I miss you Nat King Cole

Trying to figure out why is probably impossible but I just heard Nat King Cole singing "Unforgettable" in my head. I haven't thought of Mr. Cole in a long time but right there, in the dark, as I'm heading to the bathroom, I hear his unforgettable voice singing to me. It made me happy and sad all at once because that's when the floodgates of memory suddenly kicked in. And so there I was, in the bathroom in the middle of the night with a montage of sounds and sights charging one after another toward the front of my mind, each yearning, no demanding, my private attention.

"Unforgettable" by Nat King Cole may have been the very first song that triggered something akin to passion inside me.

Mr. Dalke ran the shoe shop and in the summer the radio in his workshop could be heard a half a block away. I use to love to go into his shop and look at all his tools and the machinery for polishing and shining shoes of all shapes and sizes. It didn't hurt that he sold minnows for fishing either along with red wigglers and night-crawlers. Those were the sorts of things an eight year old boy could literally get his hands into.

But it was the music that day coming from his shop as I was walking across the dusty, empty except for the propane tanks, lot. And to recall it today I was walking toward the music and nothing else. That voice and those instruments that suddenly filled my head with something new, exciting and for an eight year old boy life changing were sounds that got me to feel something I wouldn't understand for years to come.

Today it seems we're constantly being assaulted with sounds and images but in those days, in that little Wisconsin town, sounds consisted pretty much of semi-trucks shifting gears through town, the occasional distant sound of the train whistle as it approached another crossing and in the summer robins singing. Mr. Dalke's radio always broke that rhythm but not with loud and raucous "look at me!" lyrics and sounds; rather something that was far less intrusive and much more an addition to the world around me rather than a subtraction. There was no yelling and screaming, cussing and cursing, not from Mr. Dalke's radio at least.

So, as I sit here tonight I remember a world and a time that maybe all these years later I'm finally realizing was a world that wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but was a world where an eight year old boy could feel something inside coming to life while trucks shifted gears out on US 12 & 16, when the wind was just right the "thump, thump" of a farmers' tractor out plowing fields, where robins searched for worms on greener than green lawns and Mr. Nat King Cole sang "Unforgettable."

Yes, I miss you Nat King Cole.