Our song
My 6 year old grandson is sitting next to me playing some dinner music on his yoto speaker. His current favorite throwback is an Elton John greatest hits album. We listen to I’m Still Standing, Rocket Man, Crocodile Rock and then Your Song comes on and I can’t help but smile. It's a song that takes me way back to a time that feels like another lifetime. Was that young teenager in the memory really the man who now sits across the table from me in our daughter’s dining room? Was that young girl really me?
We are in the last few months of high school. We are just starting to get to know one another and this is the first time I am at his house. He, the basketball player, wants to impress me, the singer, and so he sits down at the piano to tentatively play Your Song. I sing along. It feels like the start of something.
And it was. If I drew a line from that song to this dining room table it would include a college romance, a wedding, three children, their spouses, and 4 grandchildren. We started out, just two kids at a piano, and collected people along the way. Who would have guessed on that spring afternoon way back then I would, so many years later, be sitting next to my grandson on a crisp fall evening listening to this very same song?
I sing along to myself, How wonderful life is while you’re in the world. And those words stick with me throughout the evening. Who is you, I wonder.
When you is the we from long ago it’s a love story. All those years ago, a boy wanted to show a girl that he could play a song and she wanted to show him that she could sing along and that song happened to start a spark between the two people in the room. A story began, a household was built, a family created. And now almost a half a century later, (a half a century later!!),I am left reflecting on the sweet little boy next to me and how wonderful life is because he is in the world.
When you becomes collective and means all of us it becomes a reflection in gratitude. How wonderful life is as long as you, (me, you, we) are in the world. For as long as we are in the world.
This time in my life is filled with reflection. All around me there are changes. Babies are being born into our family. The story of us is shifting to our children’s generation. All of a sudden, there are friends with medical concerns and creaky joints. We are watching our elderly parents’ vitality fade. We have survived our own health scare. Obituaries and funerals have more personal impact than they once did.
Yet the passage of time, the losses, the nevermores, the bygones lead me to see how wonderful life is while we are still in this world. I turn the phrase over in my mind, and a rush of gratitude for what has been and what is left comes rushing in. This world where we can wake to the second chance of a sunrise and sleep as the moon is rising to keep watch over the night. This world, that somehow gives rise to the songs of symphonies yet also sparrows. This world where there is the majesty of mountains, and the perfection of a snowflake. This world where the seasons of the year mirror the seasons of our lives and through them all we reach for one another, the you.
In the end, the time we are in this world is so very short. All of us, merely grains of sand on the wide beach of history. That memory of two teenagers at a piano is seemingly insignificant in the wide view of the world but yet gave rise to all these people gathered at this table. I sit here, next to this beautiful boy, the next generation of a family, a family that started with a song. We are in this world together for a time. How wonderful life is while you, me, we are in this world. I am so very grateful for this little slice of life in the big, wide world. His, mine, ours.