The McGarrigle Christmas Hour
Kate and Anna MCGarrigle ( and Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Emmylou and Beth Orton...just get the whole CD, and look up a bit o' history on the McGarrigle family at the same time.)
>> Play "Counting Stars"
(just for a few days in hopes you'll get the whole album)
Every year around Christmas or New Year's, the big black phone tucked into the cubbyhole of our yellow kitchen would send its loud bbbbb-ring into the house late into the night. We'd all wake up as mom ran for the phone knowing that it was my uncle, loudly talking about eternal life and Jesus while mom tried to calm him down. He was always half in tears and more than drunk. Being drunk was his thing, his lifelong thing.
The song Counting Stars reminds me of him, gone now to lung cancer. My last memory holds a thin man sitting in a low-rent apartment hooked up to an oxygen tank, a necklace of plastic tubes on his stained t-shirt. This spoken word piece reminds me of him and other hims and hers that might be "in damn trouble again" as Christmas rolls around. I listen to this song and try to send hope along. I hope they're all counting the best kinds of stars as the chorus sings and the pianos play. I hope when they call - all drunk and thinking of Jesus - that someone picks up the phone.