Friday, September 26, 2008

Singing the Memories

I bet everyone, or most everyone, had a wedding song. It's one of those traditions, as engrained in the wedding as the rice and the cake and the garter. I've been married nearly 20 years, and I look back at my wedding song (I actually had a few, because I couldn't choose, LOL), and wish I'd chosen a better one.

Not because I didn't like it.

Not because it didn't perfectly capture the moods and emotions I was feeling right then.

Not because my husband (and when he was my boyfriend) didn't think it was perfect, too.

But because it was sung by a one-hit wonder band and thus, it's NEVER played on the radio. Oh sure, I hear it at weddings from time to time, but let's face it, how often are you at a wedding? DH and I can hear it if we go out to a bar and get some screechy karaoke singer trying to belt it out, but we're OLD, according to our kids (meaning over the age of 20, and thus, we should just give it up and collect our social security and sit quietly in the rocking chair in the corner) and we never make it past 10 o'clock for anything. Bars start happening around 11 or 12, and that's simply past geezer bedtime (geezer being 40 in my case ;-).

My wedding song, the one that we danced our first dance to, was Sheriff's "When I'm With You." I think the band released one album, LOL. I read the story of the song on Wikipedia (the regular page WILL NOT work with blogger, so just click on that redirect there and it brings you to the story) and love that it came with its own happy ending. Now that's appropriate.

We did have two other songs, backups, if you will ;-) The Bangles "Eternal Flame," also one that's never played, and "Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing, which gets played all the time -- that was our end of the wedding song, when everyone gathers around to say goodbye to the bride and groom. I still get choked up (even writing this) when I hear that song and think of all the memories of that moment and what that song says, to me, at that moment, about my life changing, and the new life I was taking on.

Of course I don't think my DH was thinking all that, LOL.

As for "When I'm With You," when it does happen to come on the radio, I'll sometimes call my husband at work and listen to it with him. Just a quick, "remember when it was just me and you" and for a second, we're back on the dance floor, two silly, in-love kids thinking we had the world by the tail, because we had each other and that was all that mattered.

What about you? Did you pick a one-hit wonder for your wedding song? Or something that has been played ad nauseum?

Shirley

posted by Shirley @ 5:16 AM