The LDS Primary songs of my youth continue to make it impossible for me to wallow in tedious labor. “Saturday” is a song that has gone through my head every Saturday for more than fifty years now. I can’t help it. It’s just there, being the soundtrack of one entire day of every week. Some people work all week long just to get to the excitement of a wild Saturday night on the town, but that’s not how it works for me. Because of the aforementioned song, “Saturday,” from the official Primary songbook, being permanently stuck in my head, Saturday is tasks, chores, and to-do lists. But it’s oh-so fun because there’s a song to sing about it.
Like any good kid song, it is simple, and so it easily accommodates new lines about the real-life Saturday tasks I find myself engaged in. One of my best “true” lines came about because my dad—not too long before he passed away—had been on his back in the driveway, fixing something underneath his forklift. Later that Saturday afternoon, he was puzzled because he couldn’t find his lower dentures. Mom was poking around in every nook and cranny of their house to find them. I asked Dad where he had been working. I got the rake and headed for the forklift. Dad was yelling to me out the front window that he didn’t have his teeth at the forklift, so I didn’t need to look there; meanwhile, Mom came outside to give me a run-down of all the places where she hadn’t found his lowers; and just at that moment Suzanne called from Ogden, needing something. My dogs circled my feet, wanting me to throw the ball for them. My head was full of all these voices. I answered the phone and said to Suzanne, “Whatever it is, handle it. I can’t talk to you right now because I’m busy raking the gravel for Dad’s dentures. Click.” Thus, the following line was born, and I forever added it to “Saturday:” “We rake the gravel, and look for Dad’s teeth,/so we can be ready for Sunday.”
I did, in fact, find Dad’s lowers in the gravel under the forklift. My instincts were correct. He had put them in the chest pocket of his overalls while he worked, and they had slid out of the pocket as he tinkered. Suzanne later told me she thought I was drunk on the phone, because it didn’t make any sense to her why I would be raking gravel to find Dad’s teeth. Like any really good story, it didn’t make any sense at all. Of course it didn’t make sense: It was true!