In my closet are boxes and boxes of heirlooms, books, and tactile family memories. Some of it belongs to me. And some of it, you might say, I am just holding. I inherited these things from my parents.
On Sunday, with nothing better to do during a pandemic that's not a pandemic but is a pandemic because Fresno is on lockdown because of an epidemic, I opened one of the boxes marked "books."
I won't go through the entire list of its contents, but in the box marked "books," there were a couple of my books by Robert Fulghum and a stack of 40 CDs harboring my father's bootlegged Big Band music.
My dad started bootlegging big band music in the late '60s. He would go to the Altadena public library and bring home a few Benny Goodman, Clyde McCoy, Lionel Hampton, or Duke Ellington albums and copy them to reel-to-reel tape so he could listen to them whenever the mood struck. Of course, he returned the albums. But, he never sold the copies, gave them away to friends as his mix-tapes, or even lent "his originals" to anyone. He also didn't care if he copied the scratches and other imperfections that library patrons may have added to the tunes.
He was happy enough with his reel-to-reel library until the late ‘90s when he and my mom bought a used Mercury Marquis. According to the car salesman, the car had a CD changer that could hold six CDs and a trunk that could hold six bodies. The salesman was either a comedian or a driver of one-to-many getaway Marquis.
My dad was too blind to start whacking people, so he didn't need the trunk space. His vanishing eye-sight meant he could no longer drive, but buttons he could push. He decided to become the car's DJ. For this, he had to copy his collection of analog music from reel-to-reel tape to CD so that he could serenade my mother with the hits from the 40s such as "Cement Mixer," "Goody Goody," or "Begin the Beguine." It freed my mom to put the pedal to the metal when they went grocery shopping.
When I was a teenager, my dad and I used to argue over "my music." Now that I saw his playlist, the argument today would go more like this:
Me: "Dad, nothing personal. But, you're telling me, 'Cement Mixer' is better than 'Dead Skunk in the Middle of Road'?"
Dad: Son, nothing personal, but" 'Wully Booley' is no match for 'Goody Goody'!"
Me: "Oh, yea? What's a 'Beguine?'"
Cole Porter
"Begin the Beguine," written by Cole Porter, was one of World War II's most popular songs. It was part of the soundtrack of my dad's life. All the major bands recorded it. It was a love story, though my dad preferred Artie Shaw's version, without lyrics.
The copy I put into my CD drive this particular Sunday had these lyrics:
"What moments divine, what rapture serene,
Till clouds came along to disperse the joys we had tasted,
And now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted,
I know but too well what they mean;
So don't let them begin the beguine ..."
He downloaded some free-ware to turn the analog files into digital files. When the free-ware expired, he deleted the software and its cache and then downloaded it again until he had copied all his music. I might have accidentally told him how to that.
My dad lovingly marked each CD with its title and included a sheet of paper — typed — that listed all the tracks. He then added the album name and song titles to a printed spreadsheet he kept near the stereo.
James Baldwin
As I listened to the "Beguine," I reached back into the box and pulled out Robert Fulghum's "Words I Wish I Wrote," published in 1997. I had purchased the paperback as soon as it was available a few years later. The book fell open to a passage from an essay written by James Baldwin in 1964 called "Nothing Personal," and I started reading. He wrote about a social pandemic he and many, many others lived every day of their lives. My dad had fought a war that, in its retelling, was supposed to help end injustices against peoples, though I am not sure the average American soldier truly understood what was at stake at the time. World Wars have a habit of changing everything.
Fulghum selected this passage for his book:
"People are defeated or go mad or die in many, many ways, some in the silence of that valley, where I couldn't hear nobody pray, and many in the public, sounding horror where no cry or lament or song or hope can disentangle itself from the roar. And so we go under, victims of that universal cruelty which lives in the heart and in the world, victims of the universal indifference to the fate of another, victims of the universal fear of love, proof of the absolute impossibility of achieving a life without love. One day, perhaps, unimaginable generations hence, we will evolve into the knowledge that human beings are more important than real estate and will permit this knowledge to become the ruling principle of our lives. For I do not for an instant doubt, and I will go to my grave believing, that we can build Jerusalem, if we will."
Not in Fulghum's book is the ending of the essay:
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
It seems both Cole Porter and James Baldwin had come together at my desk to remind me — us — to "Begin the Beguine" so that we remember the steps that make us human and to have faith.
"Oh yes, let them begin the beguine, make them play
Till the stars that were there before return above you,
Till you whisper to me once more,
Darling, I love you!
And we suddenly know What heaven we're in,
When they begin the beguine."
Baldwin's essay is available here at scholarworks.umass.edu.