Apple Commercial Offers an Honest Feel Good

Lately, several television commercials have been enjoyable. Yes, enjoyable. They may be better than some of the shows they bookend.

One is special. (You guys with Tivo miss this stuff.)

Actually, I had to watch a couple of times specifically to find out whose ad it was, which seems to be a new trend. This one shows the Apple logo for several seconds at the end.

There's this woman singing a song. "We're Living a Life of Dreams." It's really great. Happy, lilting and poignant, all at the same time. It's in a commercial on tv. You can also Google it and there's a YouTube version.

In the ad, various parents are shown busily taking care of babies, toddlers, preschoolers in a seamless blend of scenes. You do hear the babies screech a time or two. There's the little blonde girl with the happy smile who is stopped in the nick of time as she is inserting a Q-tip in her ear (and I swear I have seen that footage somewhere.) The only spoken audio is the couple in the car consulting a diagram on a phone as one says, "he's got to be here somewhere," and the next frame shows a dog in the shadowed foreground, ears pricked, as a car stops down the street, the door opens, and the dog is off like a shot to the car. There is a woman jogging slower and slower as she pushes twins in a stroller up the hill, the music slowing, too. "Dreams...dreams....dreams." The last frame is this four-year-old who accidentally turns the hose on his daddy working in the garden, and the delighted, innocent smile of that boy as the screen fades to the Apple logo. It's humorous. And it plucks a memory chord, at one end or the other. Probably both.

It is about the matter-of-fact loving of children we rear and our dreams for them and for ourselves, and it isn't at all sentimental, but it isn't cynical, either. These people are just doing what needs doing, and the lilting, tender song reminds us, "We're living a life of dreams." Indeed.

So, where did the song come from? That's easy, I googled the title. I discovered the song was written and performed by Julie Doiron, 42, a pretty well-known Arcadian songwriter and performer in Canada, where she lives and was born. Apple has bought the song from her and you can get it for your ring-tone.

Would the rest of you have to do the same thing to know this? Probably not. Do you understand something I don't know? Very probably. If this is the way it works for everyone, I don't understand that, either. Subtle sells?

If I had something to download to, I would download this. It reminds me, as I scrub a filthy grill for a cookout, or take the time and patience to work with someone else, any age, really, that what always I am doing is the prep work for what comes after--dreams reached. A little dream of a happy outcome.

I'll take that. I have done so. I just realized I'm smiling as I write this down.

We do the scut, sweat, cuss, repair, hurt, cry, see our children cry, and we despair. There's that little laugh that goes with the despair as we grab a loved one anyway and just hold on.

And at the very bottom of it, if we look, so often what is left is...we're living a life of dreams. And the dreams carry us.