“How Things Work In My World” by Christine Lorraine Morgan, May 5, 2021

I had heard the songs “Itchycoo Park” by Small Faces and “Lonely Days” by the Bee Gees playing constantly in my head during a two-week hospitalization while undergoing open heart surgery. They played so frequently in my mind’s stereo that it was almost annoying.

Two nights after I returned home, oddly enough, I heard the song “Itchycoo Park” playing in the kitchen! What a coincidence! I dashed as fast as I could (all things considered) and observed my husband Michael seated at his computer. He was getting ready to shut the computer down, take our dogs out, and go to bed. This was about 11 p.m.

I studied him there, tuned in to this song 55-year-old tune out of the blue. “What prompted you to listen to this particular song?” I asked.

He shrugged and replied, “I don’t know. It just came up on my social media timeline.”

I then explained how it had haunted me the entire time I was in the hospital.

A couple minutes later I got up to leave the kitchen and go back to the other computer, down the hall in the office, but stopped to put away a package of drink mix sitting on the counter. When I picked it up, it was hot to the touch!

I looked around, trying to figure out why a box of True Lemon might be noticeably warm. That’s when I noticed that there was still a low flame visible on the gas stove’s front burner, near a pile of plastic bags which were also warm by that point. It had been on since dinner a couple hours earlier.

That’s the exact moment when I knew why that song “Itchycoo Park” played in my head for two weeks of hospitalization…It was so we could avoid an after-bedtime kitchen fire.

I thanked the Heavens because Good Karma had struck our lives, using a very cool old song as its mellifluous vehicle.

Here’s a link to “Itchycoo Park” if anyone would like to have a listen…