Music vs. Words

When I was perhaps 7 or 8 years old, we lived in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska. We were on 2nd street, which was 2 blocks from the river, and 1 block from the city library. I don’t know if there were other branches. Why would I? I lived a block away. It was a traditional Alaska frontier building, made of logs (as was our house) with I think, grass and flowers growing on the roof in the summertime. I think.*

Being a reader, living a block away from the library was a wonderful thing. Being home schooled for one year (perhaps I’ll tell you why sometime, but it had nothing to do with religion or a general distrust of public education, trust me), living near a library was extremely helpful. I remember going there to research my 3rd grade report on Peru, trying to find out what their imports and exports were, population, language, all of that 3rd grade report stuff that came in handy in college when I was working on my degree in International Relations.

My favorite thing about the library, though, was not the books. You could perhaps blame my mother, for having SO MANY BOOKS all around the house and its built in bookshelves that we were never really needing to look elsewhere for reading material.  And to be clear, I did check many, many books out from the library.  Perhaps every time I went, which was a few times a week.  But that wasn’t my favorite thing.  No, my favorite thing was that I could listen to records on a little record player, using headphones. I suppose I could have checked my favorite record out from the library and played it at home, but I suspect that the hippy type commune situation there would not have been enough to ensure I would not have been yelled at for listening, over and over and over again, and again, over and over and over, to wolf songs. Gah, my favorite record had side 1 (boring side 1), which was full of dry information about wolfs, their lives, their packs and mating habits and maybe hunting strategies. Blah blah blah. But whomever made this album had the soul of a poet, because side 2 was nothing but wolves. Not even words in between tracks, telling you what you were listening to. Just wolves. Pups yapping and playing. Adults howling. I don’t know what else. I just know that I could not get enough. It was marvelous.

There’s something so human about wolf songs.  Not human.  No human makes those sounds.  But so real, so sad and lonely and desperate, so happy and joyous and playful, that they touch me as though they were human.  They were, to my young Alaskan girl ears, music.  I was a happy, healthy, well loved girl, but something in these wolf songs touched something in me, and were like a balm I didn’t even know I needed.

And that, my friends, is the difference between words and music.  Why I can sit through a stupid rom-com movie dry eyed, and then the end credits come on and the music gets me all choked up and Maya laughs at me and how smushy I am because I have tears in my eyes, when really, it’s just the music.  It gets me sometimes.  And perhaps, even, why fiction hits me harder than non-fiction.  Because in a really good novel, the story can be so compelling that it can remind me of those wolf songs, and how they touched me, long ago.

* Updated to say that Richard says I am thinking of the Chamber of Commerce building, as that did have flowers growing on the roof.  Not the library.  Handy sometimes to have a brother who is two years older than me, because his memory is generally better about such things.