You Light Up My Life

"Do you know what your sister did?"
"Yes, yes, I know what she did."

"Guess what your little sister did!"
"I know all about it."

"Hey --"
"I know!!!"

All day long, people coming up to me, telling me what my sister had done.

The setting: my elementary school. I was in the 8th grade (or, as Canadians call it, grade 8), and my sister, being 5 years my junior, was in the 3rd. What had she done on that fateful day to generate such a buzz? During lunch, in the lunchroom, she had climbed up onto her table and sung the song: "You Light Up My Life", which was a hugely popular hit that year. In fact, it had spent several consecutive weeks at the #1 spot on the hit parade of the local radio station I listened to.

Now at the time, having every person in the entire school inform me that my kid sister had sung this song in the middle of lunch made me roll my eyes. In fact, I'll be candid and say that it was one of the most annoying events of my middle school years. However.

Years later, or should I say decades later, I thought about this stunt of hers and decided that I loved it. What an original, brave, imaginative, spontaneous and creative thing to do!

A few years ago, I asked my sister whether she remembered the event. Her response: "Oh, you mean the time that I serenaded my friend Benji?"

Fascinatingly, even though thousands and thousands (I know, I know, if you've told me once, you've told me a million times, not to exaggerate) of people had told me about the event, not one of them had bothered to share with me the not entirely irrelevant detail that this was a serenade. All of those years, I had understood that my sister had just randomly decided to sing the song in the middle of the lunchroom. But it turns out that she was expressing her romantic feelings to her young Romeo. Making the episode all the more endearing. If everyone were to treat their loved ones to an expression of love like that, boy!

In fact, episodes like this just .... wait for it ... light up my life.