I’ve got to say it. I like eating at a certain restaurant in Logansport, but it has some of the lousiest music to listen to that I have ever heard. It would scare rats away. I have eaten where they have dinner music, and it’s nice. Listening to soft music while eating is supposed to help your digestion.

Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but the side dish of noise they serve with your meal at this restaurant sucks rope. It’s bad enough to have to listen to such a racket when eating, but they play it loud.

They could at least let us talk while eating without having to shout. I think I’ll start wearing earplugs; maybe they’ll take the hint.

Perhaps they don’t have soft music anymore, I don’t know, but if they haven’t, why don’t they just turn the blasted stuff off.

I know this article will probably ruffle the feathers of the young people, but I feel sorry for them that they have never gathered around the piano as their mother played songs such as “Peggy O’Neil,” “Hold Me,” “My Happiness,” “The One Rose” and hundreds of other beautiful old songs while they all harmonized as they sang the night away. Perhaps we were lucky to be poor, although that sounds odd, but with the piano being the only entertainment, us old people have stored away in our memories the riches of those old songs with their lyrics full of sentiment and love, and their beautiful melodies.

How good it is to be able in quiet times to recall them and hum them softly to ourselves. They make us rich indeed.

I have to ask myself how we came to lose something that was so good. Was it just a form of rebellion against parents? I can remember when my children bought Beatles records on the sly, and to tell you the truth, the Beatles don’t sound too bad today compared to some of the rest of it, but in our hearts us old people will always prefer “our” music. There is just something inside of us that rebels against what they call music today. I guess we refuse to accept screaming a few words into the microphone over and over as being music. The truth is all of us, young and old alike, have lost something valuable.

If you look up the meaning of music in the dictionary, you will find it reads something like this: The art of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony and expression of emotion. That’s how the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus defines music. I defy you to fit most of what comes out of the radio today into that meaning. I guess it must be entertainment, because the young people like it, but it is certainly not music. Do they dance to it? Sure they do, and I don’t know how much they enjoy it, but holding my Janie closely as we skate danced, or waltzed, or did a slow foxtrot while I looked into those big blue eyes that loved me had to be far superior to the dancing they do today.

The real problem is that what our old songs brought to us, the beautiful melodies, the sentimental lyrics and the love aren’t all we have lost, the deep feelings and commitment to one another seem

to have disappeared along with the music. It’s good to remember that night Janie and I decided to get married. We had gone through the steps of courtship, we had danced to the beautiful music and we knew that marriage wasn’t fun and games, but we wanted each other. We looked past the initial thrill; we looked far into the future. We looked at building a home together, raising children together and the struggle we knew it would be. Our commitment was not to the first glorious part of it, our commitment was to all of it and we knew we would make it.

Did the music do it for us? No, of course not. The way we were raised with responsibilities to meet every day and the discipline that was applied to us in our daily lives is what did it for us. We had no thought of turning back, only the thought of moving past each obstacle so we could share our love together.

The music was our bonus for living in a time that us old people agree was the best time ever. It was a time of gentleness, a time of sentimentality, a time when we learned to appreciate the small things, and a time to learn that the love we held for one another was the most important thing we would ever experience. But the beautiful music was such a wonderful, priceless possession for each one of us who lived in that time. It was, by definition, real music.

• Joe Bowyer is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com.