Singing (my entry to THE SUN magazine)

Singing

It was New Years Eve, 1959. We were traveling a long stretch of highway, and my parents were singing.

After a few regulars we all sang together (“Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “She’ll be Coming ‘Round the Mountain”); after the usual tattling (“He’s on my side! Make him move his foot!”) we back seat riders would fall asleep. Then the love songs would start.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” they’d sing. Their harmony was the soundtrack of every road trip.

“This is something you should be awake for,” our father said, rousing us from sleep. “Right this very minute, a new decade is being born.”

With no seat belts to restrain us, my brother and I turned around and gazed out the back window of the Pontiac. I wanted fireworks,a bright neon light in the sky--something!--to mark the passing of the Fifties and the birth of the Sixties. But the only light on that dark two-lane highway that night was the beam of our own headlights.

I stayed wide awake for the rest of the trip, turning my memories of the Fifties over and over in my mind, saying my own private good-bye to my first whole decade.

Nothing changed that night, but we all agreed--the stars were brighter than ever before. When they began to sing again, their first song of 1960 was the one that reminded us of their stories of wartime romance. “I’ll be loving you, Always. With a love that’s true, Always.” We knew well that this was “their song”--a relic of a decade before we were born.

At the age of 80, our father died of pneumonia. A month earlier, his doctor had assured him he had the “heart of a forty-year-old.” A month earlier, I’d been playing the piano at their house, and he’d stood behind me singing, his voice as strong as his heart.

After the machines were disconnected and the lines on the monitor told us he was leaving, we stood in a circle around his bed, bereft. My throat was too tight to speak, much less sing.

But our mother, saying good-bye to the love of her life, held his hands. “It’s been a great trip,” she told him. And then--incredibly--she began to sing. Her voice was remarkably strong and beautiful. “I’ll be loving you, Always,” she sang. “With a love that’s true, Always.”

The nurses who had cared for him and hoped, along with us, that his lungs would clear, were attracted by the sound of my mother’s singing. They stood with us until the lines on the monitor went flat. One of his friends said, “He was a giant of a man.”

Even when he was unable to sing, she sang for them both. What I heard, what I’ll never forget, is the echo of both their voices, a harmony that I carry with me always.