This songs matters to me, because: (your explanation here)

A few that immediately came to mind:

Sweet Home Chicago: I've lived five different states, but have spent most of my live in the burbs of Chicago. Anytime I hear it I'm reminded of family, friends, and where I come from.

Guns N' Roses - Sweet Child of Mine: I love the opening guitar riff and this song always reminds me girls I've hooked up with or dated. I think I was into GnR and listed to this song a lot when I first kissed a girl. She was a summer fling girl at my family's vacation spot. A few years later I was still talking to her and wanted to make her a CD and included this song. I usually get bittersweet feelings when hearing this song. It reminds me of good times with different girls, but then I always think about how/why we broke up / things didn't work out.

O.A.R. I feel home: I have a thing for songs that have the idea of home and this is one of my favorites. This song takes me back to family vacations when I was in high school and college. The parents would go to sleep and me, my brother, sister and a bunch of cousins our age would get drunk and have some great conversations about the future and life. We'd usually chill outside on a deck and a lot of these lyrics set that kind of scene of being with people you love and care about and having good times. The song, in general, reminds me of good times with different friends in different stages throughout my life.

O.A.R. Road outside Columbus: This CD came out the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. I wasn't too scared to go to college, but this kind of helped the transition. The song is about your college town becomes your second home. It had some good foreshadowing for my college years and how you set up your own life in that town and meet new friends and have new experiences that probably form you just as much the previous 18 years of your life. I lost this CD at some point, but used to love listening to it on my way to and from school on breaks. I just listened to part of it online and the song brings back good memories and great friends from college.

 

Jersey Girl, by Springsteen...

In honor of my late, great ex-wife, Ruthie...

And besides that, it's a great freaking song, especially when he performed it live in Jersey.

 

Thank you so, so much for that beautiful story about your mom, Bubs.

 

So you like Springsteen's version (with the lyric changes) better than Tom Waits' original?

 

Absolutely! I was never a Waits fan, and I'm certainly no huge Springsteen fan. However, that song, in that setting...perfection!

 

Thanks. It was hard to write, but I'm glad I did. Don't know why I'm glad it, but so it goes.

 

bubbler --
I hope it doesn't get lost on folks who admire you for that last post as much as I do that your old man was a real mensch in coming back to Wisconsin for your mom at the cost of career advancement. You can be damn proud of both of them.
Why did I fall in love with Wisconsin instantly in 1971?
Because there were people like the bubblers there.
(And 25-cent draft beer, too.)

 

I born in '71, right up the lake at St. Mary's, so I think you were basking in the afterglow of my birth. Or 25-cent Schlitz ... one or the other.

Seriously, my dad ended up doing just fine. Got a promotion again in '86 and we moved to Indiana. By '89, he was running his own plant in the Cleveland area. Stops in Minnesota and New York came later and he took early retirement two years ago.

Karma rewarded him for what he did, he's 58 and living large with his sweetheart of a girlfriend in Albany, N.Y. Spends most of his time drinking wine, skiing, pumping iron, visiting us kids in the Midwest, and not much else. All power to him, he deserves downtime alone just for raising me, much less all the other stuff we all dealt with.

 

Public service announcement, with acoustic guitar...

I'm guessing a few of you folks in here have read Rob Sheffield's "Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time." If you haven't, you must.

 

God, I didn't even read this thread until today, until Boom sent me to look.

Beautiful writing, beautiful stories.

 

Just before the spring of 1986, I was about to turn 9, and my little sister and I were looking forward to welcoming a new little rugrat we could play with, and pick on, and eventually train to do our bidding. It was only the middle of March, and Mom wasn't due until mid-June, but the anticipation was heavy nonetheless.

In the small town where we lived, there were afternoon high-school baseball games on Tuesdays, and one day I was there playing with friends behind the third-base dugout. Dad was an assistant coach on the team, and he was going to drive me home afterwards, because Mom was at home giving a piano lesson.

I remember this specific game for two reasons. First, the home team had scored 20 runs by the fourth or fifth inning, which was amusing to me because the new scoreboard only had room for 19. And second, late in the game, an ancient woman named Betty (she must've been 50!) came running out of her house next door to the baseball field, raced to the home dugout, grabbed Dad by the shirt, and said something that immediately sent him off to the parking lot. Then Betty came over to me and told me she was taking me home.

What I found out later was this -- during Mom's piano lesson, her water had broke. She was so scared by this that when the mother of her student came to pick the kid up, she didn't even get out of her chair. But when my little sister sensed something was wrong, Mom finally decided to pick up the phone and call Betty (who she knew was the closest person to the baseball field with a phone), but the line was busy. So Mom called the operator and had them break into Betty's call (I didn't even know you could do this).

So Dad burned asphalt to the house, put Mom in the car and drove her to the hospital an hour away, and Betty stayed with my sister and me that night. At the hospital, they were able to stop Mom's labor somehow (remember, this is three months before her due date). She ended up staying there six weeks before my brother -- still six weeks premature -- arrived.

