Cleaning House in Ft. Stockton

I remember when Mimi and Papa were my age.  They suddenly up and sold all their furniture and bought new everything!  This was not what grandparents do.  They keep everything just as it is so that their children and grandchildren will have their memories intact.

But no: my sweet grandmother, as it turned out, was a radical.  She changed, to our collective dismay, everything!

It wasn't in our culture to change things.  Once you got everything all fixed like you liked it, you kept it that way.  Post war, post Depression, it was all you could do to build and fill the house you'd dreamed of and you were so proud of it. You had a story for each piece of furniture, when you got it, how much it cost.  You then made memories around the house; your children could come back and it would still be just as they remembered it.  Your grandchildren, too.

But as it turned out, Mimi planted a seed in me that I think about any time a friend says, "Your house is always changing!" It's in my genes.

Mimi and Papa always lived in small houses, two bedrooms, one bath, so it wasn't like they were spending a fortune on these changes.  Even when they moved (three times in my lifetime), they took their old stuff with them--until The Change!  Everything was strangely new, unfamiliar.

When I got to this Day's Inn last night looking for the pony in the barn of shit (you all know that story, don't you?  the two brothers go into the barn on Christmas morning and see it's filled with excrement and the pessimist brother gets all sad and the optimist brother says, "There must be a pony in here somewhere!")  I decided to clean house.  On my computer and phone.

My music library has been in place since I got my first iPod many years ago.  As I've moved up to newer iPods and now an iPhone, the music has moved with me.  Listening to that music yesterday, I kept clicking past songs I know.  Very few still speak to me.

I kept only what I  want to hear when I plug the phone into the speakers.  To hear the same song over and over is like re-reading the same book, when there are so many books out there to discover.

Now, with Pandora, you can create a station that sends you songs along the way in the vein of whatever musician you want.  With Podcasts, you can hear new conversations.

And so just like that, just like Mimi and her familiar furniture, I deleted hundreds of songs, shrinking my music library down to the essentials: Leonard Cohen, Jim Reeves (who sounds as close to my daddy singing as any one could sound), some actual voice mails my daddy left for Micah who saved them and made copies for us all, some poetry, a few audio books, a few others.

Before purging my library,  each time I heard a particular song, I could tell you exactly where I was when I first heard it.  The songs have become soundtracks of former trips.

It's not exactly the same as "outgrowing" the old; it's more like "overgrowing" them. The old familiar tunes are so absorbed in who we are that we don't actually need them anymore--except maybe when we want to travel back in time.

Good-bye Doo-Wop and all those Fifties songs I downloaded for Mike.
Good-bye Elvis, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel.
Good-bye Bob Dylan, Carly, Barbra.
Thanks for the memories, all of you.  If I ever need to wallow in former loves, I'll know where to find you.