weekend thoughts

You know you miss your daughter when, over the weekend, your husband makes recordings of old LPs and 45s, and you hear a pop tune that began, actually, as a TV commercial with people standing on a hillside holding pop bottles.

You start to talk to your husband about the social and political implications of advertising and world peace (long before it became whirled peas), but he’s grumbling, as he also attempts burning CDs on your finicky computer that might just decide to implode instead of restart next time he reboots to get Itunes to keep running.

You turn to your son and launch into a history of music-musing laced with political nuggets of understanding you’ve reached, followed by a metaphysical connection, but you recognize a desperate glint in the eyes of your son who finally blurts, “I’m trying to remember something!”, so you go run the vacuum instead.

If your daughter were only around, you know the conversation would have taken wing, flowing from ideas about how cultural events of the 1960s led to 90s music styles, or that something surely would have popped up about Star Trek, old, older, and new versions, and certainly then there’d be time travel inferences or lessons in computer graphics history, and quite possibly lines would be drawn to Marx, maybe even Machiavelli (your daughter’s thesis having discussed both of them), and inevitably more would be examined regarding definitions of faith in Orthodox circles and at great books colleges.

You sigh, switching off the vacuum, and are grateful, anyway, for those many sorts of past conversations and the possibilities for future ones. Then you jot down so you won’t forget “The Coke Song,” next time your daughter comes to visit.