It’s uncanny. When I stop to pay attention, there it is! A sweetness, a memory.
I sat down to a cup of tea and clicked the tv to stream some music while I finished writing holiday cards. Pat and I composed a handful of haiku that summed up the monotony of the year as part of our greeting. My favorite was one we had written from Mocha called Dog Days: I need alone time / two mommies all the damn day / how do I tell them?.
With the remote control in my hand, I looked toward the screen and pondered the Artists page. What did I feel like? Pat and I had listened to holiday music the previous weekend. I’d had my fill of Rudolph, snowflakes, and ting-ting-a-lings. Terrance Blanchard? Not today. Alicia Keys? Not today. Patty Griffin? Not today. My eyes fell on a duo I recognized from long ago. Them, I thought as I pressed play.
In seconds I heard the song meant for me. “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson / Jesus loves you more than you will know / Whoa, whoa, whoa.” With clear pitch and a sense of conviction, these guys were telling me something I needed to hear. My synapses popped like firecrackers. Pow. Pow. Pow.
I’d received the last electronic proof of my manuscript from my book coach earlier in the day and had balked at the thought of rereading the story again so soon. Hadn’t it only been a couple weeks since I’d read the two-hundred-and-sixteen pages for the dozenth time? The dozenth time of asking myself when I reached the end if what I had written was true?
I hadn’t wanted some of it to be, but the mix of embarrassment and exposure that I felt assured me that it was. True. From the back of the auditorium in my mind, a heckler stood and shouted, “Late bloomer!” as he denounced me with forced landings on each consonant. Wait, that guy looked a lot like my father. I squeezed my eyes together to reset. He’s right, of course. Some people get there sooner, to the Almighty Truth. At eight or sixteen or thirty. Not me. I let fickle and foolish be my way for longer than I’d like to admit. I was just another messed-up white chick who finally, by a stroke of luck, got to the bottom of herself. And, no, my life wasn’t that hard, compared to what it could have been, but that freight train of thought devolves uselessly into self-deprecation. “Stop it,” I chided myself. “Don’t go there.”
Time passed and I heard“The Sounds of Silence” and “Feeling Groovy.” Another tune began and I nodded along with its melody. “I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail, yes I would, I surely would. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail, yes I would, if I only could, I surely would.” I remembered singing a set of Simon and Garfunkel songs when I was a junior in the high school choir at Robert E. Lee, the same year I joined the drill team and was stretching my legs to do high kicks they weren’t built for and polishing my used, too-narrow ankle boots, requirements for all us Southern Belles. Jade was in choir that year, too, the year after “us.” She stood a riser below on the angle opposite me, another section entirely. Her full, dark lips shaped words like a master potter would. She bent forward, pulled toward the instrumentation in a crystalline connection I envied. It’s uncanny, how a moment of beauty arrives like a long-lost friend, in the heart-aching measures of song.