He’s Irish, so I thought I’d ask him. “Do you know the name of this song?”

I began humming a lilting Irish tune, the one that’s been playing in my head for weeks because I’d heard it on the radio again. It was a song I was sure I had in my CD collection somewhere, only I couldn’t remember where, and I was too lazy to get the CDs out and check for myself.

“Hmm,” he said. “‘Londonderry Air’.”

I blinked. “‘London Derriere’?”

“Yes.”

“Derriere? Really?”

He was only half-listening to me. “‘Londonderry Air’,” he confirmed.

I was skeptical and almost absolutely sure he was pulling my leg. “That’s an odd name for a song. ‘London Ass’?”

He paused, rolled his eyes heavenward, and shook his head. “Air,” he clarified. “Londonderry. Air. Not London Derriere.” Then he burst out laughing and made a comment about how strangely my mind worked sometimes.

Okay, then. “Londonderry Air”.

The reason I asked was that I wanted to find the lyrics to it so that I could start working on creating an image based on them. The only version of the song I ever heard was instrumental, but I knew there were words; there had to be. So I looked it up on Google today and found it being linked with “Danny Boy”, another great Irish tune. I listened to various WAV, MIDI, and MP3 files and found that “Londonderry Air” wasn’t at all what I had in mind; apparently, “Londonderry Air” was just another name for “Danny Boy”.

“Hey!” I called out. “That’s not the song I asked you about!”

“Well,” he conceded, “I may have gotten the name wrong.”

So I dug into my CD collection and pulled out my old favorite: Forgiven, Not Forgotten by The Corrs. There were about five or six instrumental songs on it, and it was just a matter of playing them and finding out which one I wanted. As it turned out, the song I was looking for was “The Minstrel Boy”.

“For crying out loud!” I exclaimed when I found the lyrics to “The Minstrel Boy” on the web. “This is an entirely different image!” I’d been picturing a lone figure standing atop a very green Irish hill, and now it turns out the song is about a harpist who goes to war. What in Hades…?

Oh, well. Whatever. I began planning an image around the concept.

“Did you find what you wanted?” he asked later.

“It was ‘The Minstrel Boy’,” I muttered, “not ‘Londonderry Air’.”

“Ah.” He nodded sagely. “So it wasn’t ‘London Derriere’. It was ‘The Menstrual Boy’.”

When I froze and narrowed my eyes at him, he merely smirked and walked away.

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