When listening to most kinds of music, I'm tempted (maybe tempted isn't the right word, since this is more of a reflex) to bathe myself in not only the particulars of the music (and perhaps the lyrics) but also in the memories that have attached themselves to it.

What was I doing when I first heard this record? Who was I with? Was I happy?

Ah, but nostalgia takes many forms. I've been talking about musical nostalgia here, but there's also nostalgia of place. Everybody know s about that one. A room that reminds you of what your bedroom looked like when you were a little kid....the park where you played baseball after school...the college classroom where you met your future spouse.

Memory's a funny thing though, as all of these nostalgia fragments refuse to be pigeonholed. You listen to a piece of music and it reminds you of a place...which has its own set of remembrances. Drive by an old girlfriend's house and the melody of 'your' song will float back into your head.

Over the past month or so, I've been heavily involved in two things: 1) packing and moving my family to a new house and 2) listening to The Ditty Bops. Activity #1 is at least partially responsible for activity #2. See, all but a handful of my CD's have been tucked away in boxes, leaving me with about a dozen discs.

During all of this upheaval, a couple of unexpected things happened. The first was the unsettling emergence of all sorts of memories related to our 'old' house. As I walked around the mostly empty rooms, the mental postcards began to pile up: the wedding in the living room, news of a homeless relative, woodworking projects with my dad. On and on it went. The echoes bouncing off the walls were not just acoustic.

The second unexpected item? That I was able to use The Ditty Bops as an oasis and refuge. I mean, this almost never happens to me. When my brain is spouting off these kind of mental sparks, the 'remedy' is usually time. Instead, I was able to lose myself in the odd stories, sideways harmonies and creative instrumental structures.