Our Songs: The Beginning

I was originally going to write something much more serious, mostly about how much the last 3 weeks have sucked. An issue at work took a turn for the ugly, left me in tears a few days and Josh's blood pressure through the roof, and had to be resolved through HR. Finally got an interview for a job that I was really excited about, for which the hiring manager told me I stood out among my peers. Josh got the flu, and while he was home sick, I interviewed for the job, feeling like it was mine for the taking. (Oh, foolish pride...). On Friday, the hiring manager who had courted me called to let me know they were going with someone else. I spent a half hour crying in the bathroom before I could compose myself enough to go back to my desk. I had to go to the dentist on Monday, and when I got home, I collapsed on the couch with a 101.4 fever. In a year that has been hard, the last 3 weeks have been particularly spectacular. Here's to brighter days.

In the beginning, there was music.

Our beginning, that is.

The first time I went over to Josh's freezing cold apartment a month or so before we started dating, he played his classical guitar for me, and I played for him the one and (much to his annoyance) only song I know--a nameless song that a blue-eyed Russian named Slava taught me a few years before. That night, he loaned me The Prince's Toy's by Nikita Koshkin and it stayed in my car's CD player for a month. I listened to it anywhere I went, because it was part of him. And I wanted to impress him by having intelligent conversations about music, because I desperately wanted him to like me as much as I liked him.

When my apartment building was set on fire, he let me sleep on his couch and whistled Chopin's Nocturne op. 9 no. 2 everywhere he went. It became the way I knew he was coming. We started dating a week later.

Before long, much to the disgust of some of our classmates, we were inseparable. We drove around campus and town and blared "I Believe in Thing Called Love" by The Darkness and E.L.O.'s "Mister Blue Sky, which he always sang in falsetto to amuse me. And then, there were endless, endless rounds of David Bowie's Hunky Dory album. It was ear torture to me in the beginning. I hated it. Josh's approach was to abuse my ears into acceptance. Eventually it worked. (Similar tactics have proven less successful--after a trip to Rockford a few years ago, I have an unwavering belief that Mars Volta is the soundtrack of Hell.)

He loaned me the CD he had recorded of his own songs. That summer, when I worked at Barnes and Noble, I'd go out to my car at lunch and sit with the windows rolled up in a vain attempt to warm up, and I'd listen to his music. More often than not, I'd rewind the first two seconds of the first track, which he'd titled "Junk File," because he said those words and I could hear his voice.

The first time we went to his hometown, when I was nauseous with nerves about meeting his parents, he pointed out the Totem pole in Hopewell and cranked up Kawliga on The Best of Hank Williams Sr. And we debated whether the original version of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" was superior to Johnny Cash's cover (note: the correct answer is no). His parents loved me, and I loved his town (good things, since they're my in-laws and we live here now), but the great debate remains unresolved.

A few months later, my stomach was in knots again before I started a weeklong seminar to prepare for teaching Freshman Comp. Josh dropped me off at school and blared Selah's rendition of "By and By" and did his best to sing in a language he clearly does not know. It made me laugh every time, and somehow the butterflies seemed smaller walking in. That autumn, he took me to Grand View Drive for the first time and we listened to Estrellita and Chris Isaak's Forever Blue album and I dreamt with my eyes open that someday I would be his wife. And then, as the sky greyed and the cold settled in, we listened to Final Fantasy 6 Piano Collections while we graded papers and sipped too strong spearmint tea.

In December, the skies opened up, and we threw the Final Fantasy CD into his beat up blazer and went for a drive. He asked me to be his wife on that drive.

And the music was just beginning.