Big Girls Don't Cry

Years ago, I tried to retrieve two of my favorite songs a decade after I started to listen to. But there were no clues about songs but being sung by one or two female singers. No names of the songs or the singers. This noon, I had lunch in a western diner and the music was on as usual. When I was about to finish lunch, a piece of familiar melody sounded . In no more than three seconds, I came to recognize it is one of two songs I looked for. I reacted so quickly as the song is one of my strong feeling recorders. I can tell immediately when and where I listened to the song repeatedly.

That was on a train from Rome to Venice on December 2007. The music was filled with my emotion at that time along all the way I played these 2 songs over and over again. I can't recall any views during the journey but the music restores the past feeling to me before long. In that time, I was in depression so was the music meant to be.

Funny thing, there is a story before getting on the train. We were in Rome railway station and going to take train to Venice. And a train to Venice was about to set out in a few minutes and there was a long line in front of the Ticket Center. We couldn't make it if we took a line. So I thought to myself maybe we could tell the conductor of the train that we could buy the ticket later in emergence just like the case in China, no extra charge. We rushed to the platform and tried to explain my inquiry to the conductor who was standing by the train. Unfortunately, the Italian conductor didn’t speak English. This was the first and sole time I couldn’t communicate with others in English in Europe. I figured he could understand but was unable to explain it to us. Anyway, we got on the train, the train departed, and the conductor charged us 100 Euro for the tickets with penalty of evading tickets. Gee, 100 Euro was worthy of RMB 1200 back then. I was failed by the previous experiences in China. From then on, I learned the lesson that you’ll never get on train without tickets, no matter what.

So the song brings me back to the old days. I see the younger me sitting by the window and looked outside. She looked all right but weeping inside. “I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption. ” What had happened hasn’t changed a bit. What I had felt hasn’t changed a bit. I just chose how to keep it in mind. I used to be back and forth and sometimes I was an idiot. “To think I did that, and may I say, not in a shy way, I did it in my way.” It made me who I am. So be it.

Hopefully I’ll get the second song someday.

*The quoted sentences are from the song My Way by Frank Sinatra.