I was just reading Jonniker's entry and, remembering how my 16 year old self used to belt out "Benny and the Jets" played on, not kidding, an 8-track player, it made me laugh.
AND THINK, she said ponderously. *cue dramatic music*
I grew up in a house where my mom sang old Broadway tunes in the car and Judy Garland LPs competed with Three Dog Nights. But mom and dad weren't heavy into music as a badge, in the way some of my friend's parents prided themselves on their massive every-Stones'-album-ever-produced type collection. Children of the 60's? Technically yes, but when I begged to go to a Grateful Dead concert in 9th grade, mom asked me if they "were a nice band." Frankly, my strongest memories of music are from my mom singing as she played the piano – Amazing Grace, Greensleeves, all the songs from Camelot. Carousel. Oklahoma. My sisters and I must know every song in My Fair Lady. She sang in the car, softly while she tucked us into to bed, loud and cheerful in the morning to wake up the whole house with the world's most annoying "Oh What A Beautiful Morning!"
My own early music tastes ran similarly . . . earnest, I guess is the word. God help me if I didn't love every song our grade school choir teacher made us learn. I made myself cry over the truly treacly lyrics of "Oh Danny Boy" at age ten. And that old Mule Sal that helped build the Eerie Canal – a hoot, I tell you what. But somewhere along the way, I started listening to the radio, buying my own tapes and painstakingly writing out lyrics to Pink Floyd songs on lined notebook paper. Mix tapes for boyfriends, hours spent flipping through the CD cases at recycled music stores. And then the live music bug bit me hard. By the time I was a senior in high school, almost every weekend was devoted to seeking out some show, making pals with some musician in a band. I liked to talk record label shit and listen to music that began to sound more and more like noise. Jazz, ska, emo, 4AD, punk, new age – you name it, I studied it like the Rosetta stone.
In retrospect, my delving into music during high school was probably one of those stereotypical identity things you do. Sonic Youth was no Brigadoon, after all. And there was something proud about having this totally awesome thing that was all mine and a little foreign and a little anti-intellectual. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that when I got to Vassar and found an entire student body similarly proud and a little vain about music, dude, I started to lose interest. It didn't feel as immediate to me anymore, I guess. Sure, I could work myself into a full blown melancholy listening to Tori Amos on the train ride back to campus after visiting DK in D.C., but my mad acquisition of all things musica tapered off substantially.
Nonetheless, I still find that my mood is kicked up when I listen to my ipod on the way to work, or I push harder on a run when something awesomely bobalicious starts playing (Oh Brit-Brit, why you gotta be such a trainwreck?). And DK will never quite let me forget how I cried when reciting the lyrics to Hearts and Bones to him over dinner years ago. Paul, my heart, never change.
Sometimes I wish I was a scientist or had even a passing understanding of how the mind works, because music clearly lingers somewhere between the pure emotional center and the intellectual thread of the brain. I love lyrics, but it's the bumbumbum or piercing voice that makes me a little weak in the knees.
* * *
About three years ago, September 8, 2004 to be exact, my mom's brain aneurysm burst while she was undergoing surgery. We had been lucky in many ways – first, that she had gotten an MRI done the day before DK and I got back from our honeymoon, and discovered the aneurysm on her brain stem before it burst; second, that she and my dad had the ability and time to get medical opinions from some of the best neurosurgeons in the country, from Stanford to Mayo to Hopkins. And lastly, that even though most of them told her it was inoperable, she found a doctor in Houston willing to try a risky procedure that was crazy enough to just maybe work. And it did. The first time. On September 7th. We wrote celebratory messages to our friends and family, cried with relief. My dad, who hadn't slept in weeks, finally let his shoulders unbunch. She woke up and mouthed "I love you" to us and spent the night murmuring with my dad, testing herself with memory games and word puzzles, holding hands.
But the next day, after what we had hoped would be a triumphant MRI, the doctor told us that she needed an immediate follow-up surgery, that the coiling hadn't completely stopped the blood flow. And they wheeled her off, we waited again on the orange and red chairs, tired of feeling so knotted up, tired of the wait for her to be returned to us. We eyed the hallway anxiously. Finally, he appeared, still in his scrubs, tired and somber. It had burst while he was operating. They didn't know how much blood has leaked into her brain before he could stop it. She was on a ventilator and he didn't know if she would be able to breathe on her own. Wait and see, wait and see.
It was a dark moment. I sat alone in the sunshine outside with my cell phone trying to call DK in New York and crying by the fountain, holding my knees. Later, I found my dad, ashen, in a little room and he asked me in a shuddering, choking voice if I could do it. Please. Because he couldn't. If I could pull back and make the logical decision, if it came to that, to take her off ventilation support if she couldn't breathe on her own again. Because he knew he wouldn't be able to. I slowly nodded.
We waited some more. And thankfully, thankfully, she did start breathing on her own. We saw her, her head shaved, her skin very pale and tubes and IVs everywhere. She opened her eyes, though, bright blue, and blinked tears. She couldn't really talk much, much less form sentences. She could blow us kisses, over and over again, puckering up her mouth. And she could respond to very simple commands. It was hard to see – mom, the English major, the PhD psychologist, without her words. The doctor explained to us that it was impossible to know how much she would return cognitively, but her early responses were a good sign. There was more bad to come, a lot more, particularly that first night when we sent my dad to my sister's house to please, please sleep and my older sister and I stood vigil and made truly sick macabre jokes to each other and then an emergency stint needed to be put in and we had to give consent and make phone calls and finally hold each others hand at that horrible sound of a drill.
But a few days after that, when my uncle, her brother, was in town, and my cousin Elizabeth, we all went out to dinner to soberly eat and have some wine, happy that she was alive and there was hope, but so aware of the vulnerability of loss, of what was already irrevocably lost. Afterward, the whole lot of us went back to the ICU and surrounded her. She blinked at us, confused, like she was seeing us from under water. So we just talked to her, about childhood things and the dogs and her friends. Her eyes went from face to face, nervous, like she knew she was supposed to say something or respond, but couldn't or didn't know how. We mentioned that time she played Aunt Eller in Oklahoma and Samantha, my younger sister, started to sing, "OOOhhhhk-lohoma!" and, I can't explain it, somewhere a lightbulb went off. It was like her mind grasped onto that melody and understood it, processed it and she sang –sang! when forming the simplest of responses took minutes -- "Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain" and we all started singing with her, all of us around her bed, softly, "where the waving wheat, can sure smell sweet," and then louder, not caring that it was absurd or too loud or that there were other patients around, "When the wind comes right behind the rain! Ohhhhhhk-lohoma! Every night my honey lamb and I, sit alone and talk and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky." We finished, joyfully, defiantly, "Oklahoma! OK!" and left her to sleep.
It is one of my most cherished memories.
It was a tough year. Very tough couple of months as my dad relentlessly patrolled the hallways of the ICU and kept constant vigil by her monitors, sure something was going wrong, certain that something was missed in her care. I flew from Houston to my brand new home in New York and started in the new office the next day, flying back as often as I could. She learned how to walk again, how to feed herself, use the toilet. Learned to navigate grocery stores and social conversations. We all learned, in fits and starts, alone and as a family, how to mourn and move on. And god, today, she's doing great, really great. Yoga and book club and dinners out. Trips to Hawaii and planning Thanksgiving. And me, this kid who used to wear stupid t-shirts that said "Nobody Knows I'm Punk Rock" with my doc martins and who idolized Kim Gordon as the most awesome ultra-chick ev-ah, I can't help but think of good ol' Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! as the fiercest, most hard core, rallying song I've ever heard.
