When my first-born son Tristan was three months old, I ended maternity leave and returned to work. My son proceeded to sleep all day at daycare and stay up most of each night. This went on for six months. I became a zombie, beyond exhausted and barely functioning at work.
Five months into this ordeal, as I was driving Tristan to daycare, the song “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from the movie Oklahoma started playing in my head. On and on it played, like a broken record. The phrase that stuck the most was “Everything’s going my way.”
Not only had I not thought of that movie in years, but it seemed nothing in my life was going my way. Why, of all things, was my frazzled brain doing this?
Within a month, however, I was able to leave my job and take most of my work home with me so that I could raise Tristan.
Nineteen years later, my precious son died of a heroin overdose on June 5 or 6, 2015.
Since early May this year, I have had a song repeatedly playing in my head, a song I had not thought of in years: “On the Street Where You Live” from the movie My Fair Lady. The phrases that repeated themselves daily were “All at once am I several stories high, knowing I’m on the street where you live… there’s no where else on Earth that I would rather be.” (Lyricist: Alan Jay Lerner).
Why? I had no context, no idea what was being communicated to me.
Today is June 5, ten years after the last day Tristan walked the Earth … The song had been playing like a broken record in my brain for a month …
Bam. It finally hit me:
That was Tristan singing to me.
There’s no where else on Earth that he would rather be than on the street where I live…