Sounds

You know that time between wakefulness and sleep?  You’re not quite asleep and not quite awake.  Your mind begins to wander and ends up in strange places (Proust wrote about it.  Hells yeah, I’ve read Proust!  Ok, a tiny fragment of Proust’s mammoth.  I appreciate what he did for literature, but Remembrance bores the living daylight out of me.  How many details can you cram into a single sentence, anyway?).  For one reason or another, before I fell asleep last night, my mind ended up hearing the theme music from Taxi.  Memory works in funny ways.  Even when you haven’t thought of something in ages, a sound or smell or taste all of a sudden brings it back full force (damn Proust wrote about that too, just spent way too much time detailing it). 

Taxi was the first TV show I watched (via what I now know were late night reruns) when I ended up in the U.S. back in the eighties.  I didn’t understand a single word of it, but after a few a weeks, began to distinguish a word here and there.  I loved it!  I’d like to think it was because of Latka Gravas.  

I’d like to think that even without getting the dialogue, I spotted a fellow immigrant, even one from a made-up country because, let’s face it, Andy Kaufman oozed alienation.  

Whenever I hear or even think of that wistful theme music from Taxi, I remember my first American summer and cringe with contradictions of delight and misery. 

What melody or sound reminds you of a crucial part of your life?  Not a song, mind you, because then we’d have to take stock of the lyrics.