There Goes My Life

I dropped the kids off with the grandparents today. It's the first time they've gone away on their own. Usually if both my wife and I have to be out of town or something, then one of the grandparents comes to South Dakota to stay at our house. In any event, as I was driving home--like that scene from the movie Better Off Dead, Kenny Chesney's "There Goes My Life" came on the radio. (Those unfamilar with the song can at least take a look at the lyrics here.) While the song is about a young man who became a dad as a teenager, and I didn't become a dad until my 30s--and under much different circumstances, I suspect it is a song that resonates with most fathers of little girls (of all ages). At least, I hope it would on some level.

I'll admit to being a guy who tears up at some odd things. For instance, Bill Murray's Scrooged makes me well up every time. Chesney's song hits me in a similar fashion, especially on days when I've just started driving north while the kids are riding south. It was a bittersweet three or four minutes.

Those minutes did, however, revive my memory of a web-based writing project that crossed my brain a while back. One that I've considered using as sort of a special-topics-creative-writing-over-Interim course. Given the impact that music has on our lives, the way songs can function almost as bookmarks allowing us to flip back to particular emotional places in our past, I have this notion of a web site called "The Synoptic Jukebox."

The interface to the site would function like one of those old countertop jukeboxes, where you flip the pages to see the various songs available. When readers select a particular title, they would be met with a collection of writings connected in some way with the song. The writings wouldn't be about the songs--at least not directly--but about those emotional places that we associate with various songs. Hall and Oates's "Sara Smile," for example, might connect with an account of a high school dance where some goofy young teen (to remain nameless) requested the song in order to orchestrate the perfect moment to ask a certain Sara to dance. But, perhaps the DJ at this dance, who said he'd be glad to play the song, never got around to doing so, and the goofy young teen--waiting for the perfect moment--never asked the girl to dance. That's just one hypothetical example.

The intersections of music and experience seem such fertile ground that the site could grow rapidly, and given a sufficient number of voices, could become quite fascinating. Regional difference. Generational difference. Etc.

gad