This Vintage Gold moment comes from Kender MacGowan.
Growing up my first exposure to music outside of the rock hits of the day on the car radio, and Mom playing Patsy Cline while she cleaned, was my grandparents singing songs from their youth. I spent much of my summers with my grandparents, and their music tastes rubbed off on me. Most folks today only know many of those old songs as instrumentals, brought back by the swing revival of the late 90s. But most of those songs have lyrics. And I know most of them.
My grandparents quite often hummed and sang as they went about their day. My favorite was their after lunch ritual. Lunch usually consisted of a sandwich and some soup, crackers, fruit, and sweet tea. By lunch time Grandpa and I had usually spent the morning puttering in the garden or the work shop, fixing this or building that, always with a baseball game on the radio in the background, another sound which has the power the old swing hits have on me. Anyway, they would stand at the sink, Grandma washing while Grandpa rinsed and dried, singing “Thanks for the Memory”, in the style of Bob Hope and Shirley Ross. Little did I realize then how powerful that song would become, how apropos the title would be, because every time I hear it, I am once again back in Grandma’s kitchen after lunch, and each time it happens I think “Thanks for the memory.”
Kender MacGowan is a curmudgeon and scotch aficionado who spends his days reading to house bound horses and riding Senior Citizens. His spoken word version of GET OFF MY LAWN! went platinum on the Florida nursing home circuit. – SoCal
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