[Unpublished, April 2, 2003]
There’s a song in my heart. Sorry. I’ll try to keep it to myself.
As a rule I haven’t been successful at this. All through the years, my kids would ask, “Mom? Are you singing again?” and I’d look down and discover I was.
It might not have been so bad if I’d been softly murmuring “O-o-o-o-o-klahoma” or “We Will Rock You” or some other lilting air. No, it tended to be songs that I made up myself, though not intentionally. Songs would come evolving from random thoughts revolving, and gradually work their way up to audibility. Generally, these were not exciting songs. However, they tended to be annoyingly memorable.
Here’s a typical lyric, which arose soon after I clipped a newspaper recipe titled, “World’s Most Wonderful Cookies.”
World’s most wonderful-cookies!
World’s most wonderful-cookies!
World’s most wonderful-cookies!
Wonderful, wonderful world.
Never mind the melody. You don’t really need the melody to appreciate the full potential of this song. However you won’t get the complete effect until you mumble it over and over, half-consciously, a few hundred times. In this process I gradually realized that the muse was prompting a second verse, which concerned the world’s most wonderful toaster. This was because I looked up and noticed there was a toaster in the room. I gather this is how genius happens.
The kids grow up and have kids of their own and these ad hoc songs tend to keep resurfacing in family stories. And sometimes I worry that the trove will be rediscovered by a musical historian of the future. What if it’s someone like Stephen Foster? What conclusions will he draw about turn-of-the-century life based on, apparently, a folk spiritual addressed to the world’s most wonderful toaster?
So as an aid to scholarship I thought I’d better record a few explanatory notes. The earliest of my oeuvre was titled “The Underwear Song,” and it was prompted by a situation that, I’m sorry to say, was less interesting than it sounds.
I had a pair of underwear, you took it and now it’s gone. I had a pair of underwear but the memory lingers on. I had a pair of underwear, you took it and now it’s true If I had a pair of underwear I wouldn’t be missing you.
For Mr. Foster’s sake I should explain: overzealous housekeeping had led me one morning to collect every single scrap of launderable undergarments I could find, leaving my husband freshly showered but unable to be either dressed up or taken out. The situation could not be remedied until after the spin cycle, but its poignancy did prompt a song.
Another early favorite was “I’ve Got Peanuts in My Shoes,” but as it is nearly as repetitious as the Wonderful Cookies song I’ll omit transcribing it in toto. This song was also based on a real-life incident, though one that is harder to explain. Truth is, I don’t know how those peanuts got into the old dress wingtips in the closet. But there they were, and what can you do except sing about it?
A later addition to the canon was the endlessly flexible Amandine song, named after our golden retriever, who was named after a trout recipe.
Amandine, Amandine,
Feeling mean, feeling green.
Amandine looks like a jelly bean.
Silly old, billy old, Amandine.
As the children delighted to explore, we could also sing of Amandoon who “eats with a spoon, flies to the moon.” They particularly liked, “Amandyne, feeling fine, drinking wine.” There are as many variations on this song as there are pages in a rhyming dictionary, or as many as it takes to get from Baltimore to Disneyworld, unless you can trick them into playing the license plate game again.
Two later works must be mentioned in closing, since each would vie for position of most significant. One was prompted when we were guests in a home with only a five-gallon hot water heater. Bathing three children in succession required the stout camaraderie only a hearty song can create.
I’m saving my hot water for you, saving my hot water for you. It isn’t a gnu, it isn’t a canoe, it isn’t even an old tennis shoe. But I’m saving my hot water for you, saving my hot water for you! I’ll put it in a shoe box, send it by a musk ox, Saving my hot water for you.
But perhaps the most memorable of my works is the celebrated “Polish Teapot Song.”
I had a Polish teapot, no water would it boil, Until I filled it up with Mazola peanut oil. P-O-L-I-S-H, little Polish teapot,
P-O-L-I-S-H, I like it quite a lot.
Poor Mr. Foster would be in extremis over this one. Why am I boiling water in a teapot instead of a tea kettle? What does oil have to do with it? What does being Polish have to do with it? Why doesn’t Mazola make peanut oil?
I could explain, but really, why bother? Shakespeare had his Dark Lady, and I have my Polish Teapot. Someday graduate-student theses can be written about both, or perhaps even creatively combining both, and they will be even more obscure than my songs. And that’s what makes the world go round. Which reminds me of a number that goes a little bit like this…