Cabin lights are off.
I turn on the entertainment system. Audio channel. Classical.
Then screen off.
The Blue Danube.
As I listen…
in the darkness, I see, with my mind’s eye,
a large room,
curtains up and windows wide open,
doused in dancing sunlight,
drunk on a bracing breeze, not a single nook and cranny spared
the sweep of infectious, shimmering vibes of sanguine echoes.
I am transported back to the 1980s, to the age of radio, to the time when noble melodies like this flowed from humble, unsophisticated devices and filled grateful hearts with joy and wonderment.
I was young then. Possessions were few: not even a suitcase, not a stick of furniture to my name. Living on a subsistence wage.
But I was blessed, as were my peers.
We were blessed by cluelessness, by ignorance.
By innocence.
By the fact that all we had was ‘the present’.
One day, my dad and I were listening to the radio.Tales From the Vienna Woods came on. We were both silent as we luxuriated in the ebb and flow of the musical feast, until it was over. Then my father, visibly moved, spoke.
“Music of pure love. That’s what it is. The notes came to him when he stood before the woods. He saw the expanse, he felt the wind, he heard the twittering and the soughing and rustling. He was overcome with a dizzying, irrepressible attack of pure love. He loved his country, the land, the forests. Of that I am sure.”
Those were the days:
The age of innocence. The dancing sunlight. The bracing breeze. The sanguine echoes. Soaring on the thermals of spontaneity and unstudied weightlessness.
All that
is now
frozen,
in a vintage time capsule.