Sing, Sing a Song...

Like everyone else in the world, I bitch a lot about my parents, how I was raised, and my various psychological wounds. Being a parent makes me a little more forgiving (hoping to fend off/pre-empt my own children's blame?) but I am not yet clear of the impulse. But there are some things I am extraordinarily grateful for.
My parents loved music. And our house was filled with music. My father (six foot six and big) had a ukelele and a guitar. He was not amazing, but he was good, and he taught us that good is good enough to have a lot of fun. We sang along to musicals we had never seen, and once knew the words to every Peter Paul and Mary song. We knew the Mamas and the Papas. The counterculture sixties passed our family by, except for the music.
On our road trip with my family, one of the things that made me happiest was having our two families sing together as we shot through the dark on an Arizona freeway in a giant mini-van. My brother has a beautiful voice. He has taught my niece Ruth the words to many songs. Only four, she can sing We Three Kings, Catalina Magnalina Hoopensteiner Wallensteiner, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Chinese!!!!, The Vatican Rag, and Soldier Soldier Will You Marry Me (NOT from our childhood, but I plan to add it to MY children's childhood). Ian had looked up words and verses to our childhood songs and knew more verses than we had ever known. But I was surprised how much it meant to me to hear us all singing in the car, for miles and miles and miles. We sang The Fox Went out on the Town One Night, and California Dreamin' and a million others. Ian often sang harmony, or filled in all the verses that the rest of us, not even Ruth, remembered.
Singing makes me happy. It makes my boys happy. It makes people happy. We listen to more music now than people ever have before--on computers, iPhones, iPods, in our cars, in stereos coming out of bushes at shopping malls, in elevators, at huge concerts--but we don't sing so much, or make music so much.
This morning at Theo's school all the kids sang If I Had a Hammer. It was one of my favorite songs when I was little, from our Peter Paul and Mary eight track tape. We sang it over and over and over. It is a cliche song, but a powerful one. As I sat in this school gym, holding my boys, belting out If I had a Hammer, knowing Obama is going to be President and that people feel like trying again, like helping each other out again, I felt hope. I felt like the time of that song is returning again. And I felt so grateful that my son goes to a school where everybody sings together in a big room, and gets to feel how beautiful, how amazing, how uplifting that can be. I hope that when he is 40 years old he and Benji will go on a trip somewhere together with their families, and even if other things have come between them over time, I hope the two of them and their two families will be able to sing together, and remember how wonderful that can be.