For No Good Reason

As if you needed one,
as if you could help it,
for no good reason
a tune out of nowhere
pops into your head
when you least expect,
riffs effortlessly in the
folds of your cerebrum—

your own private jukebox,
your personal music device
on random minus the earbuds—
drumming itself up to keep
you company: here, a little
Janis Joplin while you vacuum
cat hair; there, a John Denver line
as you peel potatoes at the sink.

How can others not hear it,
this frequent odd gift?
Sometimes you forget
and blurt the words to the chorus,
which, after all, is all you can remember,
those take me home, country roads,
that feelin’ good was good enough
for me, even conjuring

the gas station in Colorado
back where you, wearing
those bell bottoms and that
paisley, were about to fill a tank
of freedom into the blue VW Bug
when Carole King belted out
and it’s too late baby, now it’s too late
though we really did try to make it

and you couldn’t move, couldn’t
quit sobbing to the steering wheel
that would not console those blues
or say what you had left to lose,
wouldn’t question why in hell
you were going down that road
where for no good reason
you seemed to be heading.
~Twyla M. Hansen “For No Good Reason” from Rock. Tree. Bird.

He (the professor) asked what I made of the other students (at Oxford) so I told him.
They were okay, but they were all very similar…
they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies,
and they thought they would always win.
But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.

He asked me what could be done about it.
I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year
to do some dead-end job
like working in a chicken processing plant
or spreading muck with a tractor.
It would do more good than a gap year in Peru.

He laughed and thought this was tremendously witty.
It wasn’t meant to be funny.
~James Rebanks from The Shepherd’s Life
(how a sheep farmer succeeds at Oxford and then goes back to the farm)

In our barn we have a very beat up old AM/FM radio that sits on a shelf next to the horse stalls and serves as company to the horses during the rainy stormy days they stay inside, and serves as distraction to me as I clean stalls of manure and wet spots morning and evening.

We live about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, so most stations that come in well on this radio’s broken antenna are from the lower mainland of British Columbia. This includes a panoply of stations spoken in every imaginable language– a Babel of sorts that I can tune into: Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, French and of course, proper British accent English.

But standard issue American melting-pot genetic mix that I am, I prefer to tune into the “Oldies” Station and reminisce.

There is a strange comfort in listening to songs that I enjoyed 50+ years ago, and I’m somewhat miffed and perplexed that they should be called “oldies”. Oldies used to refer to music from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, not the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s and (heavens to Betsy) the 80’s and 90’s!

I listen and sing along with a mixture of feeling ancient and yet transported back to my teens. I can remember faces and names I haven’t thought of in decades, recall special summer days picking berries and hear the long lost voices from school days. I can smell and taste and feel things all because of the trigger of a familiar song.

There is something primordial –deep in my synapses– that is stirred by this music. It’s almost like instant time travel without magic needed. In fact, I shoveled manure to these same songs 65 years ago, and somehow, it seems not much as changed.

Or has it? One (very quick) glance in the mirror tells me it has, and I have.

Yesterday – I Got You, Babe and you were a Bridge Over Troubled Waters for this Natural Woman who just wants to be Close to You so You’ve Got a Friend. There’s Something in the way I Cherish The Way We Were and of course Love Will Keep Us Together. If You Leave Me Now, You’re So Vain. I’ve always wanted it My Way but How Sweet It Is when I Want To Hold Your Hand. Come Saturday Morning, Here Comes the Sun as we’re Born to Be Wild

Help! Do You Know Where You’re Going To? Me and You and A Dog Named Boo will travel Country Roads and Rock Around the Clock even though God Didn’t Make the Little Green Apples to grow in a Moonshadow. Fire and Rain will make things All Right Now once Morning is Broken, I’ll Say a Little Prayer For You so just Let It Be.

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction from the Sounds of Silence — If— Those Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head. Stand By Me as It’s Just My Imagination that I am a Rock, when really I only want Time in a Bottle and to just Sing, Sing a Song.

They just don’t write songs like they used to. I seem to remember my parents saying that about the songs I loved so well in the 60’s and 70’s. Somehow in the midst of decades of change, there are some constants. Music still touches our souls, no matter how young or old we are.

And every day there will always be manure that needs shoveling.