When We Search for Obscure Songs

It’s been my first week teaching at the university level. It’s been my first week of classes myself, graduate school at my age, I don’t know… but a teaching fellowship and tremendous grant covering full tuition, a chance at more stability as a writer, a chance that this two-decade long plan in the works to build the days writing, painting, singing, could actually work…so I jumped. I am tired. I have not stopped moving. Not so much because of school, but because of everything that kept cascading in the in between hours. I drove over the Morrison Bridge last week, about 9 pm, after the last class of the day, an early October moon, the kind that is buffered in part by night clouds, the sky a movie set, the sky not sky, but a mood instead. this whole week has been a mood.

My first assignment to my writing class is for them to write about a memory of a place. Be specific, I tell them, merge concrete and abstract descriptions, sensory details, place yourself back in time, paint a picture with words, and take us there.

It’s ironic, really. Timing, and all. Irony twists time so all you thought you understood is upside down or simply wrong, and despite, days spill into a life…I wrote that lyric about ten years ago. The irony is in the call from my dad two days ago. My cousin Michelle has passed away. She is the first of my generation, this gaggle of Rian cousins. My dad keeps saying, “It could be one of you girls,” meaning me or my sister, Annie. He keeps saying, “My brother. I can’t imagine.”

And the memories come flooding back, like tethered light, hidden at night on the other side of the world, waiting for dawn or a reason to re-appear, make visible the landscape of the day. I hang up the phone and suddenly I am like nine, swimming with Michelle in her family’s pool in her backyard. Michelle was one of the coolest cousins. She had sort of a deep voice, even then, kind of raspy. sometimes she even smoked. She made me laugh. She was blond, and beautiful, and seemed worldly to me–a gawky, awkward, too tall, too skinny, glasses wearing, book worm who never seemed to know the right things to say, so most of the time I pretty much just kept my mouth shut. And watched my cousins. and wondered how they, like Michelle, could seem so at ease with who they were. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me back then.

There is this tune called Why Are We Afraid. It’s a Previn song, written for this obscure movie from 1959. I have the sheet music, found in my mother’s piano bench. She used to practice it. And I’m making a record for her in a couple months, of tunes I grew up with, that she loved. She’ll never hear this record, I don’t think, and even if she did, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t matter, but it’s for her, nonetheless. I noticed one day about a month ago when I was looking at this tune that there was a lyricist’s name listed next to Previn’s. But there were no lyrics on the sheet music. And none to be found online. And none in the Stan Getz library at Berklee School of Music. And none at the USC Cinematic Arts Library.

And on the day I find out Michelle has died I get an email from one of my musical singer heroes. Somehow my request has wound its way to him, without me knowing it. I think it’s because of my new best friend at the USC Cinematic Arts Library. But this person–we’re talking Lincoln Center, Broadway. Big. And he’s emailing me, gawky still, former glasses wearing, never knowing the right things to say, me. And he’s found this tune for me. And I don’t know, it’s ironic. timing and all.

The tune goes, “Why are we afraid? Afraid to face the way we feel. We could have it made, instead of asking, is it real? Who’s to say if the way we love is wrong, love today, and tomorrow sing a sorry song. Why are we afraid? Afraid to act the way we choose. Win or lose, long as the dues are paid, why are we afraid?”

It’s ironic. Timing and all. There is no time to be afraid. There simply is no time to be afraid.

A voice student is set to arrive on my doorstep any minute. And after that, my friend Jessie and I are going to the ballet. A voice student this morning brought me 15 pounds of fall-picked apples and tomorrow morning the house will smell like cinnamon and nutmeg and all the things that go into apple pie. My writing students, the papers they turned in, their first assignment…they wrote about losing parents, losing faith, losing hope, wrestling with psychological disorders, being abused…it is interesting, most of them, somehow went to some hard place. I don’t know why, I am reaching back trying to remember what I said or how I set it up, or if it’s just me that for some reason people go to that place when they talk to me. It happens more often than not. I am grateful for the sharing on that level, that kind of humanness, even if I don’t understand it. But these kids, in their first week of school at the college level, were not afraid. They wrote. They carefully typed up and formatted in MLA style like I requested. They turned their papers in on time. They trusted me with their stories.

And every time I start to cry about Michelle I have a kid who needs a meal or help with homework or to be tucked into bed or read to, a guinea pig cage to clean, a cat to feed, a student’s story to read or song to hear, a pie to bake, a ballet to watch, a moon to see. It is a life, that somehow continued on past those summers in Seattle, playing with the cousins, one of whom is now gone. But my life continues on, for the next hour I suppose, days I hope, years if I’m lucky. I think it’s luck. Today, at least, it is. Pure, unafraid, luck.