Songs in the supermarket
Singing hymns in every setting.
Curt was happy to hear that Jakob and Meghan have continued the family tradition of singing while shopping. Liam’s favourite song to belt out these days is “Days of Elijah.” At the end of one daycare day, Meghan opened the van door to hear Liam proclaiming “Behold he comes…” over the 15 other kids playing in the mud.
Years ago, I remember shopping at Safeway with three of our children and humming, then whistling, and sometimes singing. The children were aghast and suitably embarrassed. What made it worse was that the song stuck in my head was the Genevan tune to Psalm 89: ♫ “Forever I will sing of your great love, O LORD.”
Just this week I watched a TV retrospective about some of the pop songs played by big bands in the 1940s and 1950s. That led me to singing bits and phrases of “Elmer’s Tune” in the garden. The robins didn’t seem to mind but I detected a little superior attitude by the always-inventive purple finch who had to one-up me every few minutes.
My memory banks also supplied me with daughters Elisbeth and Rebecca fishing at Hidden Lake with me and serenading everything with “Teddy Bears Picnic.” I don’t recall if we caught any fish – probably some small trout – or if there were other fishers on the lake, but the song-scene will delight me forever.
Wilderness hymns
Then there was the time that my father was supposed to wait for us at the railway trestle so we could walk back to the car. We had been fishing the trout stream near Pembine, Wisconsin, by wading downstream. Dad went first, then us kids later (after he caught what we called all the “dumb fish” first). When the three of us reached the trestle we couldn’t find Dad. As suspected, he had declined to wait and continued downstream a little further to catch more unsophisticated trout so he could outfish us. We called out to dad by singing the words of “Softly and Tenderly” in three-part harmony. The chorus rang out across the wilderness from the high trestle:
Come home” (echo: “come home”), Come ho-o-ome –
If you are weary, come ho-o-ome.
Jeffrey and Willie and Curtis are calling,
Calling, ‘O Wimpy,’ come home.
From the bushes far below came a musical reply: I’m coming; I’m coming; for my head is bending low from “Old Black Joe.”
Call and response
Where did all this music come from? Not from our piano lessons or our band classes at school. The music came from the home. Mother would play piano: hymns or show tunes. Dad would sing or play the flute. We all joined in as time went by.
Mom also made it a point to organize supper devotions. She would make a chart and pin it to the wall in the kitchen. It had a Bible verse for us to memorize and a hymn related to that verse.
While talking about this to some friends from church, Mrs. Hiemstra said, “That’s not so unusual; my mother and I always sang hymns and folk songs while we did the housework.”
But . . . back to Safeway. Once, when I was whistling the first line of Psalm 89 in one aisle to the embarrassment of my children, we heard another whistler added the second line of the psalm. Klaas Kort, another Christian school teacher, was shopping with his children in the next aisle. They were no doubt embarrassed, too.
