Sacred Spring

It is a pleasant, leisurely drive, Etta James singing At Last on the radio as the Alabama countryside passes lazily by, gently rolling terrain and piney woods interrupted here and there by patchwork farms or the occasional traffic signal prior to entering yet another sleepy, southern town.

The driver sings quietly with her – I found a dream … that I could speak to, words he knew by heart decades before she recorded them, the resultant emotion carrying him backward to the birth pangs of his own dream – A dream that I … can call my own, the bittersweet feelings awakening with it a welcome diversion from the mental clutter that minutes before buzzed annoyingly in his brain, thoughts of preparation for the coming week briefly bowing to the hypnotic pull of memory and Etta’s sultry, soulful voice.

But even as he listens his mind is alive with the tangle of a thousand connective memories, making it impossible to enjoy Etta’s or any other’s music for its own sake without also recalling the steep debt he owes to his mama’s love and encouragement … the debt he will always owe her.

It began innocently enough as he studied Shakespeare’s As You Like It for an upcoming class, but something in the loving devotion of the old servant in the play touched him in a way it had not in earlier readings, his words unregarded age in corners thrown reawakening the debt and creating the urgency to both acknowledge and fully claim it.

I was conscious stricken, he wrote, poignantly expressing the emotional realization Shakespeare’s words had untimely invoked. But even as he explained the genesis of his realization, a sense of the inadequacy of words describing his feelings caused him to pause – his hand hovering above the page as his eyes slowly lost focus.

He could not begin again until something fundamental within his thinking had changed, his words – In the hands of most of us, language is a feeble and inadequate tool – softly invoking the deep and inarticulate feeling welling within as he slowly wrote.

That was one of the many reasons he loved music, it could be expressive in ways that words simply could not. This was not to say that he loved words any less, he had taught English literature for more than two and a half decades.

But sometimes absence speaks louder than any adjective otherwise might, the music in the phrasing – language is a feeble and inadequate tool – reawakening in the writer the feelings needed to express his debt even if it meant his only option was to describe his mama by what she was not.

I cannot recall ever having seen you do anything that I would consider cruel, he finally wrote, the image of her appearing again in his mind in an old reworked Army overcoat and with it the penetrating stare of the band director as she arranged to purchase a horn for him.

And such a horn! At the time it seemed the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, the joy of it experienced all the way into his little ten-year-old bones.

But so many times before she had advocated for her children when they were not present, the memory of this event all the more important because he was allowed to witness it – to participate in an act of motherly love and sacrifice – the image of his Mama forever etched in his memory, the words he wrote so many decades later memorializing the poignancy of love in a single, searing moment.

There is only one unpardonable sin – deliberate cruelty, he wrote recalling a favorite quote. But he could not recall ever having seen his Mama do anything cruel, neither thoughtless nor inattentive cruelty – for she was ever attentive to others – nor cruelty generated in response to hurtful words or actions from another.

He could not remember anyone else he had known in his life who had not acted cruelly at some time – even if only in response to the cruelty of another.

In the background Etta’s almost forgotten voice sings – For you are mine … At last the music softly ending. For you are mine … but not only mine, he reflects, for the love in her cup overflowed – spilling into the community, changing lives of neighbors, friends, and strangers. How many childhood buddies had commented on the effects of her love in their own lives?

After naming the song and the artist, the radio announcer does something unexpected, saying – even though At Last is Etta’s signature song, she was not the first to record it as some of my older listeners might remember. He is not surprised when an orchestral version of the song begins to play.

He first heard it as a boy watching the movie Sun Valley Serenade, the famous Glenn Miller sound reminding him even more forcefully of the feel of the beautiful horn the first time he held it in his small hands.

Miller had created the sound in 1938 when he hired the saxophonist Wilbur Schwartz to play lead clarinet, using him to carry the melody while the saxophones which led in most of the ensembles playing at the time harmonized instead.

Many of the bands of the late thirties and early forties used their own distinctive devices in an attempt to set themselves apart: stereotyped intros, repeating musical phrases from song to song, or even trick rhythms.

But unlike the soaring clarinet solo’s characterizing Benny’s Goodman’s orchestrations or the pounding, voodoo rhythm of Gene Krupa’s drums, Miller’s music did not depend on his ability as a solo instrumentalist. His new sound made his music unmistakable to even the most casual listener, the rich, distinctive tone that only his orchestra produced a reminder to the driver of his own childhood desire to be a part of it – however small.

