Spanish Lullabies

Notes, Nicknames, and the Songs That Carried Us

My husband and I were driving when “La Isla Bonita” came on the '80s radio station. The lyrics rolled off my tongue as if I’d just heard the song yesterday—my 10th-grade, music-obsessed brain had memorized every single word. I’d spent hours rewinding and replaying it on my cassette player until I had every line, including the Spanish ones, perfected.

The song was the second single from Madonna’s third studio album, True Blue. Its Latin-inspired sound—flamenco guitar, maracas, Latin percussion, and a few dreamy lines in Spanish—felt like magic. It was romantic and exotic, the kind of song that stirred something deep in my teenage heart—one tangled in hormones, daydreams, and the aching desire to be loved by my latest crush.

I reached over and turned the dial up.

Tropical the island breeze
All of nature wild and free
This is where I long to be
La isla bonita

I smiled and sang along, sweet visions of my sophomore year warming my heart. My friends. That slow, thrilling sense of coming into my own. Boys. Sixteen. Everything felt new, emotionally charged, and just a little bit golden.

And when the samba played
The sun would set so high
Ring through my ears and sting my eyes
Your Spanish lullaby

I closed my eyes and sang with Madonna, swaying slightly in the passenger seat:

I want to be where the sun warms the sky
When it's time for siesta, you can watch them go by
Beautiful faces, no cares in this world
Where a girl loves a boy, and a boy sometimes loves a girl

Sitting up straight, I opened my eyes and chuckled. “Wait… Where a boy sometimes loves a girl?” I giggled again, glancing at my husband, who looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

The thing is, the word sometimes isn’t in the lyrics. At no point does Madonna say sometimes in that song. And yet, here I was—38 years later—and it rolled off my tongue like second nature. Like it had always been part of the lyrics.

And just like that, I was back in time—with Melissa and Sheila, a couple of my best friends.

Head shots of Melissa, Michele, and Sheila wearing dark sunglasses, probably taken sometime around 1986 or ‘87.

Most of the closest friends I have today, I met in seventh grade. Sheila came from a two-room schoolhouse for grades 1-6 in a nearby rural town. I’d just moved from another small town in a neighboring county. We both met Melissa, who’d attended a private Catholic School until 7th grade. Along with a handful of other kids—girls and boys—we formed tight-knit friendships that have lasted for decades.¹

In 10th grade, the three of us were especially silly. We dealt with the angst and stress of high school with a fair amount of humor—always a great coping mechanism.

Long before cell phones and email, we stayed connected throughout our school day by writing notes to each other. We mapped each other’s seats in classrooms we didn’t share, slipping folded paper into the metal braces beneath the desks—knowing the intended recipient would find it in a later class. Words scrawled in loops and hearts, filled with silliness, laughter and sometimes: heartache. Sometimes lamenting boys who left, or never arrived.

These are my real notes from High School. Sheila saved them and gifted them to me for my 40th birthday. (Sheila became a librarian, go figure!) Don’t ask me to remember what “Turda Pungena Bombona” means. I do remember laughing hysterically at 5th period’s addition to our notes, though.

We often used our own made-up communication codes—swapping the first consonants of words, inventing new terms based on mnemonics, and mixing in phrases from our second-year Spanish classes for extra flair (and practice).

Nicknames were just as creative: our names spelled backwards, our Spanish class alter egos, or completely absurd inventions that somehow stuck.

“Hola, Elechim!” Sheila would holler from her locker as I passed by.

“Hasta luego, Aliehs!”

Melissa and I called each other “Jo” and “Stu”: short for Jo King and Stu Pid, monikers for the words we said so often that we’d decided they were our names for each other.

We thought we were hilarious—and we didn’t care what anyone else thought.

And then there was music. Music was everything. We didn’t know it then, of course, but it was doing more than giving us something to dance to at sleepovers or scribble into our shared notes—it was shaping us. Connecting us.

Photo by Bruno Guerrero on Unsplash

We turned to songs when we were heartbroken, overwhelmed, or just trying to make sense of the confusing feelings that came with growing up. A sad ballad could say what we couldn’t. A pop anthem could make us feel seen. Music gave voice to emotions we were still learning to name. And, as it turns out, science backs that up—music helps teenagers regulate and process emotions, and even eases anxiety and stress. We weren’t just being dramatic—we were doing what teens have always done: feeling everything deeply, and letting music carry some of the weight.

But music wasn’t just internal—it was social. Shared mix-tapes, dance party playlists, singing into hairbrushes in bedrooms—it was all connection. Music gave us an identity and a language we all spoke, even when we came from different places and different pasts. It helped solidify friendships, figure out who we were, and decide who want to be.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how important music was to our teenage lives—not just as a backdrop, but as a lifeline. For teenagers, music isn’t just entertainment; it’s emotional expression, it’s belonging, it’s a mirror.

And, we didn’t just listen to songs—we sometimes rewrote them and made them our own. Even if that meant slipping in an extra sometimes into “La Isla Bonita”, because sometimes, the one we longed for didn’t love us back.

And that’s the thing about music—it meets you where you are.

The world feels heavy right now. Really heavy. And sometimes, choosing joy—through creativity, music, or laughter—is its own kind of rebellion.

So if there’s a message in all of this, maybe it’s this:

Remember when you were young and unafraid of being silly.
Send a note to a friend.
Dance in your kitchen.
Rewrite some lyrics.
Sing too loudly.

And always—listen to the music.

Me, on my 16th birthday at Blue Lake, Washington, dancing on the deck of Melissa’s family cabin.

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1. More writing about my amazing friends:

The Smell of Cilantro

A Late Bloomer