The dream dreamed that it was not a dream, unperformed task piled upon undone task til they are all-surrounding, heavy as a bag of wet quilts. In the old days we wrote these on ribbons many miles long, in long hand, while trains rattled and tramp steamers tramped, people embarked, grim yet hopeful.
Our mothers were alive back then, given the gifts of long lives, gifts they many times fretted over and complained about. But when the lights went down, and the orchestra throbbed to life as the stage lights came on, their hearts always soared, giddily gulping air as the vault of the sky opened.
“I can’t hear a melody without someone singing it,” my mother, a lifelong lover of the Opera, confessed one day when I’d been unable to completely hide my dismay that she hadn’t recognized Stardust when I played it on the guitar. I learned to conceal my dismay out of love, and trying to protect her in some small way. But sometimes dismay can’t be hidden completely.
“Until I hear the singer start to sing, I really can’t tell what the song is from just an instrumental melody,” she explained.
I was shocked to learn this (though relieved it was no reflection on my guitar playing), because she sang tunefully. I’d learned the melody of Mairsy Doats from her renditions in the car, probably Swingin’ on a Star too. She would join in to sing “I’m An Old Cowhand” til the end of her life, whenever I struck it up on the ukulele. We sang it for her at her memorial at my father’s grave on that hot summer day in 2011.
My father, also a fair singer, also with poor control of his emotions sometimes, and a tendency to snap, would eventually snap at her from the drivers’ seat with a carping comment and she’d clam up. My sister and I would continue our battles in the back seat and there’d be a heavy, brutal silence in the car, or the radio would blare news.
Funny, to think how well they both sang, that they always both claimed to have no musical ability. My father was always self-mocking, self-excoriating, really, when it came to his voice, but had impeccable taste in music and an ear for truly great tunes. He loved Sam Cooke and Bill Kenney and other soulful singers, and he’d deliver his four or five note riff of each selected killer melody with style, off the beat and perfectly in tune. He loved the crooners, the hip ones. I wasn’t surprised to find out after he died that he’d loved Bobby Darin’s singing too.
“I’ll never hear Joe sing again,” my mother cried one night over the phone, when the final chemo was done and it was only a matter of time now before a twenty-three year run of relative good luck with the cancer finally came to a bad end. Joe came by after I told him that, and we looked through some songbooks. Picked out any we thought my mother would particularly like, or that otherwise struck us as beautiful.
September Song, Stardust, Are You Lonesome Tonight? We played through them and a dozen more, Joe reading from the computer monitor as I followed on guitar, reading chord charts penciled into small books. Put some reverb on us, panned us slightly to get a nice stereo separation, it sounded pretty good. Then I added a second guitar and, on a few, a little keyboard pad. Joe was backed by a spare trio, or sometimes a guitar duo.
I brought the CD to Florida, played it over crappy little computer speakers for my mother who was sitting on the couch, off to the side. She sat through it quietly, smiled a few times, but without great excitement, then smiled again when I asked what she thought. She said “eh….” and apologized for the disappointment I was feeling, thanked me for the attempt, told me she really appreciated it and how sweet it was of us to try, and all that.
It don’t remember if it occurred to me to tell her right then to listen to it through her iPod headphones, I’m sure I probably did have her listen to it at least once that way before I left Florida. I left the tunes on her iPod when I went back to New York. I spoke to her thirty or more times in the next month with no further mention of the songs.
“Oh, the most amazing thing happened to me before, this afternoon,” she began enthusing in that Bronx way of her’s, many weeks later, “I just heard the most beautiful music on my iPod, I don’t even know how it happened, how it got there. I was lying on my bed, I put the iPod on and suddenly there was Joe singing!” and she began to kvell, as they say.
Joe has a great voice and my mother always loved when he’d sing opera to her. She probably hadn’t heard him singing popular music before and she went on about how beautiful his voice was.
“What did you think of his backing band?” I asked her, when she was done. She was perfectly happy with them, who were they?
“Me,” I said, casually, told her I was so glad she enjoyed it, reminded her of her first reaction, told her about stereo and the fine sound quality of a properly mixed digital recording through headphones, and we went on to speak of everything else.
One of the great memories of my musical life.
