Stacey's Blog

My husband told me that I remind him of a jukebox.  He says that he can say a few words to me and voila!  My brain somehow pulls out a song that goes along with the sentence or words he just said out loud.  Well, what does he expect?  Music has always been a part of my life.  Usually when folks refer to something that has “always” been a part of their life they really mean since they were kids or teens our young adults.  Not me.  Music has REALLY been a part of me since I was conceived.

My mother told me that when I was in her belly she would listen to the fairly new sounds of rock and roll while she was driving and when she was cleaning the house or cooking in the kitchen she would add classical music or the Latin sounds to her musical tastes.  I can picture her now: Her belly swollen with me inside, she’s fixing my dad his favorite dinner while the sounds of Bobby Darin singing, “Mack The Knife,” the Platters singing, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” or Mozart waft through the air, making their debut into my newly-forming brain.

When I was five or six we lived in Reseda and my parents had a den attached to the back of the house. They would play their 45’s or 78’s or their 8-track tapes after they thought us kids were asleep.  I remember a few nights when I would hear the music coming from the back part of the house and on the auspice of pretending that I was thirsty or had a bad dream, I wandered into the den and loitered as long as I could before I was marched back into the bedroom I shared with my younger sister.

In the late 60’s, early 70’s my mother fell in love with Sergio Mendez and Brazil ’66 and Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass. Because of that I was probably the only kid at Vanalden Elementary School in Reseda who knew all the words to “The Look Of Love,” “Scarborough Fair,” and “This Guy’s In Love With You.”

When I was about nine or 10 my folks took us camping to the Kern River and that is when I was introduced to a real jukebox. Tired of hot dogs roasting over and open fire, my mom suggested that we go to town one night to eat.  We walked into the restaurant and right next to the front door was a jukebox. I may have mentioned in a previous column that I played “I’m Henry the Eighth” and “What’s New Pussycat” over and over again until dad stopped handing out the nickels but I do remember asking for a record player when we got back home.  For my 11^th birthday I got a 45-player along with a few 45’s. I know I had an entire collection by the time I was in my teens but the ones I remember playing over and over at home were songs by Led Zeppelin and Carly Simon. The Raiders, The Rolling Stones and John Denver were also a part of my music library.

I buried a Fleetwood Mac Album in the time capsule at my high school. I sang with bands in college, promoted bands in college, and have been working in the music industry since 1984 and now I work at a radio station.  So yes, I have had music around me my entire life and because of that, I know a whole lotta songs.

So when I overheard my husband telling some friends of ours that he was married to a walking, talking and breathing jukebox, I had to chuckle. Just to prove it one of the friends said a few words and of course, I found a song that went with the words.  It just popped into my head.

There is, however, a big difference between me and a jukebox.  In order to listen to music coming from a jukebox you have to feed it money.  If I sing something out-of-the-blue I don’t have to be fed anything, you just have to throw a few words in my direction and maybe I’ll come up with a song. Another difference between me and a jukebox is that I don’t pick the songs, the songs pick me.

Maybe that comment from my husband was his way of saying that by marrying me he got more than he bargained for. Not only is he married to a walking iPod but he married into menopause and that, my dear readers, will be an entirely different column.

I remember the first time my mother referred to my ‘baby fat.’ She had picked me up from Portola Junior High School in Tarzana and we had just turned left onto the street I grew up on in Encino, California. I was telling her that I was tired of the little bulge of lower belly fat that I had been carrying around with me since I was a baby. She told me I would lose the baby fat “any time now” and because I was going through puberty my body was changing.

“You told me when I was eight that I would lose my baby fat when I was ten,” I reminded her.

“You’re just a late bloomer. You’ll appreciate it when you’re my age,” she replied.

I’m pretty sure the main reason for my moment of self-image anxiety was because it was my first year of junior high school and I probably noticed all the cute, perky popular girls who were stick thin. I don’t remember exactly what prompted me to question my baby fat back then but I’m sure it had to do with all the issues a twelve year old girl has to deal with. Braces, glasses, a face ravaged by acne…why not throw stubborn baby fat into the mix?

By the time I made it into my first year of high school my acne went away and my braces had been removed. I still wore glasses and I still had the stubborn lump of baby fat on the front, lower part of my belly. I played volleyball. I rode horses. I even tried to stop eating French fries but no matter what, the ‘baby fat’ stayed attached to my insides in the same way that crazy glue sticks to pretty much anything.

The ‘baby fat’ I had been carrying around with me much like the blanket Linus from Peanuts always carried around with him just didn’t bulge. When I look back through pictures from my last year in high school and some during my first few years of college it is obvious I carried around my ‘baby fat’ right through high school graduation and into my days tromping around the redwood trees in northern California. Eventually I conceived my first born so in addition to the “baby fat” I had lived with for 27-plus years, I got baby and I got fat.

It was almost as if the minute Alexander was more than just a figment of my imagination, all bets were off with respect to my finally reaching the point in my life when all ‘baby fat’ would finally be shed.  I had listened to my mom for years telling me I was a late bloomer and I thought 27 was just as good an age as any for the ‘baby fat” to finally dissolve and go someplace else.

Didn’t happen.

For the next three years or so I was either pregnant or nursing. During that time I not only continued to carry around the ‘baby fat’ I had been born with but added on even more baby fat as a result from having babies. Two of them. Back to back. What was I thinking?  Wait, never mind. I know what I was thinking. It went something like this: “If I ever have a kid I’m going to have another one right away so I can have them close together and then get my tubes tied and be done with it.”   That’s what I was thinking.

Fast forward to now. I’ve long since given up the idea that I will ever be one of those women who grew out of her “baby fat.”  I will never have a flat stomach like Wendy Dwyer Carter. As a matter of fact, I’m kind of glad that that little bump in my lower belly never really went away. I needed that extra roll to help me carry things. When the kids were little they fit perfectly over my little belly bulge. It acted as a ledge so I could actually carry both of them at the same time.

When I would bring home a big box of pizza the edge of the pizza box rested comfortably on my belly ledge as I carried it through the door. I could pile groceries on top of the pizza box and it wouldn’t budge because it was resting on my bulge. Anything that I needed to carry which had to be balanced on my body was a piece of cake because I had the built-in belly ledge to help me out.

And now I have the best reason of all for not wanting to get rid of the belly ledge: The Granddaughter.

My belly shelf is once again being put to good use.