According to my complete, 30 second, quick and dirty, Internet search an album with the title, Some Things I Want to Sing About, by the Osborne Brothers came out on Sugar Hill in 1984. That song was later recorded by THE Grascals on their album, The Grascals in 2005. Bobby Osborne guested on that effort, giving it, at least for me, an authenticity that is hard to beat. This is because the version of the Osborne Brothers I heard saw the most was the good old group with E, and Mr. Smiff, current Grascals. I woke up thinking of the important things in my life, and the lyrics of the refrain came quickly to me:
These are just some things I want to sing about
Memories I can’t live without
Diamonds buried deep down in my mind
Lord thoughts I can’t quit thinking
A fountain I’ll keep drinking from
And a taste that’s gettin’ sweeter all the time
Now, in the song, the things are of a different time and place that that in which we live:
I remember thinking town was where grandmothers lived
Where brothers went to catch the bus and train
A treasured thought was Daddy grinning ear to ear
Every time we’d hear the old Chuckwagon Gang …
This morning I woke up thinking of:
- An eight year-old GS1, playing football, with great passion.
- A four year-old GS2, who was told to run around the house 10 times – each time he passed the window we held up fingers. I think he may have run around 20 or more times, we fudged, we repeated numbers, and generally kept him going as long as we could.
- D1, grabbing a chicken and getting it’s head on the chopping block. (Thank goodness she couldn’t get the hatchet out of the block)
- D2, explaining how she and 3 friends happened to go to this historical site, instead of staying in Michigan on a long-ago spring break trip.
- Freshman D3, calling years ago from a far away university, fed up, used up and needing to come home.
- Papa, shoveling gravel into a cement mixer, to pour a new drive of our current home. Papa was a bricklayer when I married him, and the sight of a cement mixer, a pile of bricks or blocks, a pallet of bags of cement or mortor take me back to building our first house, in 1976.
- Cute, red-headed GS3, who arrived 8 years ago last March, just in time to give us a little joy as Papa finished his cancer treatments.
- A couple of little red-headed girls, GD1 and GD2, turning my front porch into a nightmare of toys, cards, books, and other fun things.
So, I guess my things mostly reflect the last 38 years. Based on my happy thoughts, I can’t wait to see what the next 38 years bring.
