From Sunday night...
Driving home with Becca today, I was thinking about how I
miss spending time with her when she’s at her Dad’s house and wondered if there
was still any influence of mine on her.
She’d just gotten her report card, and though she is doing very well and
is even reading above grade level much like I was at her age, some of that is
genetic, and sometimes I still wonder if enough Williams is getting into this
Lynch.
So, I turn out onto the main highway and as I go to turn
on the CD player, Becca asks if, instead of listening to the radio, we could
practice the songs she has to learn for her choir concert on the seventeenth of
March. I paused. Sure, why not? She hands me a piece of green paper with the
words to four songs typed on it. I
inform her that she’s going to have to sing them to me. One, I don’t have the notes on this piece of
paper. And two, if it’s dangerous to
text while driving, it’s probably equally hazardous to try to learn the lyrics
to “Boris, the Singing Bear” by reading them while driving up I55 at about
sixty five miles an hour when it’s windy… you get the idea.
This seems logical to her, fortunately, so she begins
singing about the bear, whose absence is noticed in the animal chorus during
his hibernation season. Cute, all five
or so verses of it. We try again, and
slowly I learn the song by rote, the best way I know how to learn a song. Then, she jumps to another song. Fiddle-dee-dee, apparently, a fly married a
bumblebee. Lovely. Also a cute song. She keeps changing keys as she sings, and I
am left wondering if the song is like that, or if it’s set in the wrong key for
her and she’s trying to find a comfortable one to sing in. I remind her we need to sing the first one
again a few more times as this is the first time I’m hearing them and I don’t
have it down quite yet.
As the long miles pass, we sing together, learning that
song and another about the happiest street in the world, and how it’s never far
away when you need it. I lose the urge
to switch to the CD. I am taken back to
the days of short but sort of long car trips in my childhood when my family
would sing to pass the time. Because
that’s what we were; a family of singers.
A Williams learns to sing before they learn to talk, and this little
girl is not shy about it. When told to
sing out, or slow down, or redo a line, she immediately does. In fact, she even learned a song I began
singing which I’ve always called “Whither Shall I Follow”, which is a round (a
canon, in musical terms). Much prettier
than “Three Blind Mice”, and she was ecstatic when she could finally sing her
part without my help AND against my singing the same thing at a different time…
And then we got to the final song on the green missive from the music
teacher.
It sounded familiar.
“I know a tropical island where the mango moon and banana sun shine, and
on this tropical island there lives a cousin of mine. Sometimes he lives in the water, sometimes he
lives on the land…” Wait a minute. Go back to early science lessons for a
moment. What lives both on land and in
water? An amphibian.
Does anyone else hear “Caribbean Amphibian” and see
Kermit singing with a couple geckos on Sesame Street in their head? This is not a new song. And I am singing at the top of my lungs now,
in my best imitation of a Jamaican accent, and she is laughing and singing
along. We sing all four songs,
especially that one, all the way home for a two hour drive. At dinner, her first non-song words are
“Mama, I love you. Daddy didn’t know the
songs like you did. I’m glad you sang
with me. Can we sing them on the train
tomorrow for Jason?”
Yes, world. She
may live the first twelve out of every fourteen days with someone else, but
this little child is MY daughter.
Descendant of the Welsh who, legend says, drown the babies who can’t
sing. There can be no mistake. And I have never been more proud of her. And yes, sweet Roo, I will happily sing about
a frog in a coconut tree on the green line tomorrow… if it makes you
smile. Crazier things have happened in
downtown Chicago, and they’ll get over it long before I forget the look on your
face as you fall asleep humming tonight.
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