I don't think I'll ever have a full appreciation of what Mom and Dad went through during those six weeks. Because the hospital was an hour away, and Dad had to work and take care of my sister and me, they spent a lot of time apart -- Mom in a cold hospital room, wondering if her unborn son would survive, Dad at home with two young kids, beating himself up for not being by his wife's side. He drove to the hospital himself on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, leaving us with a family friend and returning home each night to tuck us in. On Saturdays and Sundays, my sister and I would ride with him, spending all day in the hospital.

Now comes the music part. Dad listened to country, mostly the old stuff, but on those Sunday morning drives to the hospital, we'd listen to American Country Countdown with Bob Kingsley. This was great fun for me -- I was always excited to find out which song was going to be No. 1, and after six weeks, I usually had a pretty good idea of which one it'd be. So now, anytime I hear one of the songs that were on the Countdown charts of 1986 -- whether it be "Everything That Glitters" by Dan Seals or "The Chair" by George Strait or "Guitar Town" by Steve Earle or "Old School" by John Conlee -- I think of those days.

I remember them as the days when Dad was overwhelmed but never showed it, and when Mom was scared to death but always put on a brave smile for her two oldest children, and when my kid brother Bobby -- who spent the first year of his life hooked up to a heart monitor but now is a few months from college graduation -- spent those last six weeks in the womb, pushing to enter a world that wasn't quite ready for him yet.

 

Writing has always been cathartic for me. And in all honesty, doing it here, on SportsJournalists.com, kind of unburdens the soul. We could write about some of this stuff on our own personal blog, but then it might feel like too boastful or too whiny. You do it here and it cuts right to the emotional core of who you are without the baggage. You can write about a lost love or a parent long gone and not have to think "What's my wife (or ex-girlfriend) going to think about this? What will my siblings or father think if they read this?"

Part of the reason I really like these threads is because it gives you an emotional investment in the people behind the screen names. I don't know you, Bubs, and chances are I might never know you. But I care about you because I know a tiny piece of your backstory. It's not my story, but I see tiny details in it reflected in my own stories.

Few years ago, my father, after a round of golf with my mom, collapsed in the clubhouse with a heart arrhythmia. My mom, badass that she is, got down on her knees and gave him CPR for 10 minutes until the paramedics arrived. After five shocks to the chest, they EMTs finally got his heart beating under control. My mom called me as they were taking him to the hospital, trying to sound calm but failing, and that next morning, I boarded a plane knowing he was going into surgery right then, and for three hours I'd be in total darkness on that plane, uncertain if I would ever see him again. Uncertain if I was going home for a reunion or a funeral. Mostly numb, I sat in seat 15E, right over the wing, starring out into the blank sky, listening to music for three hours. My pop was never a music buff; he just didn't have the patience to care about it. But he always loved Elton John. I can remember being 7 years old and having him sit me down in front of the television to watch Sir Elton sing

So on that plane ride, I was listening to Elton John, trying to send some extra love and mojo his way, at least until I could get there. I was fine, mostly, until the damn iPod clicked over to

I rested my head against the wall and just wept in silence. The poor guy sitting in the aisle two seats away from me must have been terrified. The poor stewardess I waved off when she asked for my drink order must have been worried I was going to hijack the plane. But thankfully, they let me weep. It's still hard to listen to that song.

My father came through surgery just fine. Got a pacemaker that zaps his heart if it ever goes haywire again. A few days later, the hospital even let him go home. We drove around that afternoon, just the two of us, his short term memory still fuzzy from the few minutes his brain had no O2.

At some point, without looking at him, I said, "You know, we've got a lot of golf left to play."

And then, "I love you a lot."

And finally, "I'm really proud to be your son."

The old man was quiet for awhile. Like so many dads, he fought like hell on a daily basis to keep his emotions bottled up inside. But then, eyes locked in on his shoes, with his voice cracking, he said, "I love you too. So much. You and your sister are my whole world. I'm very proud..."

He paused. Both of us were crying.

"I'm very proud of you."

That night, my mom, my sister, my dad and I had dinner for the first time in years when it was just the four of us. No wives, husbands, uncles, cousins, family friends. I wanted to hear happy music while we chopped yellow and orange bell peppers for a salad, and so I put on a playlist of Jack Johnson songs. During

my father grabbed my mother's hand and started dancing, right there in our kitchen. It was such a strange, beautiful, out-of-character, yet tender moment, seeing my father with an ear-to-ear grin on his face twirl my mom around as she tried to soak up the absurdity of the moment. All my sister and I could do was laugh. We were laughing with exhaustion and relief and joy and also the understanding that someday we'd get the call that he really was gone. We'd fly home for his funeral and there would be no awkward tango on the linoleum floor of our kitchen with our mom, no hospital miracles, and no "I love yous" and no "I'm proud of yous."

Just goodbyes.

But for the moment, here he was, mocking death, dancing in his socks with his adult children looking on, dipping the woman who had saved his life, the woman he'd been married to for 37 years, while Jack sang these intentionally ridiculous lines:

Turn off the lights girl
light up some candles;
wrap your arms around
my love handles.

They say the passion
may not always endure;
But this feeling that I have for you
is burning up my world.