It's amazing how the lyrics to songs stay in a person's memory long after other memories have gone. There's just something about them that makes them stick in the brain. For example, most of us probably learned to sing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…” in nursery school, and we still remember it when it's time to teach it to our own babies. Think about it. Do you remember the names of the other students in your class? Maybe you remember the name of the teacher, and maybe not. The song lyrics, however, are still there.
Think about the times and people in your life, and you'll probably think of song lyrics. I know I do. I can remember lying in bed during my childhood, listening to my nifty, new clock radio, and the words “and the people beat their feet on the Mississippi mud” start sounding in my head. That was probably all of fifty years ago, and I can't remember hearing the song since then, but I still remember the occasion.
My teen years are full of song lyric memories. “Our love's gonna be written down like a tragedy, just like Romeo and Juliet” always brings back visions of spending Saturdays downtown with my friend, Linda. Then there's “She loves, you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” which transports me back to sleepovers with my friend, Sheryl. I can also remember walking to school with my pal, Molly, while unself-consciously belting out, “Come on without, come on within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.”
When it comes to the memories of the boys in my life, although I've tried to forget some of them, the song lyrics keep bringing them back. “Her eyes were clear and bright, but she's not there” always evokes memories of my friends and I on a dark, long-ago Halloween walking to John's house to trick-or-treat in the hopes that he'd be there. I can still hear the lyrics “Baby, you and me got a groovy kind of love” and think of our neighbor kid, Pete, mowing the lawn with his shirt off and muscles bulging.
The lyrics don't have to have anything to do with a circumstance to be remembered, either. The lyrics “Lookin' for some hot stuff, baby, this evening…” makes me recall dancing in our living room with my toddler daughter. She's 28 years old now, so the memory is always a sweet one. Another nostalgic memory is of my son's early attempts at speech. I'd ask, “Who ya gonna call?” and he'd answer, “Dosbussers”. How sweet it is!
Sadder memories have been softened by time, but the song lyrics still bring them back. Shortly after my dad passed away I remember mowing the yard with tears streaming down my face and singing the only song I ever heard him sing. It was at a Campfire Girls father-daughter banquet. The girls sang the Campfire song, and the fathers sang, “I'll be loving you, always. With a love so true, always.” What a comfort those old lyrics brought to me after he was gone.
Another one of these softer memories is of bringing my daughter back home when her first marriage crashed and burned. I can still remember driving in the dark while the words “Who can say where the road goes, where the day flows, only time” washed over us. In this case, the words were totally appropriate for the time and offered endless hope for the future that seemed so bleak.
Time passes, and people come and go in your life, but the song lyrics seem to linger on, as fresh today as they were at the time. Whatever your stage in life, it's important to surround yourself with music, because the words you're hearing today will all become a part of the fabric of memories your life will be made of.
