Feeling very squishy and femme today. On days like this I sort of have a "What the hell is going on here?" bewildered demeanor.

Don't get me wrong...I very much like being a female. We hold strange and mysterious powers --ask any man who's honest and he will agree-- that we as girls and women don't always or fully understand; we are simply acquainted with the fact that they can be really advantageous, in more than one sense (TO more than one sense?). I LOVE lipstick. I like heels. I dig frilly undies, even if my clothes sometimes belie that. My femininity doesn't define me, however, but maybe in the larger picture that is what makes me even more feminine.

So I got out of bed this morning all sappy and sentimental and painted my toenails navy blue. After my shave-them-legs-floss-them-teeth (fortunately not vice-versa) routine in the shower, I pulled on a straight-to-the-ankles flowy dress (move over, Ms. Nicks) and mixed up some French clay and peppermint oil and slathered it on my face. I leisurely munched on fruit cocktail while I watched this new program I flipped past on VH1 (LOOK, taking in ONE program in no way makes me the Mtv Networks' token bitch, okay?). It was called 'soundAffects' and it made me cry.

Maybe it was just the premise of the show, which I found wonderful and inventive---why they didn't do it ten years ago during the peak of their lameness, I dunno. Individuals are filmed discussing (and are subsequently spliced with) music that touched or moved or soothed or inflamed them at a pivotal or memorable point in their lives. So I cried, because some of the stuff that they shared was so raw and undiluted. I cried because I empathize and sympathize and I know the magnitude of meaning behind a song to its' creator. It may not intrinsically mean what the listener has extracted from it, but there is even more glory in that. The words and musical phrases generated by someone/a group of someones, relevant to one circumstance, have touched a whole other part of someone else in regard to another circumstance. That transcendence evokes awe in me. It always has. A vicious, gorgeous power that one is. Seductive, raw and poisonous.

Blah, blah, blah, this doesn't feel meaty, it smacks of verbose. Clean it up, child. Clean it up.

My grandfather and I had nothing in common, or so I thought until my mid-twenties. Hell, he and I didn't even have a civil multisyllabic conversation until I was 20 years old. Even then, we were just being snide about someone else, but it was something, you know? He had 38 grandkids and 18 great-grandchildren; at the time I was carrying what would be the 19th before he died. Out of all of those, I was his least favorite (or running a real close second) and one of my sisters was his favorite. I didn't really care, I don't guess. Life has a way of evening things out in other areas.

BUT, I remember being astonished at our similarities after his death, both physical and spiritual. We share these traits: a disdain of people with a love of being in their midst, tall stature, fierce determination to meet our ends with purpose, a love of the prosaic, a hearty distemperate strong will, pure voices and an unfailing love of song. Especially the latter.

I used to curl up at his feet on the battered front porch when I was little and listen to him rock and sing for hours upon hours. I would watch his demeanor, my pigtailed head upturned, and I would bask in the depth of his rich bass voice. Sometimes the hand holding the hymnal would shake with the vigor of restraining his sound within the subtle pianissimos and the farm-sharpened tendons in them would leap out as he soared loudly largo, bent on holding the phrase. In retrospect, he was larger-than-life and I loved him immensely. I finally realized that it was not my father that had shaped my misguided image of what a man should be, as much as I adored my dad. Daddy is crisp and clean and cool, the most even person I know. Papaw was loud and gruff and passive-aggressive to a fault. I pursued his likeness in ill-natured relationships for the longest before I finally got it: Not everyone with whom you would fall in love is the person you were meant to be with.

So there you have it, I am the girliest of girls today and I am reflective to boot. Days like these the world should be put on hold. Days like these should be reserved for long, indulgent love-making and lemonade drinking and lying under rustly trees with an old gospel song running a loop through the brain.