Sing along

Just now, working on this blog, I moved the keyboard and the mouse together and somehow turned on Randy’s music and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. Just as I was thinking of giving up and just turning the volume off I came across a little symbol pinned to the top of the screen (of course) that allowed me to turn it off.

I’m not at all musical but I do like to sing along, which means I tend toward the music of my youth because I know the lyrics - I don’t care if it’s a good song or a bad song. Randy couldn’t care less about lyrics - in fact, when I would tell him the lyrics of a song he was listening to (in order to demonstrate what a depressing song it was) he would be surprised. I would ask, Do you know what he’s singing? And Randy would say, No, but I can tell he’s really angry about something.

I’m not really able to listen to music since he died. Every song on any of our playlists touches a nerve. It might be Another One Bites the Dust - when it would play Randy would give me a dirty look and say, Who put this on my playlist? Or it might be a Pearl Jam song and I might comment about how Eddie Vedder’s growly mumble is so annoying. Or it might be an Elvis Costello song - we listened to him on our first night together. Years later as a birthday gift I took him to an Elvis concert at the Mountain Winery and it was a beautiful night. Or it might be Van Morrison’s Have I Told You Lately and I would make him stand up and dance with me. Once, when he was in the hospital waiting for new lungs he played it for me and danced with me in his hospital gown with his IV pole and canula for oxygen.

I like to sing along to music when I’m cooking or doing housework. The first time I played a Spotify playlist, though, every song had some connection with Randy. Because of course it did, because every part of my fucking life is connected to Randy. Every part.