The Geography of my Life is set to Music

I am sure this has happened to you. A song starts playing and it immediately whisks you back to a high school dance, or college date, or maybe a road trip.  As the song continues to play, you have shifted to that time. You can almost feel the sun, the breeze, hear the cadence of a conversation, the melody of your senses are playing now.  Most times, the time travel elicits a shared story of good times past. Other times, a reminder of a painful situation like a breakup. For me, it tends to set my geographical compass.

I moved around quite a bit when growing up.  At the time, I didn’t see many advantages of it other than I was able to reinvent myself for about 10 minutes at my new school, in the new state.   Except for one instance when we moved during the middle of the school year as a sophomore in high school (the day the Challenger blew up – awful coincidence), I was fairly ok with the nomadic experience. I wasn’t exceptionally excited or distraught at each move and I credit my parents for moving during the summer to reduce the strain on my sister and I.  Looking back, I am very grateful for having moved around so much. I have learned more about different people, states, cultures, styles,  and customs, but mostly myself.  You would think I moved to another land, but living in places like Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Virginia – they are each unique and offer vastly different experiences and history.

For me, I can’t remember the years of songs (or titles for that matter) or often can’t quickly name the year an event took place, but I can tell you exactly where I lived and which house (if we moved a few times within the same city, which happened often too). Heck, I can still give you all of my addresses back to when I was a baby.  The geography of my life is set to music and for most songs of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, I can tell you where I was, what I was doing and most importantly, where I lived.

Even now, as I listen to a song from my iPod from many years ago, I can picture myself sitting in the car with my sister as we go to Kroger with mom for the weekly grocery shopping trip.  We live in Indiana, I am in third grade and we just passed the Dairy Queen that we frequent for celebrations after mine and my sister’s softball games.  Ahhhhh, the power of a song. Where does it take you??