Item: 1 CD - A Collection of Hits, by Kathy Mattea

If there's an antidote to feeling like I belong in Los Angeles, it's country music.  Not all country music - far from it - just some.  It's only certain sounds, like a slow twang or a hollow slide, or certain songs that can stir up whatever repressed longings I suddenly realize I have.

On this album, the song that does it is "Love at the Five and Dime."  The song is about a couple named Rita and Eddie, and how they meet at a Woolworth store and get married, but that isn't the point.  The point is that it's sweet and lonesome at the same time, and neither ever really takes over the other.  The point is that it seems to be about me, even though it's not. 

It's not even that I've taken the appealing aspects of the world evoked in country music and built them up as real.  Country music is in a way a story about itself.  Instead, these traces of sound I've mentioned remind me of places I have been that are real.  I'm swallowed up by a place that is not clean or new, that is not a set built to look down-home but actually is what it seems to be, as someone's cowboy boots echo across the floor, and the tires of a pickup truck roll over gravel.

I want to be in that place.  The parts of me that thrive in Los Angeles - they're there, for sure, but I'm not always certain that they're the most essential parts.