Voices Singing
by Annaliese Jakimides
“I can’t hear you at all,” my friend Catherine tells me as we clomp down the street, our winter boots powdering up the new snow. There are about 12 of us, singing Christmas carols door to door. Sometimes we just stop on a street corner under a light; one person starts and the rest follow. The words of a wistful, quiet “Silent Night” or a rollicking holly-jolly like “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” tumble out into the frigid air.
The wind is sharp. The temperature hovers around 15° but it feels like we’re singing into a below-zero night.
Actually, they’re singing. I’m just mouthing.
“We need all the voices we’ve got, so pick it up, girl,” Catherine calls back to me. She laughs and then adds, clapping her mittened hands together, “I never have any trouble hearing you talk.”
She’s right. I can be pretty loud, and often I have to warn myself to pay attention to the decibel level of my speaking voice. One friend says that I can sometimes scratch the inside of her ears when I get carried away.
“I can’t sing,” I say. “I’m just mouthing the words.”
Catherine turns and stares at me. She slows her pace, and a few of us almost stumble into her.
“Everyone can sing,” she says.
For sure, Catherine can sing. She has a beautiful contralto or alto voice. Well, something not high. I know it’s not a soprano, but actually I can’t tell the difference between anything but the extremes. I think I’m the only person on the planet to have been asked not to join a Unitarian church choir.
I grew up in a house with a radio tuned to classical and easy listening, if it were on at all, and a limited number of records (Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, one Beethoven) for the “hi-fi,” which my dad persisted in calling a “hi-five” (although the hi-five hadn’t been invented yet, and the hi-fi has long been forgotten). No one in my family could sing, no one played an instrument, actually no one but me danced, but music resides in my body. Give it the right beats, a saxophone, raging piano rifts, and my body is screaming to get up and fling itself around even in the most contained spaces.
My youngest son had perfect pitch. I wouldn’t have known it if someone else hadn’t told me. Truth is I have no idea what perfect pitch sounds like. The first time he sang in public, he was 8 years old. He was standing on the makeshift stage at school singing his little perfect-pitch heart out—a duet, something Christmas. He said he sweated right down into his socks. It was the first thing he told me in the dark of the car on the way home—the sweat and the socks, how scary it was to stand there, how much he wanted to run away. Later, at bedtime, I sang to him as I did every night.
I turn to Catherine. We have stopped at the next house. A small, dark-blue Cape. The only light is upstairs in the right-hand corner. A voice begins, and I remember my son and his fear and his singing anyway and that he never once told me I couldn’t sing. I open my mouth and sound carries the words into the air.
BANGOR METRO, Last Word column, December 2009