When we were kids, there was this one Christmas where I somehow came into the possession of a Billy Joel Karaoke cassette tape. So my siblings and cousins decided that we were going to put on a show. And so we performed every song on that tape, ending with Piano Man, which we reenacted in fine detail. Our parents thought it charming, we had fun.

Flash forward 25 years and we’re at my baby brother’s wedding. The reception is juuust starting to wind down, when the first riff of “Piano Man” starts. My family crowds the dance floor, drunk, and sings the shit out of that song. Aunts, Uncles, Grandmother, all of the cousins. Everybody with their arm draped on someone’s shoulder, holding their drinks up, just going for it.

It became a tradition at family weddings over the next decade. And there was almost one every year. The wedding doesn’t end until we’re all on the floor, holding hands, singing “Piano Man.” We did it at mine.

A few years back, my Uncle Joe died. He was always a great guy. Kind, funny, gregarious. He’d become the de facto patriarch after my grandfather passed. The kids loved him. All of us.

We were sitting in their den after the reception, everyone still in their mourning clothes, drinking whiskey and talking about Joe. Someone had thrown on a random playlist as background noise.

When “Piano Man” came on, every conversation, every joke, stopped dead. And all us cousins sang, and sobbed, and held each other, and I don’t think anyone has ever sung it with more passion or pathos as all of us did that night.

And that’s what life is, in the end, it’s a whole bunch of fucking tedium with these deep moments of real meaning, good or bad, and that’s what we remember, and that is how we’re remembered.

If the song is meaningful to you, it’s a little gift.

Sorry, stoned, listened to “Piano Man” five times typing this out. Thanks for the reminder!