By Rawlins Gilliland, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-515662.mp3
Dallas, TX –
My friend John Kubin once commented; when our life is ending, "We'll only have a handful of perfect moments" to look back on. He's probably right; those rarest idealized memories to exhume and examine. But my good-byes will be set to music I learned from my father, a Swing Era musician. Because, like all good movies, American lives have soundtracks that parallel almost any remembrance.
The American experience foments musical nostalgia; classics of the 20th century sung by icons of the era - Sinatra, Fitzgerald - remain alive as poignant lyrical expression. The American Songbook, arguably our most positive export, illustrates and illuminates our national character while helping create and perpetuate its emotional myth. Growing up, that music captured my imagination and encouraged me to dream. I became the most American of mutants: the modern romantic'. Music told me how a broken heart felt long before I suffered one, hearing that aching lament for love's loss, "What'll I Do". Or how kind love could be, hearing Irving Berlin's, "Always".
Once in New York, listening to Bobby Short at the Carlyle, I thought like a kid; if he never stops singing, would time stand still, suspended within this dream? Throughout that evening, I revisited childhood musical epiphanies; hearing Sarah Vaughan on the radio singing "Deep Purple" made adult life sound sensuous and alluring; hearing Gershwin's "An American in Paris", I yearned with obsessive desire to experience romantic adventure.
Music told me that seeing life with an eye for ironic nuance and perceived significance is truly soul food. Last winter, on an elevator with Musak, for 15 floors I listened to my father playing bass on a wartime recording and suddenly realized: this would have been his 100th birthday. At moments like that, how can we not see life as romantic time travel with everything that trivialized word, romantic, connotes.
The aging process can cripple our youthful impulse to find beauty and meaning where it isn't readily apparent; to allow our personal poetry to go unwritten or unread. It becomes the lot of an aging romantic to be warned by those who lost their heart's compass that fearless daring is unwise, dangerous, foolhardy, and immature. Somewhere in life, when our bodies betray us and our dreams seem finite, adults feel duped by romantic notions rather than seduced by their healing power.
My personal hero Teddy Roosevelt wrote of his advanced years and the brazen Amazon trip that nearly killed him, "It was my last chance to be a boy". So what about me? Like years ago in Colombia, when I first saw the love of my life, I'm going to Cairo. And when I finally touch the pyramids, I'll hear another song predating my birth on my mental IPOD - the bittersweet and innocent, "Isn't It Romantic?" - and think back 30 years, when I was that young poet in residence, reciting a verse I wrote at 20:
"The perfect moments come and go. They're not recalled with clarity. Of all the treasures one can know, the truest is a memory".
Rawlins Gilliland is a writer from Dallas.
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