Memories

Do you have a song that instantly reminds you of a person? I do. Today at the mall Customer Service desk a tune came over the speakers and I thought about "Mikey", one of the students at the tutoring center for teens I used to run.

Mikey attended the center in 2007. He was a smart kid, but had one of the shortest attention spans I've ever seen. When he wasn't distracting himself, he was looking around the room to see what everyone else was up to.  He tried to get by with doing the minimum, but when I got him to move beyond that, he produced very insightful work.

I allowed the students to use their personal music players while they worked as long as they wore headphones. One day Mikey started singing out loud to the song "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette, using a horribly fake, squeaky voice:

It's like rain, on your wedding day
It's a free ride, when you've already paid
It's the good advice, that you just didn't take
And who would've thought?
It figures.

It was SO funny, everyone started laughing. The song turned into a standing joke. Every week or so Mikey would break into song again:

It's like ten thousand spoons, when all you need is a knife

Now I remember Mikey every time the song comes on.



Five years ago today: New Thing #53--Let It Snow!