Matt's Songs

Matt's latest post here has me wondering--does he remember the game we used to play, Matt and I and his brother, Peter. It was right after we had moved to a new town back when they were in high school. Members of my husband's former congregation had all put money with a card and given it to us at a gathering celebrating our leaving. My husband always hated that, so maybe that was why he decided that the four of us should go shopping and blow the whole amount. We got a new brass bed that I had always wanted and a new refrigerator. I got new curtains for the new parsonage kitchen and new shoes for myself. Matt and Pete got what they wanted most in all the world, a sleek black stereo in a glass-fronted cart. Their older brothers had left home and taken their stereos with them and we had been without. We got home rather late on a school night, but no one went to bed until it had been properly assembled. I can still remember the three of them and all of the components all over the living room floor while I watched from a chair. I remember those days as kind of lonely, but a sweet time. My husband was busy with the new church. I was suddenly unemployed after having worked in a library job that I loved for seven years. Matt and Pete were starting a new school where they knew few people right in the middle of their high school years. Every afternoon they would come home from school, sit on the living room floor again, me on the chair again, and start playing tapes for me. [It was tapes in those days.] It became a game with two variations. Sometimes Matt would play a tape and we would listen, then Pete would play one. I was to choose which one I liked best. I almost one hundred per cent of the time liked the one Matt had played best. The variation of the game was when they played two tapes and I had to guess which was Pete's choice and which was Matt's. This was an easy guess for me --the one I liked best was bound to be Matt's. I was a soft-hearted mother and my heart ached for my youngest chick so sometimes I tried to cheat. I never got away with it. They knew I was lying. The reason Peter's songs were never chosen was because he was avant-garde--way out ahead of the pack of ordinary folks. How do I know that he was avant-garde? He told me so.