How does this happen? Every so often, as I daydream about matters of life and death and everything in between, a song lyric floats up out of nowhere. From somewhere deep in my unconscious, the music begins to flow. I hear the needle drop on the vinyl, a moment of silence, and then the song. It’s been like this for decades.
We absorb music from infancy. Lyrics and melodies get rehearsed hundreds of times during the years our memories are most plastic, and they get tangled up — in blue — with our most charged moments: where we were, whom we loved. The amygdala gets recruited, and the trace deepens. So whenever it happens, I feel an enormous joy — and sometimes I get a little verklempt.
There I was, contemplating my cup-runneth-over life, when this obscure lyric surfaced:
They gonna fix the weather in the world
Just like Mr. Gore said
But tell me what’s to be done
Lord — ’bout the weather in my head
It’s from “Weather in My Head,” on Donald Fagen’s 2012 album Sunken Condos. I think it surfaced because I’d been wondering where I’m going to be, and when. Another baby on the way, a wedding, a shorter stay than usual on the Cape, High Holy Days arriving the second week of September. That’s a lot.
But those life-cycle peaks aren’t the storm. They’re amazing. They generate their own kind of energy — call it a high-pressure system — but they don’t trouble me. The weather in my head has turned stormy for a different reason: I keep trying to take in what’s happening in the world and make some sense of it.
And I can’t.
The debacle in the Middle East — terror and war, extremism, hatred, politics — has thrown up a stormfront the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The growing antipathy toward Israel keeps slopping over into antisemitism. We will not get through it unscathed. The weather in my head is raging. How about yours?
Still, summer has arrived, and with it so much naches. Somewhere inside this awful, portentous storm there have to be reasons to celebrate. I have to look up from the screen and stop obsessing over the weather in my head.
So I’ll be taking time off here and there — holding babies, standing under a chuppah, and just breathing. In the meantime, I send all of you my love and my gratitude. I’m tapping out for now. See you in September.
Before Shabbat 