Xanthippa's Chamberpot

I am the first person to admit that my brain is not ‘wired’ in the neuro-typical way.

The more  l learn about other people, the more I realize just how atypical my thinking processes are.

Which is a bit of a self-conscious segway into my post…which is all abouot the excitement of finding a ‘lost’ song…

When I was ‘an itty-bitty-baby’, my parents used to listen to ‘their’ music:  and, being political dissidents from the ‘other’ side of the ‘iron curtain’, this naturally included a few records they had managed to get in English.

(And, yes – growing up, I saw many performers who would do ‘yodling’ and ‘stepdancing’ together in one musical piece because they both typified ‘Western culture’ and were thus part of ‘the same culture’…ok, let me re-focus…)

In other words, the ‘classification norms’ I grew up with were ‘slightly’ different from the ‘North-American-perspective’!

But, that is not my point – at least, not now:  now, my point is that my parents had acquired a few records in English, back when I was an itty-bitty-baby who did not speak a word of English – and they used to listen to them.

Before I had learned to speak any English whatsoever, that is.

And, I, too, would listen.

Over and over and over…

As a matter of fact, there were a few songs that I picked out that I liked and I would play them – even though I was forbidden to use the record-player by myself -1 song at a time, over and over and over…when my parents weren’t home!

I had no clue what the words said, but I memorized the sound of them and tried to reproduce it…and, I’m afraid, it was as dismal a lingustic failure as I was a musical one (as I am almot completely tonedeaf).

But, I did not give up!

I kept the memory of the sound of those songs deep in my brain…including the sond that the ‘foreign’ singing would encompass.

Fast forward a few decades:  I now live in an English-speaking country and can, most of the time, pass for an Anglophone who might speak a littlepeculiarly…but an anglophone nonetheless.

The point is – I remembered the song and re-played it enough times from my memory – once I had learned English – to make ‘some’  sense of the sounds!

OK – except for a tiny little bit – I had made complete sense of these sounds!!!

And, being a new parent, I reverted to my parent’s patterns and tried to sing to my babies the lulabyes I had recalled from my own early childhood – including the ones that were in English!

I had separated the sounds into words, understood their meaning (in time), and filled-in-the-blanks as I needed to…and then sang them as a lullaby to both my ‘surviving’ sons…

A few weeks ago, I actually thought of searching for that song on YouTube…

OK, I should have thought of it before…it seems so obvious now – but I did not really trust my recollections…

…still, I found it!!!!

‘when those cotton balls

get rotten, you can’t pick

very much cotton….’

I freely admit I remembered the song lyrics as:

‘when them cotton fields

get ripened, you can see

very much cotton…’

But – that is the only divergence from the lyrics!!!

I mean – we are talking decades and re-playing the sounds in a language I did not know until years later!

That is pretty cool – is it not?