Songs of My Childhood

I wasn't a fan of the pop music that interrupted my Saturday morning cartoons; there was more than one dance rhythm that seemed interminable to my five-year-old self.

Ah, but music found me! In one of my first memories of pop music, I am riding down the hill that leads from my house to the main road. It is a snowy morning, and I shiver in my father's four-wheel-drive truck as the radio plays, "What's Forever For": "I've been looking at people, and how they change with the times/ And lately all I've been seeing are people throwing love away and losing their minds..."

I will carry that song in me forever.

Another of my favorite songs way back when -- dare I admit? -- was "The Coward of the County." I remember sitting at Pizza Hut there in small town Virginia, my mother hushing the table with the words, "They're playing her song."

As for other songs by Kenny Rogers -- well, I didn't know that "The Gambler" was about gambling. I heard the line, "There'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done," as "There'll be time enough for counting when the mealing's done." (Perhaps I thought it had something to do with paying the bill at the restaurant.)

There was another song that I believe might be titled "Barbara Ann". At the time, I thought that it was titled "Barbarino" and that it was named after a character on Welcome Back, Kotter.

From my blog Evening Nigh Reflections

(Mother is) still waking enough from a late Altzeimer's slumber to take in a little water and nourishment. I had read that people may respond to music when they respond to little, so when I visited I sang something we used to sing in the car when was little, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". (Of course my mother has not known who any of us are for quite a long time.)

On the way back to Seattle, I was thinking about it, and "Over the Rainbow" was going through my head. But then it was being sung out loud, too -- quite near me there in the Greyhound bus. A bored little girl, just four or five, was singing to amuse her mother and herself.