The sound of music

Our TV doesn’t get reception, but it’s ok because we have Mark for both musical entertainment as well as commercial breaks. Music runs in Mark’s blood. One of Mark’s sisters recounted trips to the grocery store with Mark when he was little. They would never take more than a few steps up an aisle before Mark would recognize a product and promptly break into its associated song or chant its tagline. “Rice-r-roni, the San Francisco treat.” And over an aisle, you’d hear, “The quilted quicker picker-upper…Bounty!” Or the one that would embarrass his mom the most, “Coke is it!”

Mark’s musical blood can be both a blessing and…well, less of a blessing. For example, Sage is fully versed in all the words of “I Wanna Love you Tender” (among many other songs, both annoying and not), and during our car trip last week, I recognized the unmistakable words “Santa Baby” in Eliza’s chanting.

To Mark’s credit, Sage has over a dozen songs in Spanish memorized, and Eliza is as quick to request “Cabeza, Oh-oh [hombros]” as “Head, …Knees and Toes.” There is no doubt that our girls have picked up much of Mark’s musicality, and that makes me very happy.

Not only does Mark do a great vocal imitation of various singers (my favorite is Colm Wilkinson’s “Bring Him Home”), he is also a bit of a song writer in his own right. Well, at least he rearranges the words to familiar tunes (does that earn any particular title?). Mark is famous in my family for his unique variation on the song “Love Story” (Where do I begin…). My sister’s Christmas request was that I keep a list of Mark’s “variations” on common tunes. As many sound a little (unintentionally) sacrilegious, and likely violate copyright laws, I had better not publish them. Besides, as is common with Mark’s songs, they always stick in my head for a long time. If I want to sleep tonight, I better try to think of other things.

The song we’ve all had in our heads today was “Mamma Mia,” by Abba. We recently saw the preview for the similarly named movie with Meryl Streep, and had to check out Abba’s music video on Youtube. Listening to it twice was enough to have us all singing it, including Eliza, who walked around chanting “Mamma Mia” every few minutes, long after a normal 1-year-old should have forgotten it.

It was clear that Sage also had music on the mind today, because I caught her chanting a line from the folk song “Cindy,” (which she’s especially enjoyed singing since the birth of her cousin, who—in Sage’s mind—was probably named after the song. Right, Danielle?). When I heard Sage’s one-liner, without recognizing the context, I stopped quickly, torn between curiosity and the temptation to launch into a lecture about things that are not appropriate to repeat. Sage, unfortunately, had chosen to repeat over and over the line “She knocked the preacher down” (substituting “I” for “she”). “I knocked the preacher down.” Sounds bad, especially for a 3-year-old, huh? To clear her name, I had to look up the real words:

Now Cindy’s got religion,

She wheeled round and round

She got so full of glory

She knocked the preacher down

Interestingly enough, it’s for this same “Cindy” song that Sage has invented her own chorus, the protagonist now being “chicken nuggets” (“Get along home, little nuggies.”) Someone is clearly their father’s daughter. I wonder if the chicken nuggets will be knocking down the preacher soon. That’s better than Sage giving herself credit for such a deed, even though she undoubtedly has no idea what it means. Let’s just hope her Primary church teachers didn’t ask Sage what her favorite song was this week.