Music is uniquely powerful. I think many, if not most people feel that power and celebrate it in little moments in their lives. I'm not a rockstar singer--I dropped out of choir after eighth grade--and my Saxophone is gathering dust in my closet (and is probably also infested with mice, but that's a different story). Nevertheless, I think I am one of those people for whom music means more than for most.
I'm told that this is because of my grandmother.
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| Jane Eileen on the Left, Jane Eileen on the Right, Jane Eileens all around, late into the night, ba da ba da |
Grandma spent much of her time cleaning, crafting, fiddling about around the house, and unless she was speaking, she was singing. Sometimes, she would sing songs, but most times, she just sang notes. I have a vivid memory of watching her in the kitchen in Barrington, Illinois, her soft, wordless singing floating to me over the sound of the rushing tap, the sun catcher on the window in front of her holding colorful images of the birds she loved so much, in part because their songs matched her own.
My mother, also Jane, continued the tradition of constant melodizing, and in fact got a bachelor's degree in vocal performance. I remember nights as a child when I would wake from a nightmare and my mother would come in to comfort me back to sleep, and I would ask her to sing the Star Spangled Banner, which I called the star song. I thought it was a beautiful song, and I loved my mother's voice, and the combination of the two soothed many of my frightened fits. When I would listen to the radio or watch movies, I would sometimes hear a song so lovely, I felt the need to memorize it so that I could sing it to my own someday-children in their troubled moments.
When my mother and I would go to churches other than our home church--if we were out of town visiting family, or if we were attending a first communion, christening, or wedding--I would secretly hope that others around us would hear my mother's singing and be jealous of me because I got to hear it every day. I got to wake up to my mother singing along to her hymns as she read her Bible in the morning before work. I got to listen to her sing the harmonies to all the television theme songs. I got to be serenaded on my birthday. Everyone should have been jealous of me.
The moment I learned that not everyone sang as much as my matriarchs was, in fact, in a church. I don't remember what church, or when, but I remember looking around during the congregational singing and seeing dozens of people merely staring up at the stage, some bobbing their heads, some standing with an emotional hand in the air, but none of them singing. I remember that I tried it, right there. I tried to just look at the words on the screen as they passed, tried to not sing and just to listen. I enjoyed the experience of hearing all the voices around me raising up those words, but I did not enjoy not singing. The words were there, the music was playing, I needed to sing.
The moment I learned that not everyone sang like my matriarchs was, also, in a church. When I was in England, I weekly attended St. Thomas with St. Maurice with a large contingent of other Calvin students. One of those students, a great friend of mine, Hope, often stood near me during worship, belting out the words to songs familiar and not. Her voice, nothing like my mother's or grandmother's sweet sopranos, was, at first, jarring to my ears. I wanted her to be more on-pitch. I wanted her to be softer. I wanted her to sing as beautifully as the women I'd grown used to.
The moment I learned that the beauty in singing comes not just in the sound, but in the act, was not in a church, but in my mother's living room. At the time, this living room was furnished in thick, sound- and light-blocking curtains hanging in the doorways, several large plastic containers of towels and other hygiene products, and a heated hospice bed where Grandma lay for weeks, her Alzheimer's preventing her from sitting up or standing. It was a hot July in Chicagoland, but the air conditioning kept my mother, my aunt, and I all comfortably cool as we stood around Grandma's bed, in which, after a few more long hours, she would die. We held her hands, we ran our fingers through her still-thick, white hair. We sang to her.
White coral bells, upon a slender stalk
Lily of the valley deck my garden walk
Oh, don't you wish that you could hear then ring
That will happen only when the fairies sing
My aunt began the round. Like me, aunt Judith was raised with music in the air around her, and like me, she could not make it as beautifully as she wanted to. Then my mother, with her practiced and wonderful voice, joined. Their voices came together in a way families should, like at Christmas when Grandpa reads the nativity story to us, first from a rocking chair in the big Tree Room in Barrington, Illinois, and now from a television in my uncle's sitting room. Their voices made magic, and it didn't matter that one was clearly stronger than the other, or that one had a quaver to it that kept it from hitting every little note in the arpeggio.
As the song is a round, I joined in third, coming in just in time to be in unison with Judith, though I didn't know the song as well as she did. And now I was in the family too. And it felt like Christmas feels, like church when everyone sings, even off pitch, like the dishes in the kitchen with the birds watching. It really was a magic beyond explanation or description. She gave us our voices, and as we sat there around her, we felt compelled to give them back. We just couldn't not sing.
