Down Memory Lane: 65 Years of Song Hits

So I found this:

which is full of these:

And it also had this in there:

So Reader's Digest collected a bunch of music for old people from back when my mom was young. I don't expect to find it thrilling. Stashed in there though, is this Christmas album. It's scratched all to fuck. I don't expect it to play at all ever. The weird thing is though, what the hell is my mom doing hanging onto a Christmas record? She hates Christmas. For one thing, she's jewish. That's no big deal. She's not a bigot about it or anything but it's not as if she grew up waiting for Santa to show up every year.

But even worse, her mom died right around Christmas. My mom was young when it happened. It shook up the whole family really badly. By all accounts she was the best thing about the family. Everyone loved her. Even my dad who doesn't have a vested interest in pretending to like a mother-in-law from someone he's not married to anymore only ever has good things to say about her. I never met her. I wasn't even conceived yet when she died. 

It's weird growing up with a grandparent you never met who everyone loved and talks about a lot. I wish I could have met her. I think maybe my kid has a touch of that with my grandfather. He died before I even met my wife. He died back when I was still married to my first wife. So my kid's never gonna meet him. But there's a picture of him in my hallway.

Every night before we tuck James into bed, we have this routine. It ends with a bedtime story, but it starts with him brushing his teeth in the bathroom at the end of the hall. The hallway is lined with pictures of family. So as he's walking from the bathroom to his bedroom, James waves at the pictures and says goodnight to them all. "Goodnight mommy, goodnight daddy, goodnight Auntie Leah, goodnight Auntie Johanna..." and on and on. So every night he says goodnight to this black and white picture of my grandfather. "Goodnight, Grampa Crab." That's what everyone called him, Crab. I never got the same story twice so I don't know how he got the nickname. But my kid says goodnight to this old guy who we all loved an awful lot who he never actually met. It's sweet. It's also a little strange. 

If you had to choose two adjectives to describe my family, those would be good ones: sweet and strange.

I miss my grandfather. Toward the end of his life we lived pretty far apart so I hardly ever got to see him. I do wish I had more time with him. And I wish I had gotten to meet my maternal grandmother. I wish I had more than stories to go on with her. But the stories are pretty good. And the stories I'll tell my kid about my grandfather are pretty good too.

So that went and got pretty long and sappy for a description of a collection of old songs I'm never gonna listen to.

Come to think of it, that's a pretty good description of this entire blog.