This is how the CD my sister and I made for our mother turned out:
Fiddler on the Roof, Prologue, Tradition
Because whenever we do something because we've always done it, we sing the chorus.
10, 000 Maniacs, My Sister Rose
More a sister song than a mother song, but a family song.
Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, Two Of Us
More a couple song than a family song, but pretty
Beatles, Julia
About John Lennon's mother
Cat Stevens, Where do the Children Play?
Well, where do they play?
Cowboy Junkies, Musical Key
"My mother's hands were always cool and soft..."
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Teach Your Children
"Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you."
Innocence Mission, Medjugorje
"You're everywhere
Everywhere"
About the Virgin Mary, so religious though not her religious. Also pretty.
Shirley Horn, Summertime
My mother told me she sang this to me when I was a baby. I can't quite imagine it, but it makes me happy to think of her singing "And your ma is so good-looking, baby/ She's a-looking good now."
Joni Mitchell, Love,
With a Biblical source even: "As a child I spoke as a child/ I thought and I understood as a child/ But when I became a woman/ I put away childish things."
Kate Bush, reaching out
"See how the flower leans instinctively/ Toward the light./ See how the heart reaches out instinctively/ For no reason but to touch." Also pretty
Kate Bush, this womans work
"I stand outside this woman's work,/ This woman's world./ Ooh, it's hard on the man,/ Now his part is over./ Now starts the craft of the father."
Louis Armstrong, What A Wonderful World
"I hear babies cry, I watch them grow/ They'll learn much more than I'll never know/ And I think to myself what a wonderful world"
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Our House
"I'll light the fire, while you place the flowers/ In the vase that you bought today."
Michelle Shocked, When I Grow Up
"Uh huh, that's what I said a hundred and twenty babies/ We'll raise ‘em on tiger's milk and green bananas..." I love this song. It's so silly and loving.
Shriekback, Cradle Song
A lullaby: "May the fire be your friend and the sea rock you gently,/
May the moon light your way till the wind sets you free."
Godspell, By My Side
Our favorite song from our favorite musical.
Sting, The Lazarus Heart
About his mother: "Every day another miracle/ Only death will tear us apart"
They Might Be Giants, Birdhouse in Your Soul
Another delightful love song: "Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet/ Make a little birdhouse in your soul."
Fiddler on the Roof, Sunrise, Sunset
I should have had just songs from musicals, though I can't think of an appropriate one from "Sound of Music." This is about parents watching their children grow up seemingly in a day.
The Waterboys, The Stolen Child
She used to be Irish, and Yeats is beautiful. "Come away, human child to the water and the wild/ With a faery, hand in hand/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
I am going to have to restrain myself mightily. My sister probably is moving in with our mother and BDL. The stories, they will flood in, and I have not enough thumbs for the dike. Already we have discovered that she--an LPN--had never heard of Tourette's Syndrome ("that sounds serious") and that a wooden toilet seat must be left up "to let the wood breathe."
Using unconscionable amounts of water, I blasted one length of the fence with a powerwasher. The ricocheting spray was not water-colored or even brown with dirt but black with city filth, hooray. I think the fence had never been treated at all. That was Saturday. Sunday I stained that whole length. I did two sections--a section being the stretch of slats between posts, whatever the technical term is--a cappela and bored out of my skull. I broke for lunch and did the remaining five sections with my iPod attached to speakers, much happier. And stained and sticky. When I prime or paint or stain, I am like a three-year-old with an ice-cream cone. It's a full-body experience.
Also this weekend I was RDC's gofer in the saga of Venting and Wiring the Hood. He cut a hole through the ceiling for the chimney, and an eight-inch crack opened out from the circle. Yea. So that has to be pasted up. Then the work in the attic began, which means emptying RDC's closet and kneeling carefully in dust and fiberglass insulation and cutting other holes and installing supports between joists and detaching the chimney from the previous, pointless ceiling fan and routing the hood's ducts to it and wireclippers and cowhide gloves sliced by jagged ends of galvanized pipe and of course, duct tape. After that the wiring and the thinking that the hood had a short and would need to be unmounted returned and haggled over and a new one remounted and then the big brain getting to work and the process of elimination and finally the discovering of a tiny nick in one wire right here and finally, whoosh suck whoosh, the hood working.
I am at least 15 pages behind in Ulysses and won't catch up until Tuesday at least, because Monday two cubic yards of planter's mix arrives and I am going to get in touch with my inner Stanley again. I wonder if I will be able to walk Tuesday.