Sing Along

Last night, I sat down with two fiction writers and one painter to sing. There were two guitars, one banjo, and lots of sheet music. We started with some classic bluegrass numbers and moved into the blues and then some Gram Parsons country. Most of the songs I didn’t know, and I had to try and catch the melody from the painter, a soprano sitting on my right, whose voice sounded as holy as late afternoon light in the woods. I would fumble, and come back, miss notes, forget the melody, and come back again. When you’re singing with strangers, it can be hard to know where to look. Singing into someone else’s eyes is awkward and stagey, looking at the music the whole time borders on autistic. Most of the time, I stared at the music.

“Let’s sing Annabelle,” the painter suggested, a Gillian Welch song I wasn’t sure I’d heard before. And then suddenly, as the chords on the guitar began, I knew it, and it hurt. It was a song I’d walked around singing a lot during my six months in Phnom Penh, when the streets were relatively empty. I sang it about losing my sister Blair, long after her death, which had occurred five years earlier in Singapore. But five years is a lot shorter than the seventeen years that have now passed, and, as I sang, I felt the grief as fresh as it had been when I lived in Cambodia.

That usually happens with listening to music: you hear a Crash Test Dummies song on the radio, which instantly summons your first dance with a boy you liked, but I had never experienced that flash of body memory that comes from singing a song you haven’t sung in years, a song that you sang from a certain place inside of you before. To some degree, that’s the power of Christmas music, the evocation of a specific mood, sung only for a month or so every year. It felt derailing to sing that song last night, to have my sister Blair, and the missing of her, so close, and for no one else to know it. Anyone who saw me sing would have simply assumed it was a song I love. And that was also true of that time. No one knew how close the grief was, a silent harmony to my everyday. Of course, that was true of most of the Cambodians I was around, who had been ravaged by the Khmer Rouge, and lost loved ones. The sidewalks were crowded with all of our ghosts, and our hungry singing, calling them back to us.