We are all thinking about our fathers this Father’s Day week. I found this remembrance our daughter Amy wrote a few years ago about Bill teaching her musical intervals, She has given permission to share it with you.
"This is one."
We’re in the car, he drives. I sit in the back seat, repeating the tone back to him.
"One."
"Now, give me 'three'," he says.
My mind scrambles to make the musical steps. My pitch is not perfect, but "relative," they call it. I find the note with mental reasoning, unwilling to let him hear me do the figuring.
"Three," I sing.
I know he knows how I find it. It doesn't matter. The game has started, and we both enjoy it.
"Give me 'two'."
Back to one, I think, then mentally, "One"-- aloud--"two."
We play like this: he tests; I challenge myself to do my mental gymnastics more quickly.
He falls silent, and I know he is thinking about-- what? The days when he was a boy at the Stamps School, first learning intervals and harmonies? Or is he hearing the harmonies themselves? He fades further away, and I think I can hear the echo of a scratchy 78 playing in his brain...sounds drifting down from upstairs at my grandma and grandpa's farmhouse.
I often fell asleep to those sounds, harmonies fading and blaring on what sounded to my ear like very primitive technology, songs with titles like "The Bible Tells Me So," "Happy Rhythm,” singers with names like Denver Crumpler, Hovie Lister, and Jake Hess.
I know he is hearing them now, here, in the car. I watch him in the rearview mirror. His mind is always a mystery. What harmonies, what memories, what beginnings fill him now?
Nights when we had dinner guests, and I would hear my father say, as the candles burned low, "Hey..hey, can I play you something? Come in here." And long after I was supposed to be in bed, I would sit at the top of the stairs in my nightgown, peering around the banister watching as my father's face danced with admiration, joy, astonishment, laughter, tears. And our guests, smiling and nodding and catching his fever. Then, black gospel choirs, Andree Crouch, and the singers with the Caravans. Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin brothers: "I've Done Enough Dyin' Today" and harmonies that made your heart ache.
"Daddy." I have to say it two, three times. "Daddy. Daddy."
"What?" He is still absent.
"Earth to Bill," my mother says.
He blinks, focuses. "What?"
"This is one," I say. Back to one.
He grins, returning. "Okay, give me seven." His favorite interval.
I wonder what memories my children will have of me, what late night reveries and what music will bring them back in their minds to our living room. I wonder what memories they will imagine I am returning to when I disappear before them like my father does, has always done. I wonder what will anchor them, like my father returning to harmony, his home base, his roots, his "one."
I feel him grounding me there: "This is one. Now give me--"
I wait breathlessly, wondering what I can give him, hoping it will please him, grateful for this reference point. Back to the one.
--Amy Gaither Hayes
