Put your shoes on Lucy

We landed in the midst of a mild kerfuffle when we went to pick our littlest buddy up from daycare yesterday.

A friend in stocking feet was refusing to put on his shoes.

“Should I sing him the song?” asked our second littlest buddy, which confused me a little until he launched in.

“Put your shoes on Lucy don’t you know you’re in the city?” he belted out and my heart just melted.

It’s still astonishing to me how music can break through the space/time continuum and bring together two precious people who’d never met on this old earth, like my young friend and my Grandma Fey.

My Grandma Fey sang that Petula Clark song to me more than 50 years ago when it was time for me to put my shoes on. I remember the song and the way she laughed after she sang it.

I don’t have many memories of my Grandma Fey, because Alzheimers slowly stole her away from us at a relatively young age. So, I carefully unwrap and admire that one as often as I can.

“Why do you sing us that?” the second littlest guy asked me last week as we were getting ready to leave the house.

“Because my grandma used to sing it to me.”

I’m not sure what my grandma, whose every well-ordered day began with a bacon and egg breakfast and ended with the Al Schottelkotte news, would make of our chaos. I think she might be both impressed and appalled. Grandma dressed well, properly coiffed and lipsticked, with earrings and matching gloves.

I sometimes forget to comb my hair.

But, I know she had to have loved that moment yesterday when a sweet little boy summoned her memory with that silly song and she joined us in that noisy room for a special moment or two.