Terryl's Troubles: The Looney Tunes of Life

One thing that stands out about my generation is that we grew up along with television. Like most baby boomers, I remember black and white television and having only 2 or 3 channels to watch on T.V. With so few choices, boomers have common childhood memories about favorite shows like I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island, and Looney Tunes. We knew all the theme songs then and we still remember them now.

As with television, the musical scores of many movies of our generation like Star Wars, Love Story, and Jaws, elicit an emotional response for us. Then and now, movies without a musical score are unusual. One of the most frightening films that I saw as a child was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 movie, The Birds, which had no musical score. One of my favorite films is Cast Away (2000, starring Tom Hanks), which has very little musical score. The absence of music in this film underscored the isolation that the main character felt while stranded on an island. Like the television theme songs, the musical scores to movies become a part of our cultural history.

Nearly all suspenseful movies use a soundtrack to build our feelings of anxiety and fear as we watch heroes and heroines enter frightening situations. We sit back in awe of how they saunter fearlessly into their homes, put away their belongings, and delay hitting the light switch. As an audience, we are in disbelief that the character does not realize that danger is eminent. Soundtracks in movies alert us to many things in life: when people are falling in love, when action is about to take place, when the moment is sad, and when things start to move towards the happy ending.

It’s a shame that life has no musical score. It would be nice to be able to rely on the theme of Jaws to play when there’s a shark in the ocean. Some romantic music swelling in the background to signal the development of true love would also be nice. But, alas, we’re destined to go through life with no warnings or signals; we just have to muddle through and figure it out as we go along.

On June 25, 2012, my husband and I were at the grocery store, tackling the chore of shopping in our usual divide-and-conquer way: James in one direction with a cart, I in the other, meeting in the middle at the cash register. We were almost finished when my phone played out the Looney Tunes ringtone, letting me know that my brother was calling. He told me that an ambulance had been called to take Mama to the hospital. I was not too terribly alarmed by his call because this was something that had been happening relatively often over the past couple of years. I told my brother that I would check out our groceries and head to the hospital to meet the family.

A few moments later at the cash register, my Looney Tunes ringtone went off again. This time it was my brother’s wife, telling me that Mama was not breathing.

If I had ever written a soundtrack for my life, I would never have chosen the theme music of Looney Tunes to be the last thing I heard before hearing the news of my mother’s death.

The story of our lives follows no script and has no predetermined soundtrack. We choose what we say and do, we react to situations, we make decisions (belabored or impulsive), but mostly, life just happens.

Looney Tunes may be more appropriate than I thought.