Songs

There was a specific feeling to my father being dead, a sense of him being gone from this earth. It was hot when he died; July in Alabama, steaming hot, and when I returned to Chicago the inner city baked and shimmered the way the fields had. The lake, billowing and bucking as I walked on the pier reminded me that he was not there and would never be again. Silence reminded me that he was gone forever.

It was not until I had my children that I could remember and bear to listen to the songs that made me think of him, songs he woke me up in the middle of the night to sing and learn, and get the words right, dammit. Six years old at one in the morning. Sit up straight. Come on, you KNOW this. Roddy McCorley, Finnegan’s Wake.

He would make us sing different parts of the song, harmonies. He loved Over the Rainbow. My part was always, “where troubles melt like lemon drops…. “ Once he suggested grandly that we should take our act on the road, kidding of course, but I was too young to know that.

“Do we have to use our real names?” I asked. My father sat down at the table and laughed until he gasped for air, and our mother sent us up to bed.

My father loved jazz, Irish folk, classical music. He HATED John Denver with a passion, which was a problem on long drives to Gulf Shores in the summer. The opening notes of “Rocky Mountain High” could set off a tirade that would last from Birmingham to Baldwin County. We would wait until he was out of town on business to get out our 45 of “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”

Sometimes my father would get us up to march around the living room with brooms to bagpipe music. More than once our house was jumping at eleven p.m. with several sodden but distinguished local attorneys, two young girls in pajamas and a frantic barking dachshund, circling the living room to “My Bonnie.”

I wonder how my mother stood it.

Those were the happy, funny times I remember, and I do remember them, before my father’s drunkenness turned sloppy and passive instead of engaging and jovial. Before the divorce. Before we lost our house, and my sister left for college and my mother and I wound up in a cheap apartment near a strip mall. Before I left for Chicago swearing I would never come back, ever.

I did return to visit, years later, after my father completed a treatment program. I was trying to get used to my new, sober dad, who was actually still quite funny and entertaining, although somewhat subdued. He picked me up from the airport and we drove to his house, and after I dropped my duffle bag and sat down he handed me a diet Coke and asked me if he could play me a song on his stereo.

He played me a duet, called “Perhaps Love,” by John Denver and Placido Domingo.

I stared in amazement as he wiped tears from his eyes.

I wondered if they had lobotomized him at the center without our permission.

Now it makes me smile to think of him finding beauty where he wouldn't have looked before, and wanting me to see it too.

I sing all those songs to my sons, the ones he loved. As I gave birth to my son Eden, “Over the Rainbow” by Brother Iz played in the background, on repeat, over and over as I pushed. The opening notes he sings, are, I am convinced, the exact sound of a parent looking at a child and wishing it could last forever, innocence and childhood and perfect uncomplicated love.

When my son came out we named him Eden. Eden for perfect, uncomplicated love, that doesn’t last, but you sure never forget it.

Eden. Eden McCorley Hill. And as long as I live, it is true. I will never, ever forget.