Forever and ever, amen

The soundtrack to us

Do you remember that day? I ask again and you say, Of course, Joy, with a little eyeroll and smile. But I want to talk about it anyway, because it was one of my favorite days ever.

We’d gone to Yosemite with my family, filling two cars, and had a picnic lunch out of the trunk in the snow on the valley floor. As we trudged through the snow down an icy and slippery path, my hair was damp from a snowball fight and hung in limp ropes around my flushed cheeks. I said something about how it looked terrible, and you said, “No, it looks great.” Which I knew was a lie, but I loved that you said it.

But then here comes the best part.

You started singing Randy Travis’ song Forever and Ever, Amen. I laughed because I wasn’t into country music. I grew in southeast Asia and didn’t even know who Randy Travis was. All I knew was that you were singing these sweet words to me at the top of your lungs. We were slipping on the icy path and grabbing each other’s arms for balance as you sang, and I just laughed and laughed.  

As someone who had adored musicals my whole life, I always believed that everything improved when you sang about it. And there you were, singing how you’d love me forever and ever, amen. The last of the winter sun reached through the trees, danced on your hair, and I remember your eyes and your smile. People stared a little and probably thought you were drunk, and I caught the expression on my grandma’s face that clearly said, “Oh no, she’s falling for this guy when she’s still so young and foolish.” 

And she was right. Because I was. Because we both were. 

We didn’t know yet how hard the road could get. We hadn’t been those church-mice poor newlyweds, celebrating another Friday night with frozen pizza and Tostitos Lime chips in our tiny apartment. We hadn’t sat next to each other yet in the pain of broken dreams and disillusionment, when there aren’t any words to say or anything to give except our own empty hands. We hadn’t spoken awful words like missiles in the height of our anger, trying to destroy the other. We didn’t know what it was like to love each other from thousands of miles apart, when we couldn’t tell each other daily of that love. 

But a couple years later, on another hike through different woods–the woods at Point Lobos–you started humming that song again. You were singing quieter, and I could tell you were nervous. “Your shoelace is untied,” you said suddenly, pointing at my foot and then dropping to your knee to tie it. You kept singing, and then you fumbled awkwardly in your jacket pocket and took out a little box with a ring in it. And I said yes.

Now, so many years later, I hear at least a hundred songs that make up the soundtrack to our story. My love for music was contagious; you figured that out and now songs wind around our story and tie it together. 

Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”--there hasn’t been a single time we could listen to that song without belting it out because do we ever know. You plunged me deep into country music so that Lonestar’s “My Front Porch Looking In” might as well have been written about us. And on the days that felt so completely crazy and hectic with our little ones that all I could do was laugh, I still had Travis Tritt “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive”.

 In the last minutes of my laboring to bring our fifth child into the world, you turned on Queen’s “Under Pressure,” and I don’t know if there was ever a more perfect time for that song. I hit “play” on Green Day’s “Good Riddance” at the end of a hard two years as we drove to a new home. We slow-danced to Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way” in the last minutes of your twenty-year Navy career, and then I turned on Chris Stapleton’s “Starting Over.” And now I can’t help but tear up a little at Ben Rector’s “Steady Love”.

Would it all still have happened if you didn’t sing those words that day, when we were so naive and full of silly ideas? Maybe. Probably. But I’m so glad I can close my eyes and remember you singing those words to me.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Lyrical".