Me, a brown eyed girl

I feel like I'm in Groundhog's Day. Every day in the car for several days now, I have heard the same song playing on a variety of stations. Only it's not "I Got You, Babe" by Sonny and Cher. It's Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl".

It was one of my favorite songs when I was a little girl. My sisters both had blue eyes, exotic. I was the plain brown-eyed one. That song made me think it was special, not boring, to have eyes the color of freshly turned soil.

My siblings teased me about that song. I used to tattle on them for watching any inappropriate television or listening to suggestive music, but here I was, the baby, listening to a song that said, "Sometimes I'm overcome thinking about....making love in the green grass."

One time, indignant at their teasing as I danced around to my happy song, I stopped and shouted at them, "Making love means hugging and kissing, that's all!" Leave it to me, a young devourer of classic literature with archaic language to make such an argument about a song written in the 1960s.

They all smirked back at me, so I turned to my dad for backup, "Isn't that right, Daddy?"

My dad smiled and said, "You're right, Hoodoo." Then he told the older kids to stop teasing me about my favorite song.

I don't hear that song much at all anymore, so I guess the universe has been trying to tell me something this past week with repeated emphasis. What could it be? Well, considering that I have not slept at all well this week and am very mad about it; that I have allowed my calamitous thoughts to attack my brain and pillage my reason for over a month now, an auto-thought disorder; that I am beating myself up today for forgetting a second night in a row, despite lying awake until almost midnight, to reward my son for his lost tooth, the benevolent message might go something like this:

Be happy. Be happy, for crying out loud! 

BE happy, you brown-eyed girl.