The blackest of roooooms...

When my family gets together we usually have sing-a-longs. My uncle plays the guitar and we have greatest hits we perform and it's rousing and unifying and has gotten a lot more fun as the cousins all catch up to age 21. So this last family reunion was in Montezuma, Georgia for my cousin Will's amazing wedding (which I should have blogged about because he is such a wonderful man who had a wonderful wedding) ...anyway... My Uncle Jim loves to play for everyone and got out his guitar back at the cabins we had rented and we sang the favorites, even repeating some because that's just how much fun we were having. Quite often we kind of fantasize about what it will be like when the cousins all start having kids and if we will still have sing-a-longs (who will play the guitar?, will we sing the same songs?, etc. etc.) But no one has found themselves gifted enough or confident enough on the guitar and were realizing that maybe the tradition might turn a capella with select songs on the guitars that some had learned. But, in heroic mastery, my 18 year old cousin John who is a senior in high school, has proven to be inherently gifted at the guitar and so the tradition will not die. He played along with his dad all night. At some point the adults began to fade away and it was John and some cousins playing. My brother came over and started playing a song he had taught himself (studying alone 7 nights a week in your one bedroom apartment lends itself to idle time learning to play guitar, you see) that most of my cousins knew and it turned into a cousin sing-a-long. Then John started playing songs he knew and we swung into our new repetoire. So this is all really special because it was the first time that the young-un's took over. What was especially special (is that possible?) about it was seeing my uncle stand back and watch us sing and love each other and share music and see his talent and influence oozing all around. I love my family.

So, I told this story because I didn't know the song William had played that started us cousins singing, but I recently heard it on the radio and downloaded it on iTunes and now constantly have it stuck in my head. It was "I'll Follow You Into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie, a depressingly sweet song about love and after-life. This began our playlist of Glycerine by Bush, Wonderwall by Oasis, something by Green Day, and various other mid-90s grunge-era songs that do not go along with Elvira by the Oak Ridge Boys and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. But I guess we have to mix it up somehow.