Music to my ears

I love how just a few beats of a familiar song can take you back to another place and time. There was the James Blunt song, "1973" that played over and over on the Italian radio stations as we drove around Tuscany. And then I'm teaching a spin class a few months later and that song was our cool down. I was instantly transported back to the Italian countryside with its yellows and oranges and smell of hay and lilac. Didn't matter that 25 people were staring at me, waiting for me to tell them what to do next on their bikes, I wasn't wavering from my daydream.

At Oktoberfest this past year, the bands repeatedly played "Just the Way You Are" by Bruno Mars.  I had never even heard the song, but the the internationally-diverse crowd would go wild and sing/shout the lyrics, complete with emphatic arm motions, each time.  When I hear that song on leisurely drives, I now feel a sense of excitement unfit for the errands at hand.

Recently, I entered a 10k race around Lake Hefner. Around the half-way point, I'm fighting with the wind and my Ipod's earbuds when The Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" starts up. The line, "all the foreign types with their hookah pipes" made me recall the Syrian girls smoking hookah in Dubai. The group of four girls, barely in their 20's, wore full abayat and their eyes were laced with heavy make-up. The waiter brought them a large hookah pipe to pass around and it smelled faintly like strawberry. The scene was a study in contrasts.

And while running the OKC half-marathon, the smash up of "Singin' in the Rain" with Rihanna's "Umbrella" was extra loud as to cover up my huffing and puffing (the song is performed by the Glee cast - I'm not embarrassed to admit that they are among my fav!). It was only too perfect since the rain poured dramatically as it blew diagonally.

It's all music to my ears.