
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 27, 1993                   TAG: 9309290333
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BLITHE SPIRIT

I LIKE a little poetry before I go to bed. But the other night, while I was trying (yet again) to get all the way to the end of Shelley's "To a Skylark" before falling asleep, this moth got into bed with me.

I don't mean it just batted around the back of my neck or completed one of those awkward moth dive-bombs into my hair. I mean it got under the covers, between the sheets, down around my toes.

After some leapin' about and swattin', I managed to convince the moth that the lamp was a better hangout than my toes; and then, energized as I was, made it all the way through the poem to Shelley's "harmonious madness."

Not really worth the effort, if you ask me. Worse, thanks to this moth, I now can't get the poem's opening line - "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" - out of my head.

You know how this is, don't you: Some phrase or word or scrap of music starts playing in your head, and nothing you can do gets it out.

All day long, when you least expect it, when you need to be thinking on something else, something important, "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" or some little piece of somebody's jingle pops into your brain instead.

You start grabbing co-workers by the collar. "Listen," you demand. You hum your scrap of tune. "What is that? You know that?" You hum it again. "You know that! What is it? you insist.

You could be Marilyn Horne or Luciano Pavorotti and you'd still get the same blank stare from your co-worker. "Try listening to the radio. Try your CD player. Try asking someone else," your co-worker will finally say, "I don't know."

In my naive youth, I took to reading 19th century British novels. The more romantic the better.

In these novels, the word "intercourse" often appears. It doesn't mean what you think. It means "conversation." But I didn't know that then, and the word got stuck in my head.

I'd be walking along, thinking about something else, and "intercourse" would pop into my brain.

Finally, I asked Mama. "What does 'intercourse' mean?"

"I don't know," she said without hesitation. "I've never heard that word before."

Sure. Just like your co-workers can't recognize the "you deserve a break today" phrase from the McDonald's jingle when they hear it. They pretend like they don't know it so it won't get stuck in their heads.

But it does anyway. It plays over and over in their minds. Every step they take for the rest of the day seems marched to that rhythm: "You de-serve a break to-day! At McDo-nald's!"

Meanwhile, however, your brain is free and clear, sailing through complex problems once again. Hah! Hail to thee, blithe spirit.

\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB