SOD: Rolling Stones "Tumbling Dice"

When couples have songs, it's cheesy. It's some of that "romantical" rubbish that seems oh so cliche. It's another one of those sappy things that couples seem to invest a lot of meaning in, and everyone else on the outside can laugh at. That's how I saw it at least, until it wound up happening to me. Sometimes it's not so much the song, but the moment in which it plays. There's a lasting effect to it, a memorable one. Thereafter, every time the song plays, you're drawn back to that place, that moment, when the song first meant something to the both of you. It's not like choosing a wedding song for a first dance, you can't create meaning for it, and often times you can't pick it. You can't go out searching for "your song," it just kind of happens.

You'd have to go back a solid five years and change to get to the point when it happened to me. Kimi always liked the Rolling Stones, but she hadn't delved too deep into their catalog. Of course I was playing her all sorts of stuff since the first day she ever decided to take a car ride with me, and I think somewhere in her mind, she knew that she was dealing with a real music nut. If not, she found out really fast. Jokingly, she used to refer to me as the Music Nazi. I think she got it from my mom. But once in a while I'd play something that she hand't heard before, and she'd coyly ask what the song was, not wanting to reveal that she altogether didn't know it. "What's the name of this song again?" she'd say, as though she'd heard it before, but couldn't remember. Sometimes I'd play her game, sometimes I'd call her out. Either way, it would always end in smiles. 

So five or so years ago, we're on a car ride out east on Long Island. It's cold still, but the far reaches of Long Island are empty then (as compared with the spring and summer), and it's an amazing time to get away and take a break from it all. We drove to the beach, put the car in park, and watched the ocean while we ate breakfast. My parents had passed this ritual down to me, as we had been doing it since the first months of my life. The ocean can be an angry bitch on those cold late winter/early spring days, and the gray sky on grayer water is less than inviting. But it's oh so beautiful to watch. And as we sat there, eating our breakfast, watching the waves, a Rolling Stones mix of mine played in the background. Obviously the car was on auxillary power, I couldn't not have the tunes going. We weren't saying much, we were just kind of taking it all in. And then this song came on. 

Kimi had always liked "Tumbling Dice," that much I knew. She's a sucker for almost any song you can move your hips to, and I'd always liked it, but it wasn't one I'd really think twice about. Well, she starts singing the song, and I looked at her with puzzlement. What the hell was she singing? And when I asked her just that, she broke into laughter. Busted. She didn't know the words. And when Kimi doesn't know the words, she makes them up. Ridiculous combinations of existing words in our lexicon, to strange sounds that only Kimi and certain species of birds can make. And there we were, laughing and dancing, making up words to Tumbling Dice, until the hook came on and we belted out the words we both knew, "You got to roll me, and call me the tumbling dice." And we'd make silly dice rolling motions with our hands, and Kimi would try to belt it out an octave higher, I, an octave lower. Thank god no one saw us, we must have looked nuts.

We didn't say to one another that day, "this is our song." But in the days since that one time, whenever the song does come on, we always sing along. Wrong words and all. And we reminisce without even thinking about it, and probably forever will. It became our song that day, in that moment, and cheesy as it may be, I kind of like it. So this one's for you 'Bo. Happy Birthday.