WHEN YOU WISH...

 When you wish….

I was in the kitchen preparing supper. The classical music station was playing in the background. They played a quite beautiful rendition of Disney’s theme song, “When you wish upon a star”, written for  the movie Pinocchio. I was immediately taken back to my childhood ,as memories of  early television watching, and events of time past, came flooding back. Strange, how that happens, how a song, a piece of music, can send you back in time to events, although not forgotten, have been filed away in some dusty corner of your mind. I remembered that we always looked forward to Sunday, back in the time when the evening meal, especially on Sundays, would be eaten on TV trays, while watching Disney.  It would be years before I stopped wishing on stars, before becoming hardened to life’s disappointments, and realizing that wishing didn’t make anything come true. Then, as quickly as one memory appeared, another took it’s place. I saw with my mind’s eye a small single storied house, white with a black roof, a garden at the side, and then I saw my great aunt Vera, and my great uncle Fred, but just for a moment, the moment before I found myself in their living room leafing through old National Geographic magazines, or was it Life magazines? I don’t know as the image was only there for a moment, then it was gone, and I saw  Walter Cronkite reading the news on the old black and white TV ,and finishing with “That’s the way it is”, only to be replaced with a nature program. As quickly as these thoughts, and images appeared they disappeared, and moments later my mind wandered to a dirt road that led from the main road near to my Uncle Fred’s, down through the bush to the Midland Harbour shore, and there was my Great Grandparents, standing on the deck of their cottage where they spent most of their live’s living without running water, nor electricity. I remembered the outhouse, the chicken coop, and their fierce, tawny coloured, no name, tom cat, with its half ear, torn off in some territorial fight during one of its summer sojourns. My mind, just for a second saw the interior of their cottage home, replaced in an instant by my standing on the rickety wooden dock after running down the poison ivy lined path , down to the shore. I found myself lying on the dock peering into the water at a Rock Bass that always refused to bite my hook. And then, the music stopped and I was back in the kitchen. It was time for supper. Funny how the mind works……