"...Forget the chorus, you’re the bridge
The words and music to everyday I’ve lived
There’s nothing, I wouldn’t give
For one more time, when I can sing for you...
Soft and low when the evening comes
Holding you, sleeping in my arms
I remember there was a time
When I used to sing for you
Do do do, do do do
Do do do, do do do
Do do do, do do do
I used to sing for you..."
"Sing For You", Tracy Chapman
Anyone who has ever suffered the indignity of listening to me belt out a tune will tell you that I can't sing to save my life, and I certainly can't sing for my supper.
But that's never stopped me from trying.
A few nights ago, around dinner time, I took the two babies out in the car for a quick trip to the market. We needed some bread and milk and I suppose we could have made it until the morning without the stocking up, but I felt like getting out of the house. I didn't have the energy to chase a three year old and a two year old around the yard or around the block, though, so I opted for loading them into the car instead.
I took a little detour, felt like driving a bit, with the radio on, so I headed out of town and out onto my favorite little road in the world. Knickerbocker Road. It runs past a little golf course and then out alongside empty fields and the occasional house, tracking the Hudson for a mile or two before turning hard right just where the Hoosac empties into the Hudson; then it follows the Hoosac out for another mile or two, with almost nothing but tall trees and corn fields on either side of the road.
Absentmindedly flipping through the dials, looking for the right song, toodling along at about five miles an hour, no one around, a couple of hundred yards before the road turns to meet the Hoosac, I look up and see a deer standing in the road, with an apple in his mouth. Don't know much about deer, but he strikes me as young, with antlers that look like the deer equivalent of the peach fuzz that sprouted unevenly on my face as a fifteen year old boy.
Evie spies him.
"A deer, daddy! Look!"
Riley points and yells, too.
"Deer! Deer! Deer!"
We roll to a stop. The deer picks his head up and looks right at us without moving from the road.
I look into the rear-view at the faces of my children. I see their smiles and think of how, without knowing it, they have saved me; I think of how many times, in the eleven months since their mother died, those smiles have sustained me and given me the strength, when I thought I had absolutely nothing left inside of me, to raise myself to my feet one more time.
The young buck finally moves off into the trees, and we drive on, slowly.
I keep on looking for a station playing a song that could strike the right chord, for a song that could sing to me.
Sunset neared, though the sun hid behind a curtain of gray. I have always had a thing for gray skies; my father always said it had to be the Irish in me, even though I refused to acknowledge that side of my heritage for a long time; a story for some other time, perhaps.
That gray light surrounded me and my children and it seemed somehow majestic and it brought me back to the myself of twenty years ago, to the boy who wandered this road and wondered anxiously and hopefully about what the rest of my life held in store for me, it brought me back to the boy moved nearly to tears at the achingly gorgeous sight of a shallow, slow-moving river, barren trees, and gray skies; that gray light made me think of some shapeless and hard to define thing I can only call hope, now, it reminded me of two days before Thanksgiving, and it gave me faith that no matter what it looks like today, it all has been and is and will be worth it.
I clicked on to a new spot on the dial, ninety-seven point seven, WEXT out of Amsterdam, NY. A deejay announced a new song from Tracy Chapman, "Sing For You." I laughed and thought, now THERE'S someone who can sing.
The opening chords of the song sounded out as we drove along. I looked back at Evie and Riley again. Evie sucked her thumb and stroked her forearm, as she does, and Riley just stared out the window, maybe looking for another deer; who knows what runs through the mind of a two-year old, after all.
"...I used to sing for you..."
By now, this far along the road of grief, I know how to recognize the moments that seem to reach up out of nowhere, out of relative tranquility, and shake you to your core. And I recognize that I have just crossed the path of such a moment.
The song reaches down into me and grabs a memory and sticks it right out in front of me, and suddenly I am driving along a different road, Route 7 in Vermont, somewhere between Bennington and Manchester, another twilight, a long gone twilight, and I drive a different car, and their mother sits in the passenger seat. It is April, 1994, and their mother is here from her home in England, visiting me for two weeks. In three months we will be married. We'd just spent a few days in Maine, we got there before the tourists did, and it seemed we'd had the whole state, the beaches and the ocean and the mist and gray spring skies, to ourselves, for a few days, and we'd had such a good time we'd decided to stay out on the road for one more night, even though we had virtually no money and, with the impending nuptuals, we should have gone on home, but we decided to find a place in Vermont for the night, one more night away from the bright harsh lights of real life, though, then again, we could easily make the case that those nights on the road were more real than the other stuff.
Driving in some other car, with some other radio station on, and a popular song of the day came on, Beck's "Loser", and I started singing along, at the top of my lungs, and Lauren feigned disgust, but she also found it amusing, because she knew I knew I couldn't carry that tune, or any other, and when the song came to the line, "choking on the splinters", I sang it like I thought Daffy Duck might, and it came out funny, or at least, funny to us, and I sang that line again and again that way, for fifteen minutes, and we laughed and laughed and laughed and drove on through the twilight, not looking for anything, just laughing.
"...holding you, sleeping in my arms..."
I looked back one more time at Evie and Riley. They stared out their windows at the fading light of this day, with the strains of this lovely song playing around them, and in the near dark they could not see how the tears streamed down my face, they could not see me at the mercy of a song I cannot sing. They sat there, because of the twilight on some road in Vermont a long time ago, they sat there because their mother would let their father sing to her, even though he did so badly, they sat there because their mother and father sang to each other in ways we thought they would someday hear, and now I don't know if they will hear, without her here, but either way, I will keep on singing, do do do, do do do, do do do, do do do, I used to sing for you, my love, and I will keep on singing, and maybe one of these days I'll catch a note just right and for a second or two, they will hear us.