The Soundtrack to Life Is Written In Hindsight

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I was sitting upstairs at home as my husband watched a movie downstairs when a sinuous tune spilled out of the TV and traveled up the stairs to my ear. Because of the distance, it sounded like a background soundtrack rising from my home, having nothing to do with a movie.

It was beautiful, poignant, and filled the space. It stirred the imagination in me, and suddenly I was listening to the soundtrack to my family’s life and the episodes that transpired. This is our music, I thought.

I tilted my head and enjoyed the pretty sound. It told me what I know but sometimes forget: I’ve had it good. It was tough at times. It was worrisome — touch and go. But even amid those hard times, a meaningful story unfolded thanks to something or other. Love? Determination? Acceptance? Humility? Luck?

Learning?

It takes time to compose a soundtrack. You need to know what you’re going for and what the music is commenting on. After all this time, I’ve composed the music for some of the scenes in my life. My hindsight knows better now. It knows what has made me who I am.

I remember watching Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in my one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, NY in 1999 when my water broke, and amniotic fluid dribbled down the insides of my thighs. My baby wasn’t due for another seven weeks.

I was stunned. Bad things like this didn’t happen to me. Maybe some troublesome situational fate I brought on myself, yes, but my body had cooperated my whole life to that point. This was my first child who, along with his brother two years later, turned my life switch to “on.” They were all I wanted in life.

Music wells in the room as the fluid trickles to the floor and I frantically grab the phone to call the doctor. There was no music back then, of course, but there is now in the soundtrack I’ve written. A violin builds the tension with a sharp staccato as its bow sparks off the strings in a clear message: we don’t know what will happen next. It makes your heart do a partial, tentative crumble. You’re left hanging.

Later, after I staved off labor for a week in a hospital bed, as I held my firstborn in all his healthy perfection, piano keys tap out lightly from low notes up to happy high notes. I whisper to my baby that I will be a mother who will guide him by only one thing — love. Then, like a pretty poem, the piano notes flicker quietly into a soft end, trailing off in hope.

I wrote a complex composition for this scene in my life because it was so pivotal, but an event doesn’t have to be an obvious inflection point to garner such impactful music.

Some years ago, my extended family went to a go-kart park together for a little fun. We strapped ourselves into our respective karts and set off circumnavigating the course like a jumbled swarm of happy lunatics. Some of us were keen on ramming into the family member directly in front of us. Others simply wanted to be the evening’s top speed demon. Still others used most of their energy redirecting their kart back onto the course, spinout after spinout, again and again.

I composed an ironic symphony piece for this scene because symphonic music isn’t what I normally link to a gaggle of go-cart ding-a-lings who can’t breathe because they’re laughing with near-medical desperation. But that’s before they get rear-ended by their beloved child or spouse and a calm focused revenge takes over.

For this soundtrack, the string section revs up as my family circles the course. Soon, the woodwinds embrace each sad though retaliatory crash. Then the brass section triumphs over a pan-out of the amateur racers because — as the irony goes — these are adults, and you would never know it.

That scene in my family’s life ends with us walking out of the go-kart park, elbowing each other in the sides, recounting the bedlam, with one last dehydrated racer sucking every drop from the water fountain near the exit door. As the door closes behind us, a clarinet twirls the last few notes and lets them fall in a message to the viewer that these moments in life are the very ground from which we grow.

All moments in life are worthy of music — the stark, the funny, the nearly unnoticed. They add up.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. Ever since Covid, wherever I go, whoever I talk to, I ask the person in front of me how they’re doing — genuinely so. Most everyone looks up in grateful surprise that a stranger would want to know about them. That reaction fuels me to ask the next stranger down the line. Their gratitude becomes the reason for my gratitude.

The soundtrack for these brief scenes is a slow, unassuming score using a banjo at first, then transitioning to acoustic guitar and mandolin. The scene is a collage of me checking in on the lab technician as she takes my blood, the FedEx delivery girl at my front door, the cashier at the grocery store, and the man helping me with a print job at Office Depot. Slowly, the music culminates in a sweet harmonica. You know these scenes are unassuming, grassroots, and simple, as much as you know they’re the silent DNA of our species.

But musical notes don’t only comprise the soundtrack to the world around me. They also emanate from me, filling the ears of others. It’s a skill to hear the kinds of songs I play for my surrounding environment, and it’s taken me a long time to hear them.

The longer I listen to my soundtrack, the easier it is to see what instrument I am and what notes I play. Am I loud or quiet? Is the music right for the scene? It’s a beautiful thing to compose music — but it’s hard. It takes time and a willing ear. When I get it right, the movie in front of me inspires not only me but hopefully you.

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Hope you're well, friends. :-)