how sweet it is

Today's Hump Day Hmm is about the soundtrack of your life. It is a fun question to answer. I love music - I was raised by it and married it, and my life without it is inconceivable.

My mom was a child prodigy. Did those of you who know me in real life already know this? When she was three or four years old, she would come home from church, sit at the piano, and play (with two hands) the hymns from the morning. Her mother drove 30 miles one way into town twice a week for organ and piano lessons, in a time before parents needed an assistant to handle their children's extracurricular schedules. As a child, the soundtrack of my life was my mother's piano. We would fall asleep on the floor of the piano room, listening to Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, Debussey.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
- DH Lawrence


(a Very Young Small Early Asher, sitting in his grandmother's lap at the piano)

On the other end of town, at my Dad's house, Led Zeppelin and Cream blared from the living room. My Dad had an entire room devoted to records, and spent Saturday afternoons listening to the stereo at what can best be described as a visceral level. He taped Bruce Springsteen for my Walkman. My soundtrack at his house was an electric guitar and a bass line that is felt rather than heard.

Then I married a musician. And like that bass line, music has become so much a part of our daily lives, so much a part of who Brian is, I cannot imagine him or us without it. The soundtrack of my life now is Brian's voice - as he makes up songs for the dog and the baby in the mornings, as he rehearses or records after dinner, as he leads worship.






How sweet it is.