Any Dinnertime

          The music that came in under my bedroom door as a child was Dinah Washington.        
          Drinking again
          And think-ing of when you loved me ...
          My mother would have been sitting out there alone, in coffee-colored knit slacks and a crisp sweater, her loafers under her chair.
          If you listen to Dinah long enough, deeply—intentionally—you hear certain things that are perfect; perfect in a way that we hardly encounter in our lives at all.
          One memorizes the phrases and transitions, and repeats them on the lips, like little religious texts, until they can be sung out—with depressing results but, still, in competent mimicry.
          But here I come back for more,
          Open the door,
          Please—please—please
          Mis-ter Blues.
          Dinah—and my mother—belong to that world of 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute, of hypnotic, slow circles ... a rippled indigo-black lake that reflected the low lights of the living room at night.
          Which found their way under the crack of my door. My bedroom was dark, and I was awake, too, but not in the way my mother was awake, at that moment.

          

* * * 

At 6:00 or 6:30, when the noises of the summer day drop and the hummingbirds idle inscrutably on the deck, I come inside to start dinner—and start listening to Dinah.  Or I may have turned the music on earlier, feeling happier or "more myself" than usual. 
          In the same way that I glanced at my piano teacher's hands, so, now, I refresh my memory of the lyrics as the computer plays. I shut the window so the neighbors won't mind.
          I understand
          And darling you are not to blame
          If when we kiss it's not the same
          I un-der-stand.
          The yearning to do one thing extraordinarily well is the hope of anyone who has not succeeded in a conventional life, or who has experienced too much rejection or pain. The losers turn—early, if they are lucky—to a craft that saves them. Thus we have Callas, and Capote.
          But the business of broken hearts—Dinah's perfect singing—is too large for that analogy. Dinah was no loser, and my mother was a perfect filly, never at a loss for glamorous work or vacations or make-up sex.
          "Even cowgirls get the blues," said Tom Robbins.
          But, halfway into a lasagna, I have no time for these propositions, and I just allow the dexterity of the singing—like pieces of a puzzle, each word taking its place with a satisfying snap—to fill me with wonder, and with the love of living, however difficult or illicitly satisfying, moment to moment, year to year.
          That's why, darling, it's in-cred-i-ble,
          That someone so unforgettable,
          Thinks that I am unforgettable, too.
          So, I have listened to Dinah Washington my whole life, and that life is mostly over—without any books or records bearing my name, without grandchildren, without having ever inspired respect or envy—and all that can be said about it is depressingly Buddhist: if I can paraphrase, "I am not this body ... I was never born and I will never die ... I am nothing and I am everything." 
          Oh blah-blah.
          Pleeeeeease won't you think that I am
          Un-for-gett-a-ble too.
          I am often in my dark bedroom, hearing the records play, looking at that narrow band of light at the foot of the door—smelling the cigarette smoke and the whiskey and the steak—and knowing my mother is just sitting there, elegant in a way that women no longer are, just listening too.
          That, it seems to me, is immortality.