Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

When you've taken a dear friend to the airport with only a three-quarter moon and a few stars in the sky, when you drive home alone through night-enveloped streets, it helps to sing: "Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been, Charming Billy?"

Darkness is the mood of inspiration. Suddenly, you're singing with the voice of your mother or father, ages ago in Charleston, South Carolina, with clacking palmettos in those long, languid summers. "I will be true, for there are those who trust me..."

And you're back at Girl Scout camp in the "foothills" northwest of Charleston, and Meta, the Scout of all Scouts, who stands at least six-foot tall in her sneakers, and sports long rippling golden hair, Meta is singing: "In a cottage in the woods, by the window a little man stood. Saw a rabbit running by..." 

You, suddenly, have become the rabbit--ears erect, nose twitching. And you're remembering a recent holiday including the kid-clan of your husband's grand children. Decent, the hard-working parents,  more than decent, inspired perhaps, but failing in one respect: the oldest kid, a boy about 13 wanted a pet. His parents who both work hard at jobs and at the even more demanding business of parenting, have allowed a small lizard, a gecko.

Darkness returns, and I am home again in South Carolina, with our first puppy, who lived with us for maybe three months before the little black and white charmer died in the night. My sister and I were heart-broken. Kudos to my parents, especially to my finicky Italian-American father, Leonardo, who refused a cat. "It will jump up on the table and that will be the end of it!" he thundered. Yes, thunder. His voice had a range from sweet morning dew to thunder and lightning.

We sang opera, my sister and I, dressed in our mother's fancy nightgowns, which she never wore in our presence. But then, my parents had been married eight years before I, their first child, was born. It was the Depression, after all, and both of them worked.

Singing in the dark of that 6 a.m. drive from the airport home, I find myself giving voice to all the joy that substituted for "things" in our Old Citadel lives. Wearing our mother's fancy nightgowns, listening to recordings of Lily Pons singing excerpts from the finest Italian operas, we girls discovered how fortifying it can be to gave voice to our own, immediate presence in a world that would open from fantasy to reality. My sister becoming an opera singer, and I? Well, poets are writers of songs too.