TOWNER, N.D. -- I found myself singing a little lullaby to our 6-year-old daughter the other night, one that my mother used to sing to us as children, and I wondered if anyone else in the world knew the song.
So, as we do these days, I Googled it. The way we sing it here, it's "Shoo shoo shoo sha lie la," and we make up verses and choruses for it as we go, depending on how sleepy, or not, the subject of our singing is. Turns out the actual title was "Shoo shoo shoo sha la la" and it was a fairly famous recording of Canadian country-singing yodeler, Wilf Carter.
It made sense. My mother was a big Wilf Carter fan. I even have her old record player, the kind you need to crank to make the records spin, and there are a few Wilf Carter 45s in its cabinet. Wilf, sometimes called "Montana Slim," sang renditions of songs like Ol' Shep, Strawberry Roan, You Are My Sunshine and, the yodeling favorite, Cattle Call. Now, you can listen to the same music without cranking. Just go to YouTube.
Or, you could sing along with me and my little girl at bedtime. We get pretty imaginative with the additions to the "Don't you know, your Daddy loves you so, go to sleep my little..." part. Pretty soon we're professing the love of siblings, cousins, grandparents, babysitters, pets, livestock and migratory wildlife, most of them by their individual names.
I'm not sure if Mom knew she was starting a family tradition when she began singing that Wilf Carter lullaby to me as a kid, but she did.
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Little notes
Meanwhile, our 8-year-old son is enjoying second grade and growing his mind every day. One of his favorite things to do is pick up a pencil and paper and write a story. I know where he gets that, it's a bit of a family tradition, as well.
At any rate, he's sharpening his spelling and handwriting skills as he writes in an assortment of notebooks that he keeps at the ready. One morning, this fall, I'm clearing off part of my office desk, which is really a family desk for everything from homework to coloring to bill paying, and I find a little note planted there. It was torn out from my son's pocket-sized notebook with the ragged spiral edges at the top.
There, written with a sharp No. 2 lead pencil, it says, "I love dad for teaching me how to ride horse." It stopped me in my tracks. My desk clearing subsided as I thought about the really important things in life, like spending time with your children and the important traditions on a ranch, like spending part of that time together, outdoors, on horses.
I'm reminded of the horse traditions on our place with three photos that hang in the southeast corner of my office -- my great uncle on a horse as a kid around 1910, my father on a stud he'd bought in 1959, and myself on a mare that traces back with 50 years of the same horse breeding lineage.
So whether you're singing lullabies, writing stories, riding horses or continuing one of many other possible traditions as we head into Thanksgiving and Christmas, keep doing it. They are the firm ground beneath our feet as we enter a future with sands that are forever shifting.
