February 5, 2014

Your post is going to be about a significant (or insignificant) memory where music plays a role. There are lots of directions you could go with this. I'll list a few topics that I could write about. My brother was six years younger than me and couldn't pronounce the "sh" sound. He always replaced it with a "t." Thus shoes became tues and our chevy was a tevy. He went through a phase (it lasted years actually) where he would do anything we asked him to. Spit at the birds, dance, whatever. At this point in his life singing was what we asked him to do the most. His sweet little baby voice singing "you can't be twenty on tugar mountain" is a really vivid memory for me. While my mother was the Neil Young fan in our house, he had been introduced to the song by my father. We all had.

Dad didn't love music with the same exuberance as my mother. She was a singer in a local band and sang constantly. In the grocery store she hummed, unless there was a song playing that she knew, then she belted it out. People would tell her she had a lovely voice. I would always watch these conversations from a distance. As soon as I was old enough to wander on my own I did. My mom would sing Elton John, Billy Joel, and Annie Lennox all with the same gusto and I wanted none of it, at least outwardly. On the inside I think I was a bit jealous of the fact that she could more than carry a tune and she and the rest of my siblings could have formed an even more youthful Partridge Family band. Mom would sing, Uriah would play the trumpet, Annah would play guitar, and Isaiah would just hang out on the drums or whatever.