Everyone has certain songs, albums or artists that immediately take you back to a scene from your childhood. For me, it may be listening to “Bear With You” by Trip Lee (ya know, the cool guy who was going to come and speak in chapel but didn’t) before a basketball game in the sixth grade, or listening to Bing Crosby around Christmastime. There are so many moments like these that can resurrect from the cobwebbed corners of my mind with a single note or riff.
Although, there is one that is very near and dear to my heart, one of my “happy places” if you will. So let me take you back on a journey into one of my favorite music memories.
I’m four years old, chubby-cheeked and all. I don’t know what school is, what genuine hurt and pain is or what the real world is like. I’m an innocent child with something that is so very needed in today’s world: pure joy. My house on Woodway Circle is cozy, with a backyard fit for the grandest of adventures.
It’s a Saturday morning, and mom is cleaning when she turns on the Motown classics CD for the first time. Out from the speakers flow the voices of Stevie Wonder, Smoky Robinson and Diana Ross & The Supremes. The song “You Can’t Hurry Love” comes on, and my mom hands me a tambourine, the first of many times doing so… and we dance. We dance just how you think a mother and her four-year-old would, with no care in the world and the biggest smiles our faces would allow.
I thought I was the best dancer in the world because my momma thought so. We would dance to songs like that for hours, but that one song (“You Can’t Hurry Love”) just seemed to stick out more than the others. It may not be the exact meaning of the song, but this is how my mind interprets it. You may want to hurry up to bigger and better parts of life, but just be patient and love the time you’re in right now. In that moment, in time when I was four, I wanted to just be there, dancing with my mom, and never grow up.
Moments like these make me realize how thankful I am for not just my mom, but both of my parents. I believe music has the power to evoke these feelings, and that is what is so simply beautiful about it.