My grandmother, bless her heart, is one of those people who goes about her day with a song in her heart. Or at least on her lips, that is; she is constantly humming cheerfully, filling up the quiet with some little tune, at least every time I have ever been around her. And that includes the time I spent three weeks with her in Europe and North Africa, when I was fourteen, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just something she does to drown out the chatter of all my relatives at holidays.
I don’t know what she hums. Just little tunes I don’t recognize.
I think perhaps my grandmother is smarter than I am. Because I have inherited this from her, and I notice it more and more now that, instead of trying to wrap my mind around sets of n + 1 nonlinear partial differential equations, I’m at home doing things like cleaning out closets and cutting up raw chickens.
Only I never learned to channel it into humming. And my brain is full of the music that I fed it when I was in college. (Trying to wrap my mind around different partial differential equations, among other things. I blame math.)
This has some unpleasant results, for example, when I am standing at the kitchen counter spreading peanut butter on pieces of toast for my two hungry children who are standing right in front of me and I catch myself belting out
I got big balls
Big old balls
Balls the size of grapefruit, balls the size of pumpkins, yes sir
which is, of course, the first few lines of "Tiger Woods," by Dan Bern. Which just may be one of the catchiest progressive-rock tunes that ever emerged from the nineteen-nineties. Which is, of course, the problem. (link to audio)
If I am really on my toes, I catch myself before I get to the part that goes
I got a friend whose goal in life was to one day go down on Madonna
That’s all he wanted, that was all; to one day go down on Madonna
But let’s face it friends. Am I really on my toes? No. I am not. At these moments I ask myself: Does Heather B. Armstrong, of Dooce, have this problem? And then I think: If she does, I bet she doesn’t feel guilty about it.
It’s not that every song I find myself singing aloud is sexually explicit or celebrates drug use or is otherwise unsuitable for children. There are a few sweetly innocent songs too. Like "I Love You, A Bushel And A Peck" from Guys and Dolls! (If you can ignore the fact that the character who sings it is a burlesque-show stripper.) And I think there are some… um… Beatles songs in there.
Oh well. At least I can blame some of this on my husband. Cue piano:
He sees his children jump off the stations one by one
His woman and his best friend in bed and havin’ fun
Ha ha! No, actually, the Jethro Tull stuff — unlike, say, AC/DC, yes, thanks, honey — doesn’t tend to be in a key that I can easily sing in front of the kids. But now that I’m learning the recorder, well. Stand back.
(No, actually there is some stuff equally burned into my brain that I can sing in front of the kids without embarrassment, at least until they turn thirteen or so, stuff that I have programmed into the manual override on my Brain Jukebox. Thank goodness, yes, for They Might Be Giants.)
This is, I think, related to the phenomenon that Dave Barry described so well in his book Dave Barry’s Bad Songs: "[S]ongs evoke powerful feelings, both positive and negative. I think the negative ones tend to be stronger because, as I noted in the preintroduction warning to this book, your brain, as part of its lifelong effort to drive you insane, insists on remembering the songs you hate and playing them over and over."
Except in this case, it’s part of my brain’s effort to warp my children, or perhaps even my grandchildren, who will someday grow up and reminisce to each other. You remember that song that grandma used to sing? You know, every year when she was carving the Thanksgiving turkey? How’d that one go?
Oh, that one? Wait, wait, it’s coming back to me now. What was it? AC/DC? Ah yes. (Sings) "Dirty deeds and they’re done dirt cheap, dirty deeds and they’re done dirt cheap." Remember how she always got that fake Australian accent when she sang that song?
How could I forget? Hey, remember that other one about the fat-bottomed girls?
Oh, yeah. I can almost hear her now.
(pause) Hey, turn off that radio, will you? And pass the turkey.
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