I'm not always sure why people who can't sing well are so touchy on hearing that news. It's as if you had just told them that they had three stomachs. (Wait a minute. Someone did tell me that once and I have to admit the experience wasn't very pleasant.) Anyway, I had a sister-in-law who was not only tone deaf, but who loved to sing, full volume, along with the car radio. Her name was Betty and she came to live with us for one summer when she was seventeen. She fell in love with her brother's boss's brother, a French boy named Luc, who had a motorcycle and who taught her how to catch King Crab at the beach. That summer Betty sang along to all the songs that she heard on the stereo -- America, Judy Collins, Taj Mahal, Joni Mitchell, Loggins and Messina, Patsy Cline, Shawn Phillips, and so on. The more we teased her, the louder she got.
Two and a half years later, when Betty was home in Buck's County for Christmas on military leave (she was by this time a paramedic nurse), and because she had been remarking on episodes of mildly blurred vision, her mother took her for a visit to an ophthalmologist. One week later, Betty was in a Bethesda, Maryland hospital having her right eye removed along with a retinoblastomic tumour. The next day, in hospital gown and housecoat, she unhooked her I.V. and coerced her father into taking her out to the parking lot so she could practice driving. Her father said everything was fine right up until he turned on the car radio and Betty began to sing.
Seven years later, home again for Christmas on military leave, Betty mentioned that she had been having a recent pain in her right side. Again, her mother accompanied her daughter to the doctor's office. Seven weeks later Betty died of secondary liver cancer. She was twenty-seven.
Do you remember when you were a kid and mixed up lyrics? I've laid around and played around Thistle Town too long? I still do that. I sang Two Below, Honey instead of Tupelo, Honey for years before someone corrected me, and only last week I misinterpreted Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler's I went down to Donkey Town for I went round to Honky Tonk (which might be closer to Donkey Town than you think). I imagine that by now everyone knows about Gladly, The Cross-eyed Bear and There's a Bathroom on the Right (which jives well with my childhood memory of ...when I get to that Swami's door).
I could sing along the whole day through, whether I know the lyrics or not. Lyle Lovett, Cheryl Wheeler, Arvo Pärt -- bring it on. I'll sing in the shower, the car, the basement, the grocery store, the laundromat, the hardware store, everywhere but a doctor's office. (I'm an extremely anxious patient.) I'm pretty sure I even sing in my sleep. I'm not a great singer but I'm passable, and I have an appreciation, and patience, for a variety of styles and ranges of vocal talent as well as non-talent. But whenever I hear someone sing who is radically tone deaf and buoyantly chanting along in whatever key she or he can grab hold of, happily oblivious, or impervious, to those within earshot, and whether this happens when I am at the laundromat, grocery store, hardware store, or in a car, I think of Betty in the parking lot and I laugh out loud.
This is for all the lonely people thinking that life has passed them by.
Posted by Jennifer Coffey at 1:13 PM
[Archived] Friday, March 13
