The Power of Music

The power of music to transform you to a different time and place always amazes me, and often catches me by surprise. While riding the bus this morning, still reeling from the shock of yesterday’s spring-time snow, my iPod shuffled to the song “Kids” by MGMT (listen here: http://tinyurl.com/2vglyg) , and suddenly I found myself in an emotional vortex of the past 18 months (we have been in Calgary for 18 months!!!) If you must know, I almost teared up as this song brought happy memories flooding to the surface!

I will forever love and associate this song with crisp winter ski days, blasting it on the car speakers as me, Ben and various friends watched the sun rise over the Canadian Rockies and got our adrenaline pumping for another day on the ski hill. It is also the background music on one of my favorite ski movie scenes, and I can feel the excitement each time I hear the opening of this song, which starts quietly and slowly gives rise to a pulsating rhythm.

Riding along in that crowded, bumpy bus this morning, all of these thoughts and feelings swirled to the surface in no more than a nanosecond, and then quickly gave way to my next memory of this song: our first visits to Almudena’s cozy apartment, when she played the MGMT CD all night long (I think it was the only CD she brought with her from Spain!) while we ate gazpacho and Spanish tortilla, and drank red wine and whiskey & cokes and had impromptu dance parties and explosive board games.

And of course I could not traipse down the memory lane of this addictively poppy and peppy tune without flashing back to last summer’s Bonnaroo, when we finally saw MGMT in person. The concert was after 2am and we were so tired we could probably have laid down in the Bonnaroo mud and slept all night, but we made it through at least a few songs!!

Somehow this unassuming band has become the anthem of my time in Canada. One close friend who we began this journey with (Alicia) has already moved onward to London, and our other amazing friend Almudena leaves us in two short weeks, so perhaps nostalgia is running strong at the moment. Regardless, I could not help but arrive at work, on what was beginning as a long and dreary day, feeling eternally grateful for the experiences I’ve had here so far, and for the people I have met.

I know that Ben and I will look back for the rest of our lives with smiles on our faces, telling friends and family about our crazy days in Canada, when we learned to ski and snowboard, tried our hand at curling, hiked our way through the Rocky Mountains, listened to whales chatter in the Pacific Ocean and made life-long friends from across the globe.

We still have one more year ahead of us in the great white north, and close friends whom we can’t wait to continue enjoying life with, and I’m sure many more amazing people we have yet to meet. I say, bring it on!