One other point of "liberation

I'm wondering how I could've forgotten *this* point: I get to listen to MY MUSIC again.

XGF had a very strong belief that the she needed to hear *her* music -- and that my music passions were somehow lesser. For starters, she doesn't like jazz, and particularly not the ladies: Ella, Billie, Dinah Washington, Diana Krall and Betty Carter. But she also had something against Stevie Ray Vaughn and Van Morrison, not to mention Ani DiFranco and ... opera.

For the six years we lived together, XGF maintained "control" over the stereo system, which had a complicated 32-disc changer that she refused to show me how to use. (Once the long-departed rabbit chewed the buttons off the remote control, there was no way I was going to learn how to use it on my own. It remained a mystery.) It was in this way that she carried out a sort of ethnic cleansing against my music, only putting in a few discs of my stuff and then only when I begged. (She created a jazz "section" in the thing for me, but it never had much in it.)

The other night, for the first time in six years, I sat down and listened to Jan Garbarek's "Officium," which is a blending of religious chanting in latin with a sweet and sensuous saxaphone. (Very good music to play when having sex, actually. But XGF wouldn't know that because she *never* wanted music and sex together, which is something of a tragedy even though it wouldn't have remedied the other problems there.) Anyway, I wasn't having sex. Not ringing any gongs. I was just sitting in the window, people watching and enjoying a glass of something red and eating some olives and tomatoes and cheese and letting this music take me away, away, away....

And I said to myself: Ahhhh.... I get *my* music back. How sweet it is.

(And, yes, Dr. M, I'm aware that I could've been enjoying my music all along if I didn't drive a Flinstone mobile. But that is not my point. I'm talking ambiance in the *home,* dear. In *my* home.)

So that is one more thing to add to my Liberation List. It's right up there with having my own deoderant.