Lately I’ve been in an classical phase in music I listen to. Last night, I was listening to “Ava Maria” and it made me feel so melancholy. Not depressed, just highly aware of my emotions… if there even is a difference… and it made me wonder if it’s the song itself that creates such strong feelings, or if it the memories invoked by it? Some music makes me think of my childhood. Like eating cherries for the first time.
I was in Ukraine, almost 14 and sharing a huge bag of real cherries from a large plastic sack with my brother and sister and spitting the pits at each other. I thought cherries tasted like the ones we used to fight over in our mom’s sonic cherry limeade. We sat in large windows with no screens, marveling at that fact since we were 4 floors up and staying cool in the breeze that never died. The elevator wasn’t working, but that was ok since it smelled strongly like pee and vodka and the floor was perpetually damp. The post-communist country in all its glory: a cold concrete reminder of promises broken and indescribable suffering at the hands of a calculating government. Peeling paint, fading wallpaper and tarnished chandeliers of a by-gone era are the only remains of the promised riches and hope of people in a government they believed in. Religion taken away and replaced with a government only to fail them.
We didn’t care, we were kids. I had been home schooled the year before and was immature in a lot of ways. Seeing starving street children begging me for money was a sobering contrast to small town southern Arkansas. Cheap ice cream bars and lukewarm Pepsi and Fanta were well within our allowances and we dined on them almost daily. We could walk to the kiosk ourselves, we just tried to ignore the porn playing cards taped to the windows for decoration, yet looked of course because we were curious. People following us, staring at us and taking to us was also a daily occurrence. We were movie stars, everyone wanted to be our friends. Several bus stops up, people would talk to us like they were our friends. They thought we were millionaires. I think I got at least a dozen marriage proposals that year.