I will never forget the first time I watched The Sound of Music. Our “Fraulein Maria’s” name was Melissa and she took us to the drive-in. She knew it would be a late night so we had our pajamas on and a bag of snacks and we wrapped ourselves in blankets and sat on the hood of her car.
I remember my brother falling asleep right around the wedding scene in the movie and I was as incensed as any 10 year old can be. How could he sleep at a time like this? This is life changing, magical, and the hills are alive. WAKE UP! As he slumbered, my eyes were locked on the big screen and the landscapes from another time and place that were sprawling before me.
Over the next 30 years, I watched the movie at least 100 times, learning every song, snapping at my husband and sons to wake up, just as I had barked at my brother so many years before.
This week, as I pedaled around Salzburg, humming Do-Re-Mi with my daughter, I felt like I was dreaming. We pedaled past Mirabell Gardens and Pegasus Fountain, Leopoldskron Palace, Hellbrunn Palace, and the Nonnberg Convent. As the scenes from the movie flashed through my mind, and my heart belted out each line from every song, I realized just how much I had learned from Fraulein Maria:
When the dog bites, when the bee stings when I’m feeling sad I simply remember my favorite things and then I don’t feel so bad.
Climb every mountain, search high and low, follow every byway, every path you know.Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, ‘till you find your dream.
I’ve always longed for adventure to do the things I’ve never dared and here I’m facing adventure then why am I so scared. I have confidence in confidence alone. Besides which you see I have confidence in me!
It dawned on me as we were experiencing this remarkable city that childhood is a fertile time for wild imagination, idea generating and crafting limitless fantasies. This journey has shown me repeatedly that the time I spent daydreaming as a child, was so much more than that – it is the reason I am standing here today, on the Fräulein Maria Bicycle Tour, with the knowledge that,
Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could. So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.
