Even though I still haven’t heard anything yet re grad school, and thus still have my old pal Magilla on my chest (this morning, he’s playing a leisurely game of solitaire ), today’s post is not actually about grad school admissions: Today’s post is about gratitude.
Yes, gratitude.
Last night, I went to go see a production of Mamma Mia! with my daughter and woke up this morning to one of the show’s songs playing in my head, “Thank You for the Music.” (This was a welcome change from the energetic drum solo from “Sing, Sing, Sing” which Magilla has lately been thumping out on my chest. But I digress.)
As I went about the business of getting ready for my day, the song played continuously in my mind. I borrowed the CD from my daughter and popped it in on the way to class, belting out the lyrics at the top of my lungs (and probably frightening drivers around me): “Thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing, thanks for all the joy they’re bringing; Who could live without it? I ask in all honesty, what would life be? Without a song or a dance, what are we?” Ahh, music. Is there anything better?
The show’s music, based as it is, on the songs of ABBA, holds particular significance for me. ABBA was, you might say, the soundtrack of my childhood. My mother was an enormous fan of ABBA, playing their music almost continuously. I remember so many times bouncing around the living room with her and my sisters, laughing as we all sang along to “Waterloo” and dancing with her to “I do, I do, I do, I do, I do.”
I watched her with a keener eye as I grew older and she, more often, sang along to those songs by herself. I wondered what long-ago starry night she was remembering as she listened to “Fernando”, experiencing those first thunderous realizations that my mother had actually been a whole and entire human being before me, with dreams and memories and a life that had not included even the thought of me. My imaginings often tended to the wild and dramatic–probably something I inherited from her.
Other times, there was no mystery as to what was going through her mind as she listened to a particular song. After her father died, I would often come upon her, standing silently in the living room, listening to the song “Chiquitita”: “You’re enchained by your own sorrow; In your eyes, there is no hope for tomorrow.” I remember on one such occasion wrapping my arms around her and holding her tightly as we swayed slowly to the music, feeling that song forever being imprinted in my heart as a permanent accompaniment to grief.
She was not the only one who turned to that song for solace. To this day, almost fourteen years since my mother died, I still play that song, and find my own solace in its message of hope and perseverance: “You’ll be dancing once again, and the pain will end; you will have no time for grieving.”
Every single one of those songs, recreated and reworked for last night’s performance, called to mind a precious memory of music shared with my mother. But this morning, I have added new memories, of sharing that music with my daughter. She squeezed my hand during “I Have A Dream” (“If you see the wonder of a fairy tale; you can take the future, even if you fail.”) We laughed and clapped at “Does Your Mother Know”. I am frightened by how she relishes the character of Tanya, the “Man Eater”. I think about the teen years to come with a barely repressed shudder and wonder what my mother thought when we listened to that same song so many years ago. Perhaps it’s better that I don’t know.
It is “Slipping Through My Fingers”, however, that undoes me every time, these days, and last night’s performance was no exception, especially when my daughter wrapped her hand in mine and laid her head on my shoulder. It was all I could do not to embarrass her and sob openly from the equal parts of love and pain that song calls forth, now that I am watching my own daughter growing up and slipping out of my life and into her own a little bit more each day.
Being filled up like that, through music, is something that happens to me quite often; music has always had a profound ability to move me physically. I remember as a child, listening to one of my mother’s friends sing “O Holy Night” on Christmas Eve and having goosebumps spring up and down my arms. Mom asked if I was cold. When I told her I wasn’t, that it was just that the music was so beautiful, she whispered in my ear that that was a gift, being able to be moved so by music.
Every time I find myself weeping from the beauty of Handel or joyfully belting out an ABBA song, I think of my mother’s words, about what a gift the love of music is, and I realize how lucky I am. “I’ve been so lucky, I am the girl with golden hair; I want to sing it out to everybody: what a joy, what a life, what a chance.”
So today, I am saying thank you.
Thank you to my mother (and my father, a gifted pianist and organist in his own right) for instilling in me the love of music, and for sharing it with me all my life. Thank you to my hubby, for the tickets last night, which allowed me to spend a soaring, magical night sharing special music with our daughter.
Thank you to my daughter, for being the next generation of girls in our family to dance, and sing, to laugh, and to cry to the music.
And to music makers everywhere, thank you for the music. “Without a song or a dance, what are we? Thank you for the music, for giving it to me.”
Maybe, if I put on a little Brahms, I can even get Magilla to take a nap.