Number-One Hits: Not Just for Birthdays

The Andrews Sisters

A lot of my Facebook friends are sharing links to the number-one hit song on the day of their birth. Listening to the song can be disconcerting. One friend, after discovering his was by the Andrews Sisters, wrote, "Will someone spoon oatmeal into me for dinner?"

(If you want to find your song, click here.) Mine was a song I'd never heard of - somehow I didn't pay much attention to the hit parade when I was in my bassinet. What with diapers, bottles, and sleep deprivation, my parents may never have heard of it either. I just checked the top hits on the days my daughters were born, and they were completely unfamiliar to me too.

So I got to thinking, this meme has it wrong. The important song in my life isn't the number-one hit on the day of my birth. It's the number-one hit on the day I was conceived. That song might explain my existence.

I immediately checked out my idea by looking up top hits on my daughters' probable dates of conception. OK, scratch that theory. One song was barely familiar. The other was "American Pie." Well, yes, "I can still remember how that music used to make me smile..."

The top hit on my own probable date of conception, though, seemed sweetly appropriate: Francis Craig's "Near You." (If you want to estimate your date of conception, click here. If you were born in a leap year, choose 2012 as your birth year; otherwise, choose 2011.)

But hey, the hit parade is more for teenagers than for sober young householders. What song was popular that Sunday afternoon when Mr Neff and I, aged 19 and 18, snuggled in a parked VW and decided to get married?

Groovin'

On a Sunday afternoon ...

We'll keep on spending sunny days this way

We're gonna talk and laugh our time away

I feel it comin' closer day by day

Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly . . .

More than 44 ecstatic years later, the music hasn't died, though it's getting more and more difficult to groove in a VW.