off because I was there. No. They never turned music on.

In my youth, if we were not actively watching TV or asleep, my family always had a record playing. One of my earliest pride-and-joys was a clock radio that I could play my own favorite FM stations on in the semi-privacy of my room (this was, like, 1978. Don’t judge). At 14 I got my own stereo which played vinyl albums AND tape cassettes; I don’t think I left my room for a month.

The worst jobs I’ve had were the ones where I could not listen to music. I have music playing almost around-the-clock at home (thank you, Pandora!). When I had a car, the stereo never got turned off.

It could be said that I hate silence, and maybe so. I know people who cannot work to music because they pay more attention to the music than what they are supposed to be doing — I’m not enough of a musician to be bothered by that, although I can’t listen to vocals when I work, so it’s all-instrumentals-all-the-time in my office.

Thanks to my in-laws, though, I know exactly how I would be in a world without music: listening for it, waiting for it, wondering where it had gone.