I remember some of those bright red and yellow records, too [from the previous story].  I think some of them were even my mom’s that we still have at her house.  She plays her old Woody Woodpecker records for my kids now; they think it’s awesome.  The treasured possession I was going to talk about is my banjo.  I’d wanted to learn to play the banjo for a long time but I kind of never got around to it, and when my family was living in Boston for two years, the kids and I went to this family choir there called the Newton Family Singers that had started up just a year or 6 months before we moved there.  And it was the first time I had heard of an intergenerational choir like that. And one of the organizers, Andy, was some sort of high-power lawyer in Boston, but loved folk music, and in particular, I think he was really inspired by the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?—the music in that movie.  And he had taken a bunch of lessons and learned to play quite a few folk instruments, including the banjo.  And one time I mentioned to him that like, “Oh yeah, I meant to learn the banjo, but then I never have.” This was toward the end of our time in Boston, and he and the other leaders of that group knew that we were moving back to Iowa and that I was thinking of trying to start a family choir here, and he said, “You should do it! You need to learn the banjo! In fact, I have like, three banjos—I’ll sell you one of them.” And I was like “Uhhhhh” And then it just came to me like this flash, like “With the banjo, you will lead them.” And I was like “Okay!” And so I went up to Andy’s house a couple times and he started showing me how to do the claw hammer banjo style, and it was very hard to catch on to it, but after a while I could kind of do it.  I still haven’t actually really learned how to play the banjo, but I can play it sort of in my own special way.  But it’s thanks to Andy ‘cause otherwise I would not have gotten around to actually getting a banjo, so I feel like the banjo is this tangible representation of the fact that that choir in Massachusetts has helped to sort of seed our choir here in Iowa City.