Having an iPod in New York City is as essential as rat traps and a good pair of walking shoes.  There are days when the only way to make it sanely down the street is to drown out the city noise with your own soundtrack.  Your favorite songs, all compiled on one tiny, thin, brightly colored (purple!) device.  A pocket therapist– and much less expensive.

Just like a scent can take me back in time (every time I walk into Banana Republic and smell their “W” I feel like I’m sitting in the suite room with JB, picking out which pair of black pants we should wear to the SAE party), a song can throw me out of the present and land me in the middle of a memory, good…or bad.  (This is why the fast forward button is so useful.)  It’s startling, actually:  one moment I’m walking down a crowded New York street and the next moment I’m somewhere else…

Birmingham, fall 2004.  I’m behind the wheel of my blue Jeep Cherokee, that old friend.  There are a thousand thoughts swirling around my head.  Among them: my sister’s recent engagement, my fear of never finding the right guy like she did, the misery that is every day of my residency, the fear of not making it through my second and final year of that residency, where I will go if I do make it through that year, how I will get out of the tangled mess I’ve created with a guy who a few weeks ago almost let me drown (literally, figuratively, and another story for another day).  Worry upon fear upon worry.  (It’s a family tradition.)  The speakers are trying to break into my head with the sounds of my new David Wilcox CD and are not succeeding.  Then I look ahead of me and see a truck with a personalized license plate.  It reads: YET.  In that moment of clarity that only occurs for people of faith and alcoholics (sometimes one and the same), everything came together.  All the answers I was waiting for were still shaped as questions because it wasn’t yet time for me to know.  It was only the “yet” that separated me from a different place.  And the music found a path through the clarity and reached me:

I see you dreaming by the ocean window…I hear you whisper like the waves upon the shore

The tide is turning on this time of sorrow…you will never be so lonesome anymore…

There’s nothing wrong with taking time for sleeping…your eyes are weary with the things that you have seen

A deeper promise your soul is keeping…tight in time for this appointment in your dream

Now I know that a heart can just get buried…stone by stone, crushing hope until it dies

Far away, but the message somehow carries…Beloved, it is time for you to rise, time for you to

Rise up, though the promise goes unspoken

Rise up, when the tears come to your eyes

Rise up, for your soul was never broken

Beloved, it is time for you to RISE.

Back in the moment of fall, 2009 on a New York street, I heard the song again and thought of all that had changed in five years.  Pretty much everything.  The loneliness that had given way to companionship (and I’m not just talking about getting a boyfriend–that took four years); the deeper promise spoken into my heart in dark times that held true to the other side; the fact that for me, “rising” meant packing a U-Haul and steering it away from home and all I knew, right in time for an appointment in a dream.  The process of YET becoming NOW.  Which, I guess, is called life.  And faith.

Apple might consider an ad, or warning, focusing on the emotional and spiritual implications of that tiny, thin, brightly colored device.  (Cut to me praying with tears in my eyes on a crowded New York street.)