A woman walked into my studio today with a small order. It was a single tape containing kids’ songs she recorded.  Songs for kids, sung by kids. She wanted to digitalize them so her grandkids could continue to enjoy the same songs that her kids enjoyed when they were growing up.

It made me think back on the songs I listened to… not as a teen, but as a child when I basically had to listen to whatever my parents were playing.

My dad liked marches.  Every morning, growing up in the suburbs of Washington DC, he played a local am station whose gimmick was to start each day with a military march. It certainly woke me up in the morning and got me to school on time, but it also instilled in me (because of his example) a deep sense of patriotism. Anytime I hear a march, I think of him and his strength and integrity.

I remember an album my mom would play called Up With People. It featured a singing group of young, wholesome, clean-cut Americans singing about the ideals of the country in which we lived.  I must have heard that record hundreds of times. I heard it so much growing up that I can still, 50 years later, remember the lyrics of many of their songs.  Here’s one, typed from memory:

Up, up with people… You meet them wherever you go.

Up, up with people… They’re the best kind of folks you know.

If more people were for people… all people everywhere,

There’d be a lot less people to worry about

And a lot more people who care.

Sure, it may sound a bit cheesy… but when you get right down to the heart of the message, doesn’t that paint a picture of the kind of world we would all like to live in? There’s nothing to say we can’t. We just have to first be the change we want to see in others. Speak kindly. Be gracious towards others. You know… the Golden Rule. It still works if we just choose to apply it. #UpWithPeople.

 

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio of Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit www.homevidestudio.com/mtd.