How I thought It Would Be

Pin It I feel that I need to preface this post with the following.

Set your way-back clock to 9 years ago. My brother and I were both attending BYU – he before his mission for one semester, and me just having completed my degree and readying to start my first year as a certified schoolteacher.

It was a Sunday evening. We sat in apt. 210 of Centennial. I plucked away at the strings of my dad’s old 12-string guitar, and a set of chords kept repeating themselves underneath my questing fingers. Again and again these chords played, and a picking pattern emerged, filling the room with the sweet tones that that old guitar could give.

My brother, reading something for one of his classes—or perhaps just the newest Harry Potter book –stopped what he was doing, and started to hum a melody.

What happened next could only be described as magical. We had a song.

No words. No lyrics. Just a tune and some chords.

Over the next hour we wrote what came to be known as “How I Thought It’d Be.” We then recorded it…either through a set of headphones made into a makeshift microphone into an old computer, or by using our answering machine—I simply can’t remember which.

Over the course of the years, I started to save files onto hard drives, and I threw away a lot of disks; I couldn’t find the file of Yancy and me singing our song. I thought for sure that this particular disk was one which made its way to the trash heap, and was now buried deep in the earth, as part of a landfill.

Until today.

I found a disk; written on it in my all-to-familiar hasty scrawl it said, “Songs with my brother.”

I slipped the disk into my laptop.

From the speakers poured our song. The one we wrote and recorded. I can’t remember if we’ve sung it since that day we wrote it, but a friend of mine recorded a version of it in a studio after Yancy had departed to Nevada for two years, and I had moved across town.

So, today I present you with the song my brother and I wrote nine years ago. It is the original version with the hiss and the poor quality you’d come to expect from two poor college students.

And it still reminds me of how life could be…



How I thought It Would Be
Jason and Yancy Zimmerman


There’s a road somewhere lost in my past
Dusty dreams echoing in my head
Times gone by, days of carefree hearts
There’s a place, way back far in my mind.

Standing tall holding her hand with mine
I act brave, leaving for the first time.
I say goodbye, tears on the windowpane.
Feel my heart, with her it will always stay.
(with her it will always stay)

Keep hanging onto dreams of my old home,
Back when I thought I never would grow old,
Things were perfect like a summer morning…

Time goes by, by like the Autumn leaves,
Memories of how I’d thought it’d be.
But for now, I wish I could make it change
In our hearts, I pray that we are the same.

Softly falls the gentle winter snow
Iced inside warm hearts need to know,
Of the love, of family oh so dear
In our hearts, we need to know they’re near.

Keep hanging onto dreams of my old home,
Back when I thought I never would grow old,
Things were perfect like a summer morning…

I stand outside the home that’s no longer mine,
feel the breeze, the same blowing from my mind.
I wish the thoughts of those days would not fade
As I grow old the world turns to gray.

Keep hanging onto dreams of my old home,
Back when I thought we never would grow old,
Things were perfect like a summer morning…

We keep hanging onto dreams of our old home,
Back when we thought we never would grow old,
Things were perfect like a summer morning…

Then it changed without a warning.
Then it changed without a warning.