Muzak Reverie

Harry T. Cook

12/19/08

The older I get, the more nostalgic I become as I remember “how it was then” — “then” being when I myself was a child or when my now-adult offspring were children or even when my grandchildren were infants. My first cognitive awareness of life around me came toward the middle of World War II when the songs heard on the radio included “White Christmas” and “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places” — both ballads of love and longing.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday last month while my wife and I were visiting our daughter in a distant city, I was sitting in a local Starbucks there one morning nursing a cup of coffee and scanning The New York Times. My attention to the brew and the news was diverted by the incessant Muzak-like recordings one hears in such places.

If it was not the recorded voice of Bing Crosby singing “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas,” it was that of Nat King Cole singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” Coffee and paper gradually forgotten, I slipped into a reverie as Christmas Eve 1944 came flooding back in memory.

I was sitting on the stairs of the home my parents had built four years earlier in a Detroit suburb. I could just see the outer edges of a newly trimmed Christmas tree below in the living room and hear my parents talking to the son of a neighbor just home on furlough from the Pacific. “White Christmas” was coming out of the old Stromberg-Carlson radio console. Next on the Starbucks hit parade was Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” followed by “Winter Wonderland” — tunes, I think, primarily of the 1950s as I was growing up and things were getting back to normal after the war with prosperity spreading at least among the white middle class.

Then, coffee turning cold, came the music of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” right out the 1960s when my older sons were approaching school age and when, despite the winsome innocence of “Peanuts,” the sexual revolution, the civil rights and the antiwar movements were hot and controversial. I cannot hear the Charlie Brown score today without the push-pull of nostalgia for my little boys as well as residual angst over the current events of their early childhood.

Then a rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock” came blasting through the Starbucks speakers landing me right back on the shores of now — and to the gloomy news in that day’s Times (the Mumbai massacre) and the cold, acrid $1.75 cup of coffee. As my voyage across memory’s expanse ended, I was, frankly, relieved. My literary hero Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe captured my mood exactly: “You can’t go home again.” One can only soldier ahead in the present and on into the future. Christmas will never again be as white as the one Crosby sang about. The carefree sleigh ride of Leroy Anderson’s chirpy tune is now the roar of snowmobiles. The wise-acre innocence of Schroeder and the charming haplessness of his pal, Charlie Brown, seem not to be recoverable in the shadows of Iraq, 9/11, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

It was time for me to cede my table at Starbucks to others. I heaved my aging frame up and out, folded the newspaper under my arm and returned to my daughter’s home, who had only so recently left ours.

I was somewhat unnerved at seeing in my mind’s eye all those old familiar places while in the same moment wondering where all the time had gone.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.