Greetings

Choosing a name for a blog is harder than you might think it would be. Or at least for me it was. I started blogging because a website that I was already using provided an easy publishing medium. But, here I am about a year and 100 posts into the making of my blog, for what it’s worth, and I really want to start publishing it in a place that is a little bit less…advertiz-y, and perhaps a little more accessible. The way it is now, because they don’t have access to the website I use, I’ve been spamming my family about three days a week when, whether they want to receive it or not, I email my thoughts for the day to my mom, my dad, both sisters, two nieces and a nephew. At times, I’d thought it would have been nice to share my thoughts with cousins, aunts, uncles and friends, but I never really thought it right to email the day’s blog post to them without warning, explanation or solicitation. So, the aim here is to put my blog in a place where people can look at it when they want to, without it being invasive or inconvenient or even presumptuous on my part, I hope.

So, back to the name. Google has this blog service, here it is, you’re seeing it now with your own eyes. In order to set it up, you have to choose a blog title, and along with it, you pick a url. You know, like http://thisismyblog.blogger.com. I wanted to pick a title that was easy to remember, but without being too bland or boring or cliche. I wanted it to be personal while being somewhat vague as to my identity, meaningful without being too specific, and maybe at the same time convey part of the purpose of writing the blog in the first place. For me, blogging is a way of connecting myself to my family. My parents are busy working their way through retirement, my siblings and I are all getting older, melting into our jobs, our kids and our grandkids. And, I… well, I live a thousand miles away from all of them. By choice. And, I must say that I couldn’t imagine having chosen life any other way. Right here, right now, in this city, in this house, in this kitchen, in Central Virginia, I couldn’t imagine being as contented, as comfortable, or as forward-thinking in my goals by living anywhere else. For the moment, at least…

Living far away doesn’t mean that I don’t love my family or want to be part of their lives, or care about what’s eating at them today, or want to see the boogers in my baby niece’s nose. All of those things are true. In some ways, the price I pay for making this choice of living so far away is that I miss all of those things. And, also, other people miss me and the boogers in my nose. I worry, too, that they don’t really know me. That they don’t know what the streets that I walk on look like, or how the sky looks on a Labor Day Monday in my town, or what makes my heart beat, or why I’m OK waking up in my own skin every morning. So, I blog mostly because I want my family to reciprocate - to hear (and see through pictures) what’s going on in their lives, but also so that they’ll understand me a little better. I want assorted relatives to stop asking me “When are you coming home?” because they finally get that I already am home. Right here. Right now. In this house. In this kitchen. In Central Virginia.

Haha. So, back to the name, again. My sister wrote to me a week or so ago and said, oh how I love your blogs, please keep ‘em coming. To which, I wrote back to say that blogging is “how I try to keep the strings tight between us.” And, I thought that summed it up pretty well. So, I started thinking… heartstrings.blogger.com? No. Too cheesy. What about tightstrings.blogger.com? No, doesn’t give the right image. Then, I thought, heck, I’d better google my ideas, just to make sure that there aren’t any crude connotations that I hadn’t thought of yet. So, I googled “heart strings,” “tight strings,” and a few others. And, in my searching a website popped up that was teaching kids about musical instruments, and on this site, a page that encouraged kids to “Meet the String Family of Instruments.” How cute. The first line on that page said:

The vibrating objects that are the source of sound in this family are strings.

What a cool line, I thought. Unusual grammar, perhaps, but cool, especially when taken slightly out of context. And apropos to my earlier email comment to my sister about wanting to keep the strings tight between us. Reading that line, I imagine all of us – my parents, my brother and sisters, their kids, the whole darn family – just sitting around like cartooned String characters with cheesy cartooned grins, vibrating away, creating sounds, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes going out of key, some of us bass notes, some of us tenors, some of us sopranos, sometimes playing with harmonics, sometimes strumming along with each other, sometimes being finger-picked individually, and always always vibrating together, making music that is beautiful and unique to our family. Our ever-growing, eternally connected family.

So, here it is http://sourceofsound.blogspot.com