Sounds Of Silence

 It wasn't until Saturday morning that it struck me: No phone, no music. Not a single luxury. Well, the luxury in this particular case may have been that I was safe and warm inside. I was contemplating braving the break in the wind and the rain to go out for a little exercise. 

But I didn't have a phone. 

Which in hindsight seems like the most ridiculous excuse imaginable. However, my continued commitment to hitting those streets most every day to get a few miles in are all but predicated on the tunes I carry with me. It used to be an iPod. Before that it was an MP3 player about the size of a Walkman. And before that it was a Walkman. My phone was my connection to the vast sea of music available through streaming services. A couple of taps on a screen and shove those earbuds into my head and voila, an escape from the drudgery of anything more than a walk around the block. 

There I was, faced with the dilemma: Cutting my run short or skipping it all together or making the grand step of going outside without external entertainment. 

I stepped out the door, and began my run. 

The first quarter mile was a bit disconcerting. My mind struggled to find a topic or a line of thought that would bring me to the rhythm that I am used to finding by shuffling through popular music from the past seventy years. Somewhere before I reached mile one, I decided to sing a song to myself.

I know a lot of songs. This is probably due in large part to the amount of time I have spent running around the streets of California and Colorado with songs that I have eventually learned by heart. 

Could I recreate this experience in my head without earbuds? 

I started with The Beatles. There are a lot of Beatles songs in my head. Getting them to play from start to finish was the challenge. Around mile two I remembered the first song by any artist that I knew start to finish: Rocky Raccoon. "Now somewhere in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon..."

I didn't worry about the tempo, and I got a little lost when I stopped to let a car pass in front of me at a stop sign, but I made it through. So I tried Yellow Submarine. And Magical Mystery Tour. Then I switched over to Bruce Springsteen. There are a lot of Bruce songs in my hard drive. Born To Run came easy. As did Cadillac Ranch. 

By now I was working into my fifth mile. Body and brain were feeling weary, so I decided to head on home, trying to recall the lyrics to Homeward Bound. By Simon and Garfunkel. When I made it up the front steps, I was ready for some peace and quiet.