Love Unquestioned

” Burt Bacharach died,” my husband read looking up from his ipad. With those words, I entered that time machine propelled by music. I recalled Dionne Warwick’s hit parade songs that provided the pop playlist of my middle-school though-high-school years. Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick played throughout.

As he began reading titles, we stopped to sing snippets summoned, melodies from raindrops to San Jose and beyond.

I remembered heading down to our nearby uptown mall, a diminutive version by today’s standards with Van Duyn’s candy store on one end and Youngland’s children’s wear on the other. Sandwiched in-between was a drugstore with a record counter where kids like me could buy 45 rpms for 99 cents each. And I bought a lot of them.

I’d head home, climb the three flights of stairs to my attic bedroom, and listen. When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid played at the local theater, I showed up more than once and knew every note and lyric. I’d hum “I Say a Little Prayer for You” as I vacuumed the carpet, these songs my soundtrack.

“The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” was first published in the New York Times in January, 2015. I read it then, bookmarked it, thought about the premise that,”mutual vulnerability fosters closeness,” and like so many of the thousands of links stored in Diigo since we began our relationship in 2010, forgot about it.

Last Thursday morning, the same morning they announced Burt Bacharach’s passing , the Times revisited the article in its Wellness newsletter; reminded, so did I. In the first set of questions, question number 5 asks: “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?” I could answer honestly, “less than five minutes ago.” Thank you, Burt and Dionne, for all the love.

“What the World Needs Now”