Levi and the Music in my Life

Levi had to go back to the vet recently for a recheck of the pus pocket on his lip. It cleared up nicely on the antibiotics but he was still digging and scratching the area constantly. This time we were able to see a 'skin tag' we didn’t see before and it freaked me out when I discovered it a few days before the appointment because I thought it was an embedded tick. Between the veterinary, her tech assistant, me and Levi’s cooperation the vet was able to pronounce that what I thought were legs coming out of the ‘thing’ were not. We were also able to see that the salivary gland near the upper lip where the pus pocket was two weeks ago was enlarged and the vet was guessing it’s plugged and that’s the source of the annoying itching Levi was experiencing. 

She put him on a twice a day drug for itching and it’s been like a miracle. I’ve only seen him digging at his mouth three times in four days since starting the pills. The plan is to reduce the drug down to once a day after a two week trial, hoping to give the salivary gland a rest and chance to correct itself. Going into surgically open it up or remove the gland would be costly and an unnecessary risk at his age. Better to do it with his annual teeth cleaning next summer, if the pills give him enough relief to wait and he's not running a fever. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “It’s always something.” 

Changing topics: I’ve been in the car a lot lately which means I’ve been hearing a lot of music. I don’t listen to it in the house but I’ll explain that later. Yesterday Thomas Rhett came on The Highway XM radio channel singing the last choir of his latest song, “Now I'm twenty-five and I'm drinking wine with my wife at home. Got a couple of dogs and a couple of songs on the radio and we sit around and we laugh about how we used to be when all we cared about was turning sixteen.” The song progressed from looking forward to sixteen, then to eighteen and twenty-one…always looking forward to the next benchmark. That’s what I’ve done my entire life, never happy with the here and now. That is until I got so old the next benchmark is dying and I find I don’t know how to live in the here and now.

Honestly, I don’t understand why people don’t like Country Western music. The songs are mini stories about looking back and looking forward and enjoying where you’re at. They’re about crying and laughing and loving. Sure, a few of the songs are about pickup trucks and hard drinking but more talk about things like skipping rocks on a river and watching sunsets with the one you love. And there’s a lot of practical advice in Country Western songs like in this one Kenny Chesney sang to me yesterday: 

“Scared to live, scared to die

We ain't perfect but we try

Get along while we can

Always give love the upper hand

Paint a wall, learn to dance

Call your mom, buy a boat

Drink a beer, sing a song

Make a friend….”

I don’t listen to music in the house is because 1) it makes me too moody, and 2) I get lost in the song writer’s creativity and that stifles my own if I’m trying to write. Getting lost in their storytelling makes me forget to eat, pay bills and wipe my…dog’s feet when he comes inside. You thought I was going to say something else, didn’t you. I thought about it but I pride myself on not being crude enough that I’d say “wipe my ass” in public. 

When I was in college I took a class on Music Appreciation and we studied classical pieces side-by-side with those written by the new-at-the-time Beatles. The professor predicted that the Beatles music would be around in four hundred years. Years later I got to hear an entire concert of Beatles music played by a full orchestra and I was blown away. The professor was right and I loved his class but the only time I listened to classical music after that was when I was plowing snow. Rachmaninoff’s Flight of the Bumblebee and Beethoven’s 5^th Sympathy could keep me awake like no other tip or trick of professional truckers. I still have my old cassettes but no way to play them without my pickup truck. 

Music played an important part in a different stage of my life. After my husband’s stroke I was back to singing childhood songs in the car everywhere we’d go. Songs learned before the age of five are stored in a different part of our brains, his speech therapist said, so singing them is a way to try to kick-start lost speech to come back. It didn’t work and after a year that "homework" faded out of our world but for the rest of his life Don often belted out, “Jesus likes me. Yo, you know” and every time I’d reply, “I think Jesus loved you when you were a kid." At that point he’d switch the only other song he could (almost) sing, Happy Birthday. Of all the things I’ve written over the past nearly two decades of writing on the web, my favorite humorous essay was about Don and his two songs. If interested, you can read it here. But be warned, the word ‘ass’ does come up. ©