I was working my way to the counter in my friend Nancy’s kitchen to have dinner with her, her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend, when a bit of song squirted out of my mouth: “Oh, won’t you stay with me…” The reaction to the Sam Smith hit was instantaneous. 17-year-old Sydney said, “I love that song,” and Kyle seconded that emotion: “I love that song, too!” Sydney has grown up with the sound of music; her father had the most eclectic taste and the largest collection of music of anyone I know. And she has often heard me leaking song.
While my mother lay dying, she often lifted a feeble voice in song. When she was well, she used to request songs of me: “Sing ‘Three Times a Lady,’ Joni.” As children, my sister, brother and I sang in churches in the Pittsburgh area, and I was part of a “singing group” when I was in high school. In the hospital before she went into hospice care, my mother startled me when she burst into song: “What’s your name?” That was the song the young “Chancellors” sang at a talent show at my high school. (I had a soaring solo that might have changed my social status at the school.) I asked my mother if she had been at the concert. “Of course, I was,” she said. I was ashamed, because I could not remember her having been there. But I do remember singing “The Old Rugged Cross” at my grandmother’s funeral.
A long time ago, a co-worker cited me as one of the reasons why she decided to join the advertising department of the Famous-Barr department store in St. Louis. “I heard you singing in the halls when I was interviewing,” she said, “and I thought, ‘This cannot be a bad place to work.’” When I visited the photo studio in the basement of the store, I took full advantage of the echoing acoustics and sent “Ave Maria” booming out. As the boss of the studio, my coming was always foretold, and the behavior was always correct by the time my body caught up with my song.
Nancy, Sydney and I visited with Nancy’s mother-in-law after I had taken Sydney’s senior pictures this spring. Bill’s mother is 91, lives with her daughter, and is still vibrant and engaged in life. She was sitting on her couch and for reasons I cannot explain, I started to sing a song I learned in grade school, a song I often sing to young people. As I sang, Jane joined me: “How do you like to go up in a swing? Up in the air so blue. Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing/ Ever a child can do.” Jane was the first person I had met who knew the Robert Louis Stevenson poem. I’ve not been able to find out who set the poem to music, but I remember singing it in music class in grade school.
Music never stays inside me; when I was an attendant at a psychiatric hospital, the nurses, accustomed to patients dealing with auditory hallucinations, would see my lips moving from down the hall, and approach me with concern, only to hear me singing, softly. My three children — and my two grandchildren — have all heard it leak out. And it leaks from my children too, though more formally from my son, who writes, records and uploads his music to a digital media sharing service. I try to manage leakage, keeping it respectful of my surroundings, but when Jane joins me in singing my childhood song, the spillage becomes an accidental joy.