Travel By Lotion in anticlimatic

You know that cover of Somewhere Over The Rainbow by the Hawaiian guy that died quite some time ago? Movies overplayed it, but I still consider it a very special song, from a distant time and place when there were very few songs like it. On par with the original, which is saying something. There’s an ethereal quality to it. Like the soundtrack to every dream you ever wished you had.

I remember hearing this song on a commercial as I was falling asleep, at some point in the 90s. The commercial was this song, a little boy about my age in a comfy bed, and a view of some kind out the window at the stars. And there was a feeling of drifting away from this sleeping boy, out the window, into the sky, all to the the dreamy ooo-ooo-oos of this song.

It was the happiest I’ve ever fallen asleep. A watershed moment, seared in my brain. Partly to torture me, like waking from dreams of winning the lotto, but more to remind me just how lovely and beautiful things can be, in miraculous circumstances.

Recently, this music, and the spirit therein has reentered my life. Partly by way of a very unlikely lotion, that for reasons I will not mention, I find myself sniffing every time I pass it in the grocery store aisle. It is very pink, and very feminine, but it smells like every fond memory I had from every fond corner of my life. It smells like the spring moss on the old artisan stone wells my great grandmother would let me drink from when I was a toddler; like the breeze through a full canopy of healthy green leaves in an old maple tree residential neighborhood, deep in summer- the sound of bicycle spokes passing by and fading off.

I stop and I smell this lotion, and everything it means to me wraps itself around me and we go drifting upwards, at about the same rate that I am inhaling, into those breezy summer evening treetops while this song plays in the background. I finish inhaling and the sensation peaks, and then fades off- like a shallow dream already forgotten by breakfast. I fear to buy it, that it might wear off, or become dull with personal over-use.

But I can’t stop visiting every chance I get, for one little trip to the stars with everything that I love.