Teleportation Songs

What are your teleportation songs? You know... Those songs that when you hear them, your mind instantly jumps to another time and place. It's like hearing that song opens up a wormhole and you travel back through time to a previous episode of your life. You may not even be able to sit and pick them out of your brain. You may not even realize that the link exists in your memory until you hear the song come on the radio.

What made me think of it was the song "Wonderwall" by Oasis, mentioned on Sam's blog. That song instantly takes me to Groton, Connecticut and the beginning of my JO tour. It's autumn. The leaves are beautiful shades of orange and red and yellow, and they swirl up behind my car as I drive the curved roads through Mystic. There's a bite in the air as the chill of winter approaches. After growing up in summertime year round in San Diego, I absolutely loved the changing seasons in New England. That's a feel-good, happy link for me.

The most recent song to burn a permanent teleportation link my memory was "Say It Right" by Nelly Furtado. Gosh, I can't believe it hasn't even been a year since the accident yet. It seems like so very long ago because so much has happened since then. But when I hear that song, I'm suddenly in Rota, Spain, and the visions and sensations flood my memory like it was yesterday. We spent three emotional weeks languishing in Rota in January 2007 while the JAGMAN and Safety Investigations were conducted for the accident that claimed the lives of two MSP sailors on December 29th. Yes, I was on board the MSP that day. I had just reported aboard. It was my first underway, so I had no official duties and was just an observer during that maneuvering watch. I felt helplessly terrified to watch it all happen with my own eyes and totally powerless to stop it. (Random aside comment: Isn't it odd how when you wake up on the morning of the worst day of your life, you have NO idea that it's going to be the worst day of your life? You'd think you would feel some sort of premonition that something was about to go terribly wrong and change your life forever). In any case, the AFRS radio station in Rota played that Nelly Furtado song at least once an hour, so every time I got in my little teenie-tiny rental car to go out to dinner or back to my BOQ room, that song was always there.

I hope I'm not opening a can-of-worms by bringing up the MSP accident. I had to stop reading bubblehead's blog for a while after the accident. It took a lot of self-restraint not to lash out at some of the people who posted comments there. Neither lashing out at them nor repressing my urge to lash out at them were going to help bring the episode to closure, so I had to just stop reading the comments and focus my energies elsewhere.

Wow. What a tangent, eh? When I sat down to start writing this blog post, I had no idea where it would take me. So, getting back to my original topic... I know there are other songs out there that have strong memory-links for me - some good, some bad... It's hard to just think of them without the link being activated by actually hearing the song (or reading the name of the song in someone else's blog as the case may be).