Greg Bales

Ditties

I began improvising songs for G soon after we brought him home from the hospital last August. The songs are nonsense and forgettable, a sort of vocal jazz-not-jazz, frequently bad because I’m not a well-practiced improviser. I get caught up in what I’m saying at any given moment such that I forget to think ahead, so I stumble over a rhyme, lose the melody (such as it is), and everything pretty much falls to silent pieces. G doesn’t yet care one way or the other how a song ends or what the words are, but he will one of these days, so I’ve begun working on my improv skills by adapting melodies I know well, such as “Hush Little Baby.”¹ I eventually lose steam on that too—there’s only so long I can go before I bore even myself.

It was this morning while walking with G and Newton that I realized the ditty making has become a pernicious habit. No matter what we did or where we went, I was singing about it. And it was really, really obnoxious stuff, like this:

And this:

And those are just recreations of what I was singing. The real songs, if they can be called that, were much more incoherent in rhyme and meter, and their subject matter was exceptionally lowbrow.² Case in point is this scatological ditty:

After that, you probably need a palate cleanser. So here’s a poem by Alberto Maldonado from the Boston Review.

¹ Fact: “Hush Little Baby” is vastly improved with the following lines:

² My vacuity knows few limits.