Young Blues Eyes

Music was always around when I was growing up. I took it for granted, as one does the air. This omnipresence is modern. The spoken word was first broadcast in 1906, a year before my grandfather was born. Music was first commercially broadcast in 1920. Between Muzak and the transistor radio, music has since become inescapable.

After I began washing dishes seven days a week to pay for college, summers became just boring and intolerably hot. Perhaps Merle Travis wrote the song of the season for me in 1947:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. I remember a pleasant July morning when I was about four years old. The clear light shone green through the leaves, the heat of the day not yet arisen. We then lived in a big Victorian house, divided into apartments by Mrs. Bartholomew, our landlady, a kindly, imposing dowager who had, if memory serves, an equally imposing gray Packard in the converted barn out back. My mother was cleaning. She put a Sinatra LP album on the hi-fi. I don't remember hearing music before then. Probably I hadn't been paying attention to anything other than myself. Suddenly Sinatra was singing Cole Porter's "Night and Day," in one of Nelson Riddle's gently romantic arrangements (I began reading before I went to kindergarten: I devoured the album liner notes with the rapt attention given the Albany Times-Union or The Little Engine that Could). He must still have been young when he recorded it: he sang with rich, seamless, effortless grace, so unlike the strain and bombast of "New York, New York." Perhaps the contrast in his performance of those songs illuminates the difference between poetry and rhetoric in art.

I have heard nothing since so timelessly beautiful. And regardless of its lyrics, when I hear Porter's song, I remember only the cool, golden light of a summer's morning.

I also remember roaring up the Northway to Saratoga in 1964 with Aunt Judy in her fire-engine red Thunderbird, sipping her homemade lemonade (alas, there was no booze in my tumbler, which might have helped develop my nine-year-old character) while her radio blared "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer." We rushed across the newly opened bridge across the Mohawk River, which obviated detours to an old two-lane bridge. A few months ago, while browsing in a Village store, I ran across a similar tumbler. Now, it was part of a set: $60 for 10. I've outlived her Thunderbird and the cups I've drunk from are antiques.

The tradition lingered into my childhood that the only way for most people to enjoy music was to play it themselves. During the mid-60s, my mother somehow obtained an old upright piano, with huge piles of old sheet music under the hinged seat of the black-lacquered piano bench. The sheet music hadn't been cheap, either: the copies of "Peek-a-Boo," "Daisy Bell" (better known as "A Bicycle Built for Two"), "And the Band Played On," "The Bowery" and "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" had cost 50 cents in 1905, when the average weekly wage was $12.75.

We then lived in Mohawk, NY, out near Utica. Within 15 minutes of leaving the house, I could be in the fields north of town, where farming had begun dying out after World War II and suburban sprawl was a generation away. I often gazed with mindless pleasure into the endless sky. I have done nothing like that since. Yet I remember its utter delight, the sort of thing that comes only when one doesn't worry about making a living. The shadows lengthened one July afternoon as I plodded into the driveway from some daylong hike. I heard the piano as my mother sang yet another old song:

Come away with me, Lucille, In my merry Oldsmobile. Down the road of life we'll fly, Automobubbling, you and I. To the church we'll swiftly steal, Then our wedding bells will peal, You can go as far as you like with me In my merry Oldsmobile. Such old songs touched her, as other songs did not. Because she played them throughout the good old summertime, I remember them.

Yet I return to "Night and Day." I heard it last July, while seated on a friend's back porch in Albufeira, Portugal, with a gin and tonic (very large, very strong). The sweat of the day had cooled. My skin felt taut and warm, which meant I'd just missed sunburn. A breeze arose off the Atlantic, out of Africa, as the eastern sky deepened to indigo, and the song suddenly passed over the fence from a nearby house. All I knew was summertime.