Pocket Full of Stories

       One of my Pandora stations is Harry Chapin – I love it because it plays all the hippie songs I know the words to, and I sing along. Usually I am analyzing mold samples at the lab when listenting to Pandora, and the old songs give me a sense of peace. Of course, there are a lot of Harry Chapin songs that are played, and when Sunday Morning Sunshine comes on, every single time I am transported back to 1980 and my first apartment in Buffalo.

       Among my five dollar record collection played on my five hundred dollar stereo is a Harry Chapin album called Sniper and Other Love Songs. I had purchased it for the song Better Place to Be which I will talk about another time, and also for Circle which I had not known about until I went to a Harry Chapin concert at Kleinhans Music Hall , in 1979 or maybe early 1980 with my brother, Eric, and heard Circle for the first time and of course loved it. Hearing all the other songs on the album gave me a new appreciation for the artist that continues to grow to this day.

       Well, it was in 1980 that I got married. And one Sunday morning, with the sun streaming in through the windows, my husband walked over to the stereo and put the Snipers and other Love Songs album on. He put on side 2, and the first song on side 2 is Sunday Morning Sunshine. When Harry got to the line, you brought your Sunday morning sunshine/here into my Monday morning rain, my husband looked at me and asked, “why are you crying?”

       Pointing to the stereo, I managed to blurt out, “The words!”

       I thought he had put that particular song on for me! I thought he was calling me his Sunday Morning Sunshine – it was Sunday morning, the sun was shining, I was sitting there, and he purposely put that song on!

       The Hubs said, “Um, I just wanted to hear some music.”

       There had been no other thought involved than to put an album on the stereo.

       As I smiled sheepishly and dried my tears, I thought of another song, The Actress, by Melanie and the line, they loved the melodies/but they will never understand the words. And I get that. (Yeah, Melanie is a Pandora station of her own.)  The Hubs had done nothing wrong.

       When the opening notes to Sunday Morning Sunshine play on Pandora these days, I see again the sunshine in that Kenville Drive apartment, and I feel again what I was feeling that day – but then the apartment and the five hundred dollar stereo fade away, and today comes into view. The first lines in the song go like this - I came into town/with a knapsack on my shoulder/and a pocket full of stories/that I just had to tell – and with those lines, I see my present husband, and he is smiling at me; he listens to my pockets full of stories and encourages me to tell them. He is my Sunday Morning Sunshine.

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