Pool Songs

I took advantage of some of the nice weather this week and walked around my neighborhood listening to my iPod.

Chicago's "I Don't Want to Live Without Your Love" came on and I smiled. It was what my siblings and I refer to as a "pool song," a song that was in heavy rotation during the summers when we were at the local pool.

With the exception of Billy Ocean's "Get Out of My Dreams and Into My Car," "pool songs" are pretty depressing songs. Yet, every time I hear them, they make me smile because they remind me of happy, relaxing times with my friends and family. John Waite's "Missing You" always makes me think of diving off of the diving board. It was the only place where you could actually hear the songs being played poolside, beyond the low and high notes.

Ah, life -- all about perspective.

In a larger context, I can look back on rough times in my life (present time included) and realize that, overall, the experience made me a better person, and are things that I should appreciate. Without everything that I'm going through now, I probably would have lost myself completely as a person because I was trying to make something work that was never going to work. It took me about six months to recover from six years of awful; while I'm not 100% yet, I keep getting closer to that every day. And, I don't know that the recovery would have been possible without being abruptly thrown from the life I was living at the time.

Today I'm grateful for nice weather in the middle of the winter. I'm enjoying the sunshine and looking forward to taking advantage of the nice weather tomorrow, possibly by going to the playground with my niece.