Hi neighbors. Is February gone already? Not quite gone I guess but certainly "door talking."

Mondays are spent listing on the calendar reminders of every thing you have to do, every place you have to be or take someone else, every job duty that must be completed, every household chore that needs attended to before the next weekend.

The days become red "Xs" that soon fill up a week. Then a month. A season comes and goes, years fall behind you like water in your wake.

The really odd part of it all is that looking back on various things you have or have not done through the years, events don't seem that long ago. When you do the math though, you realize decades have passed.

I remember when I viewed anyone over 30 as old! This sudden interest in time passages was inspired by the movie "Rent." While the movie itself was sometimes comic, but more often dark and depressing, the theme song of this movie counts down the number of seconds, minutes, days in a year. The point is there is only this day, this minute to live.

These point out that time means less than how you spend it.

I prefer musicals to be light and enthusiastic. After all, if you can get people dancing in the street to music that just explodes out of the air, why shouldn't you be happy? Maybe we should flood the air around the world with upbeat show tunes to encourage world peace. If people are singing and dancing they won't have the energy for war.

Actually, it's odd that there aren't more musicals being produced as movies. I thought that was the production of choice during depressions. Maybe we aren't in a depression, but something else with a more sensitive label.

As a child I thought it was magic the way adults could get people to stop sweeping their sidewalks and start dancing down the street. My brother and I often wondered where the music came from. We assumed there was supposed to be some explanation for music just popping out of the bushes in a movie. It was only later we figured out that musicals don't worry much about explaining where the music comes from. It's one of those things you're supposed to gain a "suspension of belief" for I guess.

One really good musical that came out not too long ago (well there goes that time slippage thingy again) was "Pete's Dragon" by Disney.

Like "Mary Poppins," there were animated characters acting alongside the real people.

Maybe we are all too indifferent to fantasy these days. Would today's audience believe a six year old curly-topped girl could help end the Civil War, stop an Indian attack on a fort, and find her wounded father in a military hospital? Do guys really fall in love because a girl sings to birds?

I hope we haven't outgrown musicals as a society. What is a society without music? Until the next time friends remember, memory and music make the passage of time a lot more tolerable.