Oh we made one another cry

Rat has her song of the week. I have my song connected to a memory thing. Its not a regular weekly thing. Sometimes there will be many songs in one week and sometimes there won’t be songs for many weeks… it’s all up to what iTunes Party Shuffle throws at me and how often I switch it on (as an aside, my boyfriend and housemate think I really should be working for Apple’s iTunes division… they can’t get me to shut up about its virtues over such lesser players as Windows Media and Real Player for example)!

So anyway, today, I heard The Games People Play by Tesla. Like any other 13 year old at the time, I was only familiar with that extremely happy reggae version of The Games People Play by Inner Circle. And then my extremely cool, 18 year old, heavy-metal-listening family friend made me listen to Tesla’s version and he even recorded a tape for me with it and all sorts of cool songs that I liked at the time or which he thought were cool. I remember there was Roxette’s Vulnerable (I looooved that song) on it as well as East 17 (how cool were they at one point)!! Anyway, he was a family friend from the day I was born, he attended all my birthday parties (till I made them exclusive to my friends from school), he had a younger sister around my age and he treated me like one too, he teased us mercilessly when we were growing up, he pinched our cheeks and stole our dolls, we played Red Indians (or was it Cops and Robbers) and Hide and Seek and someone always ended up in tears or with a bloody knee, our families (and a few others) went on picnics and trips and we swam in seas and lakes and swimming pools and we went Christmas Carol singing every year and so the torture continued.

And then he grew up… he still teased us, but in a nice way… his position as chief torturer was taken over by many other more juvenile boys and now we’d just say to him, tell them to leave us alone and he’d tell them to leave us alone and they would actually listen sometimes!! Around this introduction to Tesla time I spent a lot with him and his sister at their house… quite often I’d stay over and we’d stay up all night talking and laughing and listening to music. When I was 13-14, my Mom used to let me go hang out with his sister and him and his friends… I was allowed to go for movies and concerts sometimes… we spent three New Years Eve’s together from ages 13 to 15, him and his sister and a few of their friends and a few of my cousins. So anyway, I’m not sure what my point is anymore or if there was one to begin with. I suppose at the naïve age of 14 or 15 I just thought that him and his sister would be my best friends until the day I died. It didn’t really turn out that way… from ages 16 till now I must’ve met them around 15-20 times. He even got married just last month and obviously I wasn’t there. And I remember their mom once said the test of true friendship is whether you can pick up wherever you left off since the last time you met.

So yeah, maybe they’re not my best friends anymore and maybe I don’t hang out with them all the time anymore, but there are times I remember them (like today) and the fun things we did growing up and there may be times in the future when our own children will play Cops and Robbers together (or more likely, they will battle for supremacy on a PlayStation or Xbox)!

Everyone has these family friends that you spend your whole childhood with and if you’re lucky enough it continues beyond that. Since they knew you from the time you were a cranky baby, there are no pretensions or stereotypes involved in hanging out with them. They bore witness to all your tantrums and fussy habits of eating only curd rice and French fries and they listened without complaint to you singing the same nursery rhyme over and over again (apparently I did this)! They are the closest thing to family (duh, that’s why they call them family friends I suppose) and sometimes they’re dearer than some random members of the family you don’t really care about or see often!

I just remembered something else about this song… when I was listening to it in the car with my grandparents once, they were rather confused about why I was listening to hymns… they only caught the Glory Hallelujah part!

Oh, something else I remembered... Rat had a HUGE crush on him when we were 14.