October 18, 2007
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There’s always a drought in California. That’s what the newspaper and newscasters are always telling me – at least, back when I used to have contact with the outside world. There was a sign on the side of the bus, the words “Sing shorter songs” scrawled across shower tiles. This didn’t please me, and I continued to sing my normal repertoire of shower songs, and I think if you’ve ever heard anyone singing in the shower when they thought no one was listening, you can learn a whole lot more about the person in a few wet and steamy moments than in pseudo-deep conversations. For example, I usually warm up with
Daydream Believer by the Monkees: I believe in daydreams – *my* daydreams – every single gut-wrenching, panty-wetting, leg-cramping, heart-breaking, soul-lifting, breath-taking daydream that eases the pain of not being allowed to just Be.
Amazing Grace: I love the melody, the dips and turns of a gliding kite of hope. Shape of My Heart: When I was in HS, we had to dissect a cow heart in AP Bio. Rusty, one of my classmates, turned green and passed out when the teacher pushed her finger through one of the arteries. So when I hear songs about hearts, I can’t help but momentarily think “This song isn’t very romantic when one considers the actual shape of a heart, its proclivity towards failure when struck with a well-aimed hand formed and flicking like a snake, or its weakness in the presence of a powerful and unwanted truth.”
Chasing Cars: I sing to the one I fantasize about ” If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world?” And he replies “Show me a garden that’s just bursting into life.”
And sometimes, just to mix it up, I end with the Star Spangled Banner.There’s only been one person who has ever heard me sing in the shower. He was walking under the bathroom window at the time, backpack slung low on his shoulders as he trudged towards campus. I had both showerheads running at the time (the house I was living in used to belong to a fraternity that lost its charter for undoubtedly infamous reasons lost to UCSB history) and I was singing at the top of my lungs when I glanced out the window and saw him pick his way through the garden I’d grown, sweet peas clinging like needy hands to the jeans he’d worn the day before. His sleep-tousled hair fell in his eyes, glinted gold and brown in the morning sun, and flicked around his ears as he turned back and caught my eyes with his gray-blue ones. We shared a look of understanding, he smiled, I smiled at the chance the universe had given me – to reveal this one secret to one person who would accept it for the unwilling gift it was – then I pulled back away from that bright and blinding window and shut the showers off, at peace with life and death for a breath before wrapping a towel around me and continuing with the day.
There’s always going to be a drought in California; but *don’t* sing shorter songs……
…….. share longer showers.
Comments (4)
good point
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the drought seemed worse back then. whenever “then” was? i stopped watching the news, to really know? these days, when i sing in the shower, i don’t even realize that i’m even singing, until something breaks my rhythm, like running out of soap, or being hit by a sudden burst of cold water. and even then, it’s not entirely clear what tune or what melody i am trying to hold, like it is some secret song, hidden even from me, to remain hidden by the mist, if not masked already by the embarrassingly shrill modulations of my voice.
Good idea. Sing longer songs in longer showers.