Repeating the warm memories

Childhood produced an adventure a day, with enough repetition to make putting it all together, more or less a continual game that continued into adulthood. Facing constant change lessened anxiety and fear for what the morrow brought, and instead, a colourful daydreaming emerged that even teachers sometimes had trouble breaking me out of. There was enough difference in the adventures however, to always keep life interesting, and what became to rote and boring, simply was avoided and not played with for very long at all. A certain arrogance emerged from such a setting, for I thought that I need not put up with anything much that I did not wish to feed into, and was my way of avoidance for what life was bringing to my door.

Instead, life had to give my lessons on the run, over learning them from the same environment or bunch of people seen day after day. The only ones I saw a lot of, was my own family, which was tenuous at the best of times due to the different stresses on our family that was present, to the ones growing up in one location all of the time. By age seventeen, I had left home, as had my older brother, and my younger brother followed a year later when he had just turned fifteen. If there was any return for any of us, it was only for a short term beyond this, though mum and dad always tried to make us feel at home, no matter where in the world they chose to move to and live. Dad had begun his nomadic life early, for he had emigrated to Australia when just four, and it took him till his young man years before he made it back to England working on a cargo ship, to get back to close to where he was living as a child.

After his voice training and time spent with the RAF, he somehow acquired the desire to travel on the back of his dynamic operatic tenor voice. I never paid that much attention when young, to when dad was in his prime for his voice, and when I was twelve years old, he had already moved beyond those prime years, when I began to accompany him for a decade. We were a good team, and I loved to just sit and play new songs all of the time, picking the ones I knew he would like, and getting accolades if indeed he did choose the ones I liked. Over time, however, I gained my own appreciation for my own kinds of sounds that were different to what dad sang, and more suited to the instruments I was playing at the time. I spent years on the piano, then over many years, got to experience most of the electric organs that the different churches were buying. Growing with technology was challenging, though I did manage to keep up with the latest and best of the electronic organs of my day. I loved to play them to their limits, and if it made the whole place shake, then the better I liked it. I liked lots of bass, and liked to have every finger of my hands playing a note, multiplied through the organ, made for grand listening and playing.

Between dad and I, we had a library full of music, though as I began to move more myself, as I reached my own adult years, I began to note that it became too hard to cart all of the things around with me, that I grew up with, and gradually, I allowed this to change, losing much along the way, and whole wall full of books. What used to take a big truck to move me, I paired back to just my two trusty suitcases, and as I have aged further, have seen the advantage of travelling and living just from a backpack. Now that I have traced a full circle to almost where I started, I realize that the ideal for a nomad, was either the swaggy I got to know when in my childhood, or the aborigines who literally can walk away from it all. I too, have reached the point where no materialism can hold me, or keep my over a barrel. No money, thing, or control is allowed unless I wish it. Wouldn’t a magical creature want it this way?

~Spiritwind~