Forgetting, forgetting: the passage of time / Soon your brain will turn sand.
That, of course, is a poem by the Unknown Poet. Who carved all those American runes into the cliffs of the Wind River Range? We’ll probably never know – a thought which seems as tragic to me as the central conceit of the poem (Squaretop, south face, i.244), which is something about forgetting.
The good news is, there’s one thing we’ll never forget: the songs we had to sing in school. They were introduced early enough during neural development that they are represented as permanent physical features of our brains. One day, when we know everything about the brain, scientists will be able to reconstruct the songs by examining our dry, dry brainhusks.
Which is lucky because a lot of these songs cannot be found elsewhere. They’re part of the class of things that just didn’t make onto the Internet. Here’s one I remember watching my sister sing:
Will You Be My Friend
Will you be my friend?
Won’t you be my friend?
I am from a different land,
Will you be my friend?
Yes I’ll be your friend.
Yes I’ll be your friend.
Something something something now,
I will be your friend.
In my memory, two kids stood in front of the singers and acted this out, and the way they showed the person was from a different land was to have them sit in a wheelchair with a blanket over their legs. Anyway, while searching for this song, Google’s top suggestion was: “I am from a different…landforms”
I imagine that most of the unfindables were from huge fake book things that teachers owned. They probably cost hundreds of dollars, and even then you were supposed to send royalty payments to the authors of the songs you ended up teaching. But the books were going to last for your entire career, so it did make sense.
The other unfindables were written by the teachers themselves. Like this one, by my third grade music teacher Mrs. Verne, about her dog:
Jasper
I have a dog and his name is Jasper
His favorite thing is going for a run
When I take him running in the woods
He comes home all covered in mud
So I put him in the bathtub
Soak him all up with doggy shampoo!
Rinse him clean and towel him dry
Then he snuggles down for a hap-py nap
Songs and poems don’t have to rhyme, you know. As you can imagine, we changed the last line to: “then he snuggles down and he TAKES A CRAP!” If you’re interested, here is a megamix of both songs:
In high school, the Language Department had an annual night of language festivities, and the different language groups sang native songs. I took French, and we always had to sing stuff that taught you the words for food, or I don’t know, about some French ladies sewing French lace. But Spanish did things like Shakira and reggaeton. One year they did a song with rapping in it and a kid who was bad at school got to do the rapping, and he was good and funny at it, and it was nice to see him get his moment. But if you took French…well, where was your moment of recognition, for once?
So when I was a junior we boldly chose a song called “Moi, Lolita,” by a singer called Alizée (from her debut album Gourmandises). We cherished it, and even long after the festivities were over, we’d sometimes ask if we could stop class to listen to it. Here is the video, it is very cornimportant that you watch it.*
*[‘Corn-‘ usage invented by Christine Allison, Maisie’s mom, who realized how great it is to say replace “con” with “corn” to form words like “cornfused” and “corncerned.” Eventually it became clear that you could use it with non-con words, too].