Dear Natalie,
I’m writing to you from seat 1F en route to Calgary. After posting that note for your birthday, I received so many lovely messages including memories of our parents, with our neighbour Melanie reminding me of mummy’s love for Neil Diamond. Fuelled with that, I decided to watch the movie Song Sung Blue featuring his music. I glanced over at my seatmate’s film and there was a scene with a newborn baby in an incubator with concerned parents looking on with desperation in their eyes which of course had me imagining our parents with you. If you knew me, you’d understand that I’m already a blubbering mess in this seat with the flight attendant probably thinking that I’m heading to Calgary for a funeral when in fact, it’s a wedding.
Music has so many wonderful and significant memories in our family. I’m wondering what songs they would sing and play for you? What music was in the cassette deck when they drove you to the country?
With our mum, it was country music. Lawd! She loved Kenny Rogers and it took me decades to learn that his duet with Dolly Parton was ‘Islands in the Stream’ and not ‘Island Industries’. Semantics.
Our dad made the best mix-tapes and it must be said that country was definitely not part of the mix. I tell this to everyone, but he proclaimed that ‘Africa’ by Toto was the greatest pop song ever recorded.
Aunty Everlyn and I would sing along to the soundtracks of Cats and Phantom of the Opera when she dropped me to school in the morning.
But some songs have definitely written themselves into my nervous system.
When ABBA’s Super Trouper or Air Supply’s Lost in Love comes on, I’m right back in the living room at Ebony Glades with our ailing mum lying on the couch. My nine-year-old self had learned to use the record player so I’d put on an album from the ones that I could reach on the shelf. They were organized alphabetically so I never made it past Air Supply.
It’s the music that reminds me so much of her. In particular the song Chiquitita, whose words describe what I now understand as the melancholy that she lived with, likely because she missed you so much and was also faced with her own mortality.
By the first chorus of that song, I am inconsolable.
It’s funny that I can’t name a favourite song of Dad’s and never heard him sing, even with his reference to Africa. But he was very much an audiophile with the necessary stereo components and speakers to fill the house with songs that would transport you. I remember him going to a record store in Half-Way Tree where he’d chat with his friends behind the counter and leave with a handful of records. When CDs came out, he had a monthly subscription. If Dad knew there was a song that any of us in the house liked, it was automatic programming that he would obtain that album for us. That was his love language.
The cruel irony of life is that for a man who loved music and melody so much, he would end up losing his hearing. On one of his few good ‘ear’ days when the decline started, I watched him arrange speakers in a circular formation around him where he sat to optimize the sound. He listened to albums so loudly it was deafening, but I knew he was trying to absorb as much as he could one last time. What a beautiful noise.
We’ve lost the art of making mix-tapes, but here was my attempt for him. For his funeral, I made a playlist of the songs that I think he would have wanted:
In the same way that I link songs to our loved ones, I’ve often wondered what song I’d link to you and without a doubt, it’s Peter Cetera’s ‘Daddy’s Girl’…
The feedback on sharing more about you has been incredibly encouraging, my dear Natalie.
I don’t want our world to be erased, but let’s sing a new song, Chiquitita.