Summertime, When My Voice Was Squeaky and Wheezy

A remembrance of my late and ex-mother-in-law

I’ve often said that I want to come back as a singer in my next life. And I’m going to step on Sherry McGuinn’s post about the prompt Summertime from Marla Bishop to resurrect a memory that almost allowed me to tune my pipes in this life.

I was once married to a musician who inherited his mother’s musical genes. She was a pro, having sung and played the violin in concerts and studied with notable voice teachers and conductors.

I lamented to her when our daughter was an infant, that I wished I’d been born with a voice. She insisted she could teach me to sing, and we worked out an arrangement where I would pay for someone to do her ironing in return for singing lessons.

She asked what I wanted to sing. I suggested an aria from Handel’s Messiah. I mean, go big or go home, right?

Syliva suggested I cool my jets and start with something in my range. Three Blind Mice would have been appropriate as I look back on it, but she was kind that day. She pulled out the music for Ira Gershwin’s classic, Summertime.

Now, let me make something clear. I may not have a talent for performing music, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have music in my soul.

My mother taught me to sing Chatanooga Choo-Choo when I was a toddler and we danced to it in the kitchen because it was her favorite song during the war.

I’ve also been told I broke up my uncle’s wedding about the same age when I dashed into the aisle and busted a move when the organist began playing the wedding march.

So, yeah. I love music as much as I love the air I breathe. But at age two or three, as soon as I heard some syncopation, you couldn’t stop me from breaking out in song. Growing up, I remember hearing my mother humming as she did her housework, except when she wasn’t. But that’s another story.

She had her favorite songs, and though she hated housework, she performed her tasks daily and kept our home spotless, amusing herself by listening to soap operas on the radio and singing to herself as she dusted and mopped.

I’m sure my father, an Irishman to the bone, loved music as well. Because, well, he was an Irishman to the bone. It’s a requirement, like drinking Guiness, though he was as shy as a butterfly, and I never heard him utter a note.

So I’m sure I came by my love of music as honestly as my daughter’s father did, if not the talent to produce it.

Our star-crossed union had its memorable moments. Apart from the birth of our daughter, whom we both loved — I’m sure he still does somewhere up in the cosmos, music was our best mode of communication.

He introduced me to classical music, and while Bach was an acquired taste, when he broke down counterpoint and ground bass for me, eventually, I became as much of a devotee as he was.

Our best moments were spent listening together to Beethoven’s Ninth, Handel’s Messiah, the Mass in B Minor, the Orchestral Suites, chorales, Glenn Gould in person, Wanda Landowska in recordings, communicating our love through the music in ways we couldn’t with language.

When I was pregnant with our daughter, we saved our pennies and drove into Tower Records in San Francisco and bought Bach on the Oiselière and Deutschen Grammophon labels, likely now defunct, as many as we could afford. We would listen to flute and harpsichord sonatas on lazy Saturday mornings in bed, planning our life with our baby, happy as we’d ever been, bound as much by our love of music as our love for each other.

So when his mother offered to teach me to sing, a year or so later, at first I demurred. I have no voice, I protested.

Nonsense, she said. Any fool can sing.

I guess she meant me, so I jumped at the chance.

She said I had a “small” voice with a wide range. I was a soprano who could hit the high notes, but they weren’t pretty.

Not yet, she encouraged.

But the trouble with testing out your voice after so many years of just singing in the shower because you live with an accomplished musician — he paid the hospital bill for our daughter by playing the piano in a pizza joint on the weekends, throwing in an occasional classical hit — is the wincing when you practice.

He was delighted his mother wanted to give me lessons, but at twenty-one, I had a lot to learn about life and marriage. And that husband.

I suppose I practiced, as my mother had, doing my dusting and mopping. But when he came home from work, I wanted to show off my new skills.

I’d run through my latest success. Hitting the high C (or whatever) in Summertime. And he’d hold his ears in mock horror.

I suppose he was just making a joke at my expense, and I was too sensitive. A common complaint about each other that came up way too often in later years. I think we both came to regret that, but at the time, I lacked an important component that would allow me to continue my musical career.

Confidence.

At two or three, I could sing and dance in my mother’s kitchen or my uncle’s church wedding and sail along on the applause, thinking, I guess that I was talented, when, in fact, I was just cute.

By twenty-one, I’d learned the difference. Though my husband’s mother encouraged me to continue, I convinced myself I was wasting her time.

I got through a portion of my favorite aria in the Messiah, and most of Summertime before I said, enough.

I look back on those mornings, standing next to Sylvia’s piano, experiencing a taste of what it must be like to open your mouth and have a sound come out that transports all who hears it to a time and place that is pure joy and pleasure.

I’ve put in my order for my next life, and top of my list is still the ability to sing. But along with it now is another quality that I know is even more imporant. Without it, talent means nothing; with it, anything is possible.

No, it’s not confidence, it’s perseverence.

Eventually, I learned to stick with things, to go after what I want. Sixty years later, I call myself a writer, something many decades ago I never thought possible.

If I’d stuck with my lessons, I’d probably have gotten much better at my cover of Summertime, and who knows what else.

But I’d never have come close to my idol. Of course, few of us have.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading.