Those damn tears sneak up on me at the most inopportune times! This morning on the subway I was flipping around on my iPod and decided on "American Pie" by Don McLean.
Big mistake. Huge.
There is not a song in existance that brings back more memories of my childhood than this one does.
It pains me to even say how perfectly idyllic my childhood was. Mostly because saying it out loud limits me in my attempts to blame my adult issues on my past. But it was. Idyllic.
Even though my parents divorced when I was 5, my mom remarried and we moved from Ohio to Long Island, NY, I had a wonderful life. Sure, the three-week long trips back to Ohio to visit my dad every August absolutely sucked... but the other 49 weeks of the year were near-perfect.
Or perhaps that's just how I'm choosing to remember it.
Either way, what I am sure of is that my family was and is extremely close. I have vivid memories of all of my mom's family (my aunt and her then-husband, and my uncle and his then-wife; divorce was practically a sport in our family back in the day) being together at my grandmother's house. I remember dancing on her marble coffee table, that is now in my mom's living room. I don't dance on it anymore. I also recall that at every gathering, there were Charles Chips in the big beige canister, along with French onion dip. To this day, chips and dip are my comfort food. And Cracker Barrel still sells the canisters.
The other huge part of my childhood was listening to my uncles singing. They both played guitar, and I can picture them sitting on the ledge of the fireplace, playing guitar and singing "American Pie" and various Elton John songs. Like it was yesterday. And I always hated it when it was time for me to go to bed. I was soooo jealous of all the adults who got to stay up late and laugh and sing. And eat chips.
I was the oldest, and my uncles were relatively young, so they were like my older brothers. I always wanted older brothers. Anyway, my mom's brother went on to become a very successful singer/songwrite in Nashville (he's the one that Ryan is very close to now), and my aunt and her husband divorced several years ago. Recently they have gotten back to being friends, so he was at my sister's wedding this past September. It was the first time in many, many years that we were all together again, and it was such a blast. Honestly, it was as if no time had passed at all.
Prior to that, most of us (my sister wasn't there) were together in Charleston in 2001 for my cousin's wedding, and at one point at the rehearsal dinner, my uncle sat down at the piano and played and sang "Levon" by Elton John, and I had to leave the room. It brought back so many memories and I wasn't ready for how overcome I got!
It's so funny how a song can trigger memories.
That said, I'll think twice before listening to "American Pie" on a crowded subway again.
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3 comments:
What you said about adult issues is interesting. Just the other day I was thinking about this, how short our childhood is in relationship to the rest of our life and yet how ridiculously instrumental it is in shaping us. While the experiences we have as adults may influence the issues we have, it doesn't feel that way, does it? It feels like all personality formation was finished by 15 or so (okay, brain experts, 25) and the rest of your life is spent working to unmake some of those early choices.
I didn't mean that to sound quite so doom and gloom .....
Music is a tricky thing. There are songs where I can speak the lyrics just fine, but I can't ever sing them all the way through. Weird.
I loved American Pie as a kid, too, but all I think of now is drunk guys upstairs in college belting out chorus after deafening chorus at 2am.
BC - I'd be interested to ask someone older if it's true that the first 18 years dominate character definition. Maybe some of it's just the sheer number of changes that happen from birth to college?
The song that always gets me is Leaving on a Jet Plane it triggers some kind of tearful memory but I don't even know what it is just that something sad must have happened that I connect with the song.
Your childhood sounds fantastic. As I've mentioned in my blog, we never lived close to our family. I keep telling Neil and Katie how lucky they are that they do but of course they think I'm just havering.
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