Blast from the Past

Funny how things pop into your mind. And what provokes them. I have been having a lazy day. Got up late. Talked to my Aunt Teri, the last of my mother's three sisters still alive, who called from Manhattan, which is already seeing snow and wind of the Blizzard of 2016. Had just decided to take a late shower and thought I'd switch on one of the DIRECTV digital stations in the 800s on the dial for some music background for my ablutions.

Wasn't feeling in a classical mood. Nor was I of a rockin' disposition. And then I lighted on the instrumental station. I went into the kitchen to see if one of the hummingbirds that have taken to the feeder was whisking about. I could hear them. Their wing sounds are palpable to the ear. The TV was playing "Send in the Clowns". I found myself tearing up and harking back to many years ago when I was a child in New York, in the Bronx, in that little apartment near the Grand Concourse. 

It might have been a day off from school, because of a snow storm, relatively rare in the city (just as this weekend in the City I left 35 years ago) but always welcome. And with my mother puttering around, windexing the many mirrors, dusting, making a list for the A and P, the background sounds were the instrumentals of WPAT. They came to call it elevator music, something you pay no attention to these days. But it was my mother's favorite station. And pretty much the only one allowed in our house when dad wasn't accompanying his vinyl Latin or Italian records on his mandolin.

When I think of it, I think of her, as I did, standing in the kitchen 50 years and 3000 miles away from that place and time. 

Cozy wouldn't be the word I'd use to describe life with my mother, but in those moments, warm and safe in the large tri-part five story brick building in that 50.00 one bedroom apartment with my mother silently shuffling around, cozy is the only way to describe the feeling then, and now, as I remember it.

My mother has been dead 42 years. I can hardly conjure that life of ours any longer, so much has happened since then, until I heard a little instrumental and there was WPAT, and my mother, as they were. As another song says, "The Way We Were". 

Back to California on a hazy sunny January 2016 day, and the shower I put off to bask in a serene sensation of the past.