The Yesteryears

I’ve recently become very partial to classical music.
It happened after I bought a Bang and Olufsen radio-cassette from a charity shop.
Taking it home, I plugged it in, and there it was; a distressed fiddle chased around by a swarm of moody strings. I think it was Peter and The Wolf.
This strangely familiar sound threw me back to the yesteryears, so I took a seat.
Closing my eyes, I saw myself as a toddler being tickled by my father on a towel in a walled garden. Frightened by the intimacy, I shook my head and the picture scattered.
Once the fiddle had surrendered, the strings hushed, and my grandmother came to me. She was there, behind me, silently stroking my hair.
This time, curious enough to stay seated with the past, I unknowingly began to make peace with myself.
This unearthly encounter contrasted favourably to when I was sixteen and taking flight from the imploding agony of my parents’ divorce, listening to Sound Affects by The Jam for the first time, learning to condemn feelings of shame through smoke-rings, and dreaming of finally making love to a girl.
These moments in life don’t come often, so I decided to invest more and more time into classical music.
I found that I could isolate particular instruments. A single sound stood alone, and then, as if by magic, a suitable accompaniment would conceive another fancy.
Having run my life as an exercise in emotional homelessness, stumbling from analysis to paralysis and back again, I could see that I’d failed to develop as a person. I’d unconsciously denied growth; a deserter of maturity.
Dependent on which drugs I took to humour the horror of normality, my musical taste, from punk to techno by way of funk, grunge and house, had soiled my senses. The drugs and the music had opened my mind, but closed my heart.
Each form of contemporary music had its rightful place, but, as my spirit surrendered to it, loneliness continued to hobble faithfully behind my macilent frame, and the hole that music had filled suddenly ceased to reproduce.
And then, when all was lost, came classical music.
Finally, I could forgive my parents.
In classical music, I discovered that there was space to explore feelings. I could even laugh at myself.
Having been the commander of my misery for so long, it seemed only fair to see the funny side.
Mapping my life’s shortcomings, regret subsided and remorse vanished.
I’d never been a good listener. A wild imagination can alienate the mind.
Educational progress provides for those with a clean, undaunted mind. Only then, or when a mind is desperate enough to hear, can a person listen.
Maybe I’m just getting old, beaten by the system and maddened by rebellion, but finally I wept when I realised how much time I’d wasted on anger.
The repetitive beats that monitored my torment and restrained my emotions had been silenced. Now, perhaps, I could be a father to my children.