When I was in grade school in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, one of the many songs I learned stayed with me for some reason. I sang it to my children as they came along, starting in the early 1970s with my first child, and continuing with my second two in the late 1980s. When my eldest daughter started to gift me with grandchildren, I gave the song to them. “How would you like to go up in a swing,” I sang, “up in the air so blue?”
I’m always surprised when someone knows that song from my childhood. I sat with my friend’s husband as he lay dying from pancreatic cancer, and after his death, I would go with his widow to visit her mother-in-law. I sing without preparation or preamble, dropping songs into casual conversations and one day, while singing to my friend’s mother-in-law, she began to sing along with me: “Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing, ever a child can do.” When my two youngest children would visit with me in St. Louis Missouri, I would sing the song to them at bedtime, as if it were a lullaby. “Up in the air and over the wall, ‘til I can see so wide,” I would croon to the two of them as they snuggled together for the night. Recently, my second bride was singing the song to our granddaughter, and I was curious: where had she learned it? “From you,” she replied.
The song has been the background music to much of my life, and it was only recently that I found out its source. “The Swing,” a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, was published in “A Child’s Garden Of Verses.” I could not determine when the poem was set to music, or by whom, but I learned the song sometime in the early 1950s, and the only person to spontaneously sing it with me was at least 30 years older than me. (I don’t remember what she said about how and when she learned the song, nor am I sure that I asked the question of her.) But from what I knew of her son, I can imagine that it is likely that her life would have exposed her to “village and trees, and cattle and all, over the countryside.” As for me: I grew up in a city, not a village, and first saw cattle in a book.
Some time ago, I wrote a column about “The Effect Of A Poem”; perhaps this column is about the effect of a song. This song is pastural and unpretentious, its melody light and without challenge, a mnemonic that takes me back to a simpler, grade-school life, a song that I have scattered like seeds beneath the children and adults on the swings I encounter in life. And a song that my children remember.
In the Wilkinsburg library at the top of the hill from my brother’s apartment building, while trying to figure out how to get him to his many medical appointments, I got a text from my youngest daughter. We share spaces now, Lauren and me and baby Myah, who makes three, and Lauren has been busy crafting her dreams into reality; she built a swing set in the back yard of our shared space. “I did a thing,” her text read. The attached picture showed Lauren’s handiwork: a banner across my 15-month-old granddaughter’s swing set that reads, “How would you like to go up in a swing.”
I wept in the library, thinking of a song, and my granddaughter going “up in the air, and down.”
cjon3acd@att.net
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!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
— Robert Louis Stevenson