Speaking of Joy

This one goes out to my daddy-blogging homeboy, Hamann.

The other day, Katie and I were having a semi-joking conversation about how she had sucked all the joy out of my life. As is typical while we have these oh-so-playful conversations, we pretty much let Max drop off our radar. So, Katie and I were laughing about our awful life when Max, who had grown bored in the basement among my boxes of broken glass and jars of nails, climbed up the basement stairs, heard us talking and decided to spring up the last couple of steps to surprise Mom and Dad.

He plopped into the kitchen with an excited little yell and Katie observed, "Speaking of joy."

Recently, in a spate of CD buying madness, I got the soundtrack to "Juno". Now, say what you will about the movie, you can't really argue with the soundtrack. It's one of those cases where the soundtrack of a movie kicks booty all over the movie itself. "The Virgin Suicides" is probably one of those. Then there's this, which is a movie I've never gotten around to seeing 'cause I've heard it bites. The soundtrack, though is good, weird fun.

Anyhoos, there's a line in a song on the "Juno" soundtrack that nails it. Everytime I hear it, I think of Max's voice: the breathy way he tosses off "Bye!" when you're leaving for work. Or his face when he's totally pumped about something. Well, fine, it's everything about the boy.

In the song, there's a dream and the singer ends up -- in the dream -- in a giant tire swing, singing along with the tire swing pusher and "the sound of our voices made us forget everything that had ever hurt our feelings".

Feelings, you are healed: