Maranda Cromwell's Blog

I firmly believe that music is not something you own, though it is something you can cultivate. Like an animal, you can train it and mold it to a certain style of life, but you can never look God or the Universe in the face and say, “This thing is mine.” In the same way, music isn’t owned. It’s created and it is shared. By discovering, selecting, collating, and categorizing our music collections, we are more like gardeners than collectors.
And as we tend to our music garden and it grows, it begins to show us things. During all its time on your phone, computer, CD collection, or on your various music listening apps or accounts, it has observed you. The same way shoes break-in, learning to surround your feet’s unique shape, your music starts to learn who you are. It is a give and take arrangement. One day, you finally hear that obscure lyric to a song you’ve loved for years. Then, a song plays right as you were thinking of putting it on to get it out of your head. On the flip side, your music is right there with you. Right as a bug hits your windshield on a road trip, the song lands on a perfect ping, surrounded by silence, so that bug’s life felt more poignant than the hundreds of others smearing the windshield. It may make you laugh or pause to consider the song differently. No listen-through is the same, especially the more your music listens to you.
And music is a very good listener.
Switching things to a larger scale: On the slow decline of a massive life climax—a breakup, a move, a death, whatever—it always feels like your emotions are full to the brim. They’re pressed against the thin film of life so it can intimately feel every brush, every stab, every bump on the road. You are essentially naked. As you drive in your car, totally plugged into the pattern of red lights in front of you and yellow lights blinding your peripherals, white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel, a song plays. It could just be your current state of mind or this particular red light or any combination of sensual correlations, but the song stops you. It pulls your heart up by its boot straps and it opens your eyes. The lyrics pour into you. And the silly thing is, you’ve heard this song before. Your music player will tell you you’ve heard it 300 times, not even counting the times you’ve heard it on the radio, on a CD, on your iPod, in a bar. This time is the time that matters. Because all those times you’ve listened to that song, it was also listening to you. It was paying attention when you skipped it, when you played it over again, when you searched for it in your library or on YouTube. It was listening, and so it knows you now. And it knew exactly when you should hear it again—when you needed to hear it again.
Your cultivation of things you love will one day heal you, you just have to let it happen.

I found the skull at a Value Village and I thought I needed to rescue it. I only had thirty dollars left, or so, and I spent it all on that busted up skull with barely any teeth. All the upper fronts, all the jagged molars chipped and some missing, the canines all lined with cracks and fractures that went down to the root. Something that looked a lot like orange crayon stained its cheekbone. The skull was in disrepair and was definitely not worth the rest of my money, my frugal side insisted. I had a perfectly good coyote skull at home, why did I need this thing? But it was something else. The symmetry of this skull spoke to me. Comparing this mystery canine to my coyote, I drew a few observations. While Coyote is a shrewd arrow shape, all fluff in life and no form, this one was substantial. Notably wider, shorter, but not cartoonish. There was still some sort of divine biology dictating its shape, some sort of higher function. I’m sure if it had all its fangs, they would crisscross just like Coyote. And just like Coyote, its nasal bones, the maze of every skull, the intricacies akin to coral reefs and lichen growth and neurons firing, were pristine and plentiful. Something had helped this canine along. It wasn’t a wild animal, fighting to pass genes or continue its legacy, this was a dog. This was man’s friend of 13,000 years. And now it was my friend: my friend of $25.99 plus sales tax.
Sometimes I like to look at it closely, very closely, so that the pores in the bones become as prominent as sponges. I can see how the bones grew as the dog aged. Bones didn’t just swell like lungs, shapeless and soft, but they crawl. They overlap like the earth’s crust, grinding and pushing and weaving shapes into one another. Their plates and spongey surface, like pumice, gently creeps against the flesh, willing vein and nerve along with it. A member of an animal bones Facebook group made the observation this was a young dog, due to the unfused nasal bones. A puppy. Or probably more like an adolescent—young enough to have that puppy exuberance, but old enough to allow nature to leave behind a noble shape. Even though he was wrapped in plastic with a price tag in a thrift store, he went to a home that will continue to love and admire him as much as if he were still alive. Cracks, chips, broken enamel, and unfused nasal bones—this puppy got so close. But he can still go so far.