🧵Thursday Thread: When They Fight & When They Sing

Tell us about the last time you sang to yourself? And to another? Or were sung to? And if you can’t remember, tell us about that, too.

Recently, I was asked, as part of an interview, whether I sing in the shower or dance in the kitchen. Since I’ll be answering that question publicly next week, I’ll just say now that I often think of Dorianne Laux’s brilliant and gorgeous poem, “Death Comes to Me Again, A Girl” in which a young ghost muses aloud:

I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.

When they fight, and when they sing.

It says so much about the spectrum of a human life.

Once, when I was just falling dangerously into love with the man who is now my husband, he knelt in front of me and sang, a capella, the entirety of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis Presley. This man I eventually married had, and has, a beautiful voice. But, even if not, I’d have been spellbound.

No man had ever sung to me like that, ever.

The only other clear memory I have of being sung to is when I was very young, preschool and early elementary age, and my Nana and her sister, my great aunt Lala, sang “How Much is that Doggie in the Window” to me. I would beg them, especially Lala, to sing it again and again.

Later, I made up new words to that melody and sang them to Billie when they were a small child. It became a comfort to both of us, that invented song.

Later still, I sang endless versions of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to my five grandchildren to lull them to sleep when they were babies. I chose this song because I’m not a good singer, and it was, well, easy for me. And with the first granddaughter, that song became so intricately connected to dreaming that if I even so much as began humming, she’d start nodding. It was the sweetest, cutest thing.

So, when they fight, and when they sing.

There is definitely something about the human voice, about singing, and about the intersection of language and music. Consider this reflection:

… Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there,” writes Daniel Levitin “….weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep and college students studying with music as a background….” He continues to note that, ….music is and was [always] part of the fabric of everyday life. Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries. Understanding why we like music and what draws us to it is therefore a window on the essence of human nature….” (This Is Your Brain On Music, 2006)

So, friends, my question this week is also an invitation:

Tell us about the last time you sang to yourself? And to another? Or were sung to? And if you can’t remember, tell us about that, too.

We are ready to listen.

And I was going to say, “other than a birthday,” but then I thought, why exclude birthdays? Birthdays might be the only time some people sing to others. Every story is welcome.

Finally, thanks again for last week’s amazing thread on our relationships with our bodies. Your wisdom and sheer human decency humble me.

Love,

Jeannine

PS The photo is me celebrating my birthday a few years back, as my family sang. The photos this year have Z in them, and I can’t share his image publicly until Billie’s adoption is final, and, even then, we’ll have to see.

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