1:43 a.m. I've been running around like a crazy woman all day as I prepare for some company tomorrow. I had decided, against my better judgment, to make deviled eggs. This journal entry would have been coherent, and I would have been in bed by now, were it not for the durn deviled eggs.

And yet, this entry, by golly, must be about music and the memories it evokes. Somehow, I'm going to have to tie it all together because my time tomorrow will be limited and tomorrow is also June 1, which means the whole new design roll-out, which I've already done, but which I will have to change if I don't do an entry on music and its memories.

All will be resolved.

While I was making the deviled eggs, I thought more than once that I might turn on some music to make the time pass faster. Waiting for the water to boil, timing them, waiting some more for them to cool down, fracturing their shells on the metal sink rim, and then peeling them under running water ...

I live a very quiet life and music really complicates things. The egg construction takes a certain amount of concentration, and songs always take me so far out of myself I'm likely not to come back in time to time the eggs. So I keep the radio turned off and the turntable still.

But there used to be a time when I listened to WIBG in Philadelphia endlessly, and my life had a soundtrack. While my mother was listening to Perry Como and Madame Butterfly, my radio upstairs played Lloyd Price and Sam Cooke and the Everly Brothers. I was in love with music, in thrall to harmony and rhythm, inebriated with rock and roll. I believed in all the lyrics. I lived the songs I listened to.

That was then. Since then, I've gone and gotten myself happily married and settled and now most of the lyrics in most of the songs no longer speak to me. The longing is gone. There are no teardrops and heartache and wishing I were someplace else tonight. I am happy to stand at my kitchen sink, cracking eggs. No song speaks to this.

The last (and only other) time I attempted to construct deviled eggs was when I was first married for the first time. Everything was a shock to me back then. No more little home town. No more friends and family. No more cushy job. No more boyfriends. It was very hard to turn off the last switch and close the door.

I had spent my entire dating life comparison shopping, never settling for long, always moving on to what the new new new season had to offer. The music spoke to me, and I listened. Suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, it was forever that I was looking at. The unscaleable sheer glass wall of forever and a day. Music sounded different on this, the kitchen side of the wall.

Thus, the eggs.

Back then, I didn't know how to cut them properly and they rocked and they rolled and they slithered and spilled over. Today, I did it right. They sit tight and look pretty good. A little bland, perhaps. A little spice might be nice.

I hate to admit it, but maybe I'm ready for jazz.