Turn! Turn! Turn!

      In November, 1988, when I was pregnant with my daughter, trying to mingle at Thanksgiving dinner with my husband’s relatives from all over the Eastern seaboard, my father-in-law, Marvin, offered me a glass of wine. I declined, dutifully.

      “Really?” he said. “Not even in a situation like this?” As gregarious as he was, Marvin knew the need for anesthesia when it came to certain family issues. For me it’s not just the relatives; I look at any large gathering with dread. Last year we had a wonderful dinner with just our slightly extended nuclear family. The one person I missed and will again this year is my mom; it’s been thirteen months since she passed away two days before Halloween.

      I used to listen to my transistor radio while lying in bed, using the single earplug to avoid detection. Except for surreptitious listening, I wasn’t being rebellious. I had found a station that played the 40’s music that my mother always raved about: the Inkspots and the Anderson Sisters. I learned about the White Cliffs of Dover lying there. I still enjoy big band music every now and then, especially Glenn Miller. My own music at the time was anything piped out on KFWB: Motown, the Beatles.

      The first I heard of Mick Jagger was in a headline in the LA Times:

“Watch out Beatles, Here Come the Rolling Stones.” I was in about seventh grade. The author wrote something about Jagger’s showmanship on stage, but I didn’t know what that meant. The only dances I knew were the “Monkey” and the ones my mother taught me that involved tracing the outline of an imaginary square on the floor with my feet.

      A year later I was singing “White Rabbit,” trying to imitate Grace Slick, and my mother inadvertently complimented me by saying I sounded like a hippie. Ms. Slick is a white-haired grandma now; after she quit the music business, she said, "all rock-and-rollers over the age of fifty look stupid and should retire."

      Tell that to Keith Richards, who was interviewed on NPR Monday for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stones' first performance. He still plays all the old songs, but never the same way twice. “There’s no de rigueur,” he said, before catching himself and hardening his r’s. “These rifts were built to last a lifetime, and I’m still working on ‘em, you know?”

      It’s easy nowadays to know a previous generation’s music; everything is just floating around, at our fingertips at any moment. Taryn likes “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” but what really gets her excited is Beethoven or Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Sometimes her dad brings out the double base he played in high school.

      Two years ago I wrote a poem when my mother was still healthy and the title was only part of a lyric:

         JUST HOLD ME TIGHT AND TELL ME YOU’LL MISS ME

         In 1968, the year Led Zeppelin

         was born, listening to Mama Cass sing

         Dream a Little Dream

         of Me,

         my mother shook her head

         in inter-generational

         connectedness: “That song was even

         square in my time!”

         Today my son, resembling Edward Scissorhands,

         wonders who Cass Elliot was and further why

         I am especially sad that she died, those

         forty years ago.  When Cass sang,

         her pleasure in the silly,

         sultry melody and rhythms

         infected all of us listening.

         I’ll bet you danced

         the foxtrot to those rhythms,

         Mom, and even twisted your hips

         more than the square pattern required.

One year later, a time to gather stones together.