The music awakens deep and penetrating feeling, briefly transporting him to the squalid New York City he had known in the 1950s – rather than the one he had so often imagined as a boy – the big bands already beginning to disappear and the opportunity for profitable employment as an inexperienced musician disappearing with them.

Still, he managed to play more or less for nine years, performing with Billy May among many others, the composer and arranger most associated with Sinatra’s music in the fifties and sixties. He too met his soul mate in that magical city; he too realized in time that his innate talent and determination to excel were unworthy of the scale of his dreams even if they did on occasion carry him to surprising heights.

But he is not so sentimental to remember the sweet without the bitter that followed, his first stab at nonmusical employment after nearly a decade exposing the true length, breadth, and height of human despair hidden within the dark tenements of the city.

It was hard enough letting his childhood dream die, but even his own suffering as a sickly child growing up poor in the South had not prepared him for the squalor and futility he witnessed first-hand working for the welfare system in New York City.

After three difficult years he returned to school to begin a lifelong fellowship with the English language that introduced him to Old English writers Chaucer and Dunn as well as reviving his passion for Shakespeare and the great Southern story tellers Twain, O'Conner and Faulkner.

But the old South that Faulkner penned had largely vanished, the languid and sometimes discordant music of his prose invoking the clapboard shacks and sacred spring of his earliest memories, at times with greater power than he experienced when driving under the old railroad trestle on Young and onto his mama's stony drive.

Though he had eventually settled in the South to teach English at a university in Alabama, his life and experience in the wider world had created a hazy boundary separating himself in a very real and invisible sense from the home of his youth.

The old fierce pull of family blood worked on him much as it did on his other siblings, but even so he was never fully at home there as a mature man. Faulkner’s stories bridged the divide between his adult psyche and the spirit-land where his childlike soul once dwelt, his words reawakening the lost boy within the man in ways that nothing else could.

Reflecting on Faulkner's novel, The Sound and the Fury, he remembers the line but then time is your misfortune, playfully imagining himself breaking the glass on his watch face and twisting off its hands.

Ask me for anything, anything but time, he thinks, his eyes roving across the fresh green of the fields on this bright March day, his soul relishing the languid passing of seconds and minutes.

As a boy he had loved telling stories like the ones he heard his elders recount lazily as they sat on their porches, the rickety eaves shielding them from the glare of the hot afternoon sun. Since he did not have the life experience that informed the stories they told, he began to make them up, the stories popping into his head almost as quickly as his mouth could get them out.

He remembers sitting in the barber chair and making all the barbers laugh as they paused to wipe the tears from their eyes, the long scissors temporarily suspended shakily above their heads while his brother Jay Dee stared at him with wide eyed terror and disbelief.

Eventually his reputation spreading the school principal asked him to tell some of his stories to the entire school, kids sitting on old folding chairs in the hot and humid gymnasium as he spoke, the teachers fanning themselves when they were not doubled over with laughter.

Jay Dee was the only one present who knew the truth, his body slipping lower and lower in his chair in fear of his brother’s almost certain exposure. Some of the stories he had told before, but many he simply made up on the spot, his brother sinking still lower, expecting at any moment someone to yell, aint you Cee Dee’s brother? and demand that he get up and tell stories too.

But the stories kept coming one after another when they popped into his head, pop, pop, Pop! the teachers and children howling with waves of laughter, his brother’s head finally coming to a stop just below the top of the chair back because it couldn’t go any lower without his body slipping onto the floor.

But a haunting ballad beginning on the almost forgotten radio his thoughts momentarily pause, his fingers turning the dial upward to better hear Louis Armstrong’s unmistakable trumpet play Gershwin’s classic ode – Summertime.

He is surprised to feel tears welling in his eyes listening to the ethereal beauty of the greatest trumpeter who ever played, his horn reawakening – even if only for a few precious moments – the sound of birds and cicadas in the summer when he was a boy.

But drawing nearer to his mama's home, he remembers her ongoing struggle with dementia. He fears confronting the confused silence and vacant stare rather than the animating power of reawakened memory.

Most of all he fears that her warbling and crackling voice will no longer awaken the sacred springtime of his youth even as Satchmo’s siren trumpet plays and the Alabama countryside glides by, the car’s driver a child again for a few miles more.

Mikeydred March Dollar Prompt In like a Lion out like a Lamb