July is an hot month here. (No surprise there, really, except that the spring was so cool and even early summer was uncharacteristically cool, so July has sneaked up on me.) I feel like I am subconsciously trying to avoid m e l t i n g . . . . I need to go to my mother's house today and do some things. However, I know the cooler is off. When I go today, I will leave the swamp cooler on so I won't have such a mental block about working in there. And so I will not melt. (P.S. I did melt yesterday at my mother's. The heat had built up too much for the swamp cooler to take care of. I'm trying again today.)
My daughter is into seventies music. We listen to it on the radio in our car and when she hears a song she likes, she jots down the artist and song title and then she finds it online to hear it again. There are times when a song will come on the radio and I am instantly whisked away to my teen years--just about the age my daughter is now. Speaking of melting, the years just melt away . . . for a few minutes.
This has caused me to think a lot about music of any particular decade. When I was younger, the local radio stations played the popular songs. Will the kids of this decade have a shared set of songs that will define their decade? It seems like everything is so individual today--each person listens to his/her own music. It seems that today there are no "anthems of a decade"--at least none that a whole grade could agree on.
Also, when I'm whisked back to my youth with those songs, I remember school. We had grades seven through twelve in one school. My class was the last year to graduate with that particular set up. My graduating class had seventy-nine kids in it and it was the second largest graduating class ever to graduate from my high school. I knew many of the kids in the grades on either side of mine--five years ahead and five years behind. There were about five hundred kids at the school at any given time. Today, the students in my children's grades are four times the size of my grade, and the two grades in a "junior high" have more students than my whole school did. Those "junior highs" have just two grades at each school. There are a lot of good things about the changes that have come about since I was in school in the Tri-cities. However, I do not think you can match today that sense of knowing pretty much everyone in the whole school at any given time that I had back in the day.
I'm sounding old. Maybe that is what happens when a person has been m e l t i n g.
Speaking of school, we have less than a month before school starts here in the Tri-cities so there is that need to buy school clothes and start saving up money for school fees. L and J will both change schools this year. L and T will be at the same school--they have not been at the same school since elementary school. I'm looking forward to finding out how that school works now that I have L there. T isn't a big talker so I've remained in the dark about exactly how things work at that school. One bright spot is that all three will ride the same bus for my last year of having all three in the public school system.
OK, now I need to go face Mom's house and hope it is cooler than yesterday.
