Friday, March 06, 2009

Out of my head

I went to church three times a week for the first 19 years of my life, so a verse or two of a lot of gospel songs are stuck in my head. Here's one you know:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy crimson side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Heal me by Thy grace and power.

Not the labor of my hands
Can fulfill the law's demands.
Could my tears forever flow,
Could my zeal no respite know,
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save and Thou alone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If I would empty what's in my head, layer by layer, like an archeologist exposes a dig--but in reverse, with oldest layers first-- the result would be much like yours: verses of hymns (lots of them), then childish doggerel ("one, two, buckle my shoe" kind), then snippets of television ads from the 60s and 70s, then pieces of poems I learned to recite in school and what's left of what I had to learn in history classes (the Gettysburg Address, for example, of which I can recite only the first few words).... and so on. I remember these things but can't remember what I wanted to fetch from the living room 30 seconds ago.