30 Things in 30 Days: Thing #20—Sing Songs

This is not from tonight. We didn't take any pictures tonight—it just wasn't the right kind of moment for pulling out the camera. This is from a week or two ago, before Dave shaved.

Forgive me for being brief with this one. My left fingers are all numb and tinny-feeling from playing beginners' chords on the guitar for the first time since Hollie was born. (It's only been just the past couple of months that she hasn't required either Dave or I to be holding her constantly day and night—I love how far the three of us have come! In any case, my guitar-learnin' was put on hold.......until tonight.)

David is incredibly talented (he won't boast of himself, so I will) artistically, intellectually, and definitely musically. He's especially good at the guitar, but school and work and fathering keeps him from it far too often.

He's also getting better at the accordion that I surprised him with when we were still dating long-distance (I was in Idaho teaching school; David was in Ohio getting a Masters degree. I paid his roommate the money for the accordion that he had been eying who then hid it in their haunted closet until his birthday. Those were the days when David was poor and I was rich. Now we're both poor).

We want to be a musical family, but somehow the days seem to slip by and the instrument cases manage to collect a disappointing amount of dust. So for tonight's Awesome Thing, we spent a few hours regrowing the calluses on our fingertips and Googling guitar tabs for all our favorite songs.

David can play anything I ask him to play, so we ran through several of our favorites including these greats (linked to YouTube clips in case you've never heard some of them. Because you really ought to know them):

• Paul McCartney's "Teddy Boy"
• George Harrison's "Wreck of the Hesperus"
• Paul Simon's "Hearts and Bones"

We also found out that I can play America's "Horse with No Name" (because it can be played with just two simple chords), Cat Stevens's "Where Do the Children Play," and Elton John's "Daniel" (but only if I fudge the F bar chord with a poor man's four-finger beginner's chord).

Singing songs with David will always be one of my favorite pastimes. I've harbored a fantasy since I was young and obsessed with the Partridge Family that I would someday sew sequined, tasseled jumpsuits for my singing and dancing traveling family band. With David as my husband, this dream might actually not be so unrealistic. He just wouldn't go for the sequins, I think. But by all means, if we're going David Cassidy and Shirley Jones our way to the top, we've got to practice!

P.S. Going back to Dave's old blog, his pre-marriage blog, reminds me of this old worry of mine that I am somehow squelching part of David's personality and creativity from his bachelor days. David has said the same of me before—that he worries that he might somehow be stifling the personality of my singlehood self. We always think the other ridiculous when we say so to each other. But whenever Dave comes across evidence from the days when I was a poet or when I was a wilderness walker, and whenever I come across evidence from the days when David played in a band and threw BBQ Halloween parties at the Boo House in Ohio, we each get a little sheepish. Does any other of my married readers ever feel this way?

All I can say is, it makes me glad that we are consciously trying to do more awesome things lately. Even if neither one of us misses the "old" individuals that we once were, it's not a bad idea to tap into our old selves now and again, and remind ourselves what memories and past pieces make up who we are. (I've been Emily Grover for long enough now that Emily Gilliland seems like a little sister to me. Or a secret identity. Funny that my name change seems to be such a demarcation between two separate lives of my self, and funny that David has no such explicit renaming of himself. David once told me that he was jealous of my "dual citizenship"—my mom replied that he could call himself Gilliland whenever he felt like it. Or something like that.)

Thing #20: Sing Songs = ACCOMPLISHED.

10 more Things to go. We'd better make them count.