A Christmas Long Ago (Jingle, Jingle) - The Echelons
This song came into my life through Doo Wop Christmas, a Rhino Records compilation CD released the year I was born. I inherited much of my taste in Christmas music from my dad, as well as my bizarrely strict personal rule not to listen to any Christmas songs before December 1. I remember listening to some of these songs recently with him, and my dad said, “I bet you don’t know too many people who listen to doo wop, do ya?” It’s true, I don’t! It’s a dated sound, one that few people are recording these days*, and one that I love.
There are two poems about inheritance and aging and the passing-on of people and habits and things that I keep thinking of this year. When I look at the books and socks and shirts my Nana gave me before she died, one of which I’m wearing right now, I think of all the poetry she carefully piled up for in a corner of her shelf, and her bin of neatly folded clothing that was a little too nice to hand off to the charity shop before her granddaughters had a chance to try them on, and I think of the poem “I Dare You” by Doiranne Laux. I tried to find a nice bit of excerpt, but, damn it, I love the whole thing, so I’ve copied in all of it:
It’s autumn, and we’re getting rid
of books, getting ready to retire,
to move some place smaller, more
manageable. We’re living in reverse,
age-proofing the new house, nothing
on the floors to trip over, no hindrances
to the slowed mechanisms of our bodies,
a small table for two. Our world is
shrinking, our closets mostly empty,
gone the tight skirts and dancing shoes,
the bells and whistles. Now, when
someone comes to visit and admires
our complete works of Shakespeare,
the hawk feather in the open dictionary,
the iron angel on a shelf, we say
take them. This is the most important
time of all, the age of divestment,
knowing what we leave behind is
like the fragrance of blossoming trees
that grows stronger after
you’ve passed them, breathing
them in for a moment before
breathing them out. An ordinary
Tuesday when one of you says
I dare you, and the other one
just laughs.
The other one, which I’ve loved for several years, is “In View of the Fact” by A.R. Ammons, which is mostly (and very beautifully) about being of the age when your friends all start dying, and makes me think of the scratched-out names in Nana and John’s little phone book. I’m of the age where I had favourite compilation CDs as a child, which locates me in a different part of the poem:
it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:now, it's this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink
They have come thick and fast this year. I went to three weddings across five weeks this summer (and I missed one, on the second of those weeks, because it was another plane ride away). Some of my peers had babies, before this year, but three friends who I’m close enough with that I’d text them on their birthdays have had their first child since July this year. Such a hullabaloo!
I feel lucky to be in a part of my life where I receive news that there has been a new life far more often than news of deaths. Though, just this week, I heard that Irene, my favourite high school teacher and one of a short list of people I think of as “my mentors”, has died. We’d get brunch quite regularly, the first six or so years after I left Inglenook, and she even made an appearance at the annual family solstice party, but I wish I’d kept in better touch these past few years. When describing my career trajectory, I often reference a piece of advice that Irene gave me, when I told her at fifteen that I was thinking of being a bioethicist: “I’d say that’s probably a better second career. You should go do things before you make a living telling other people what they should do.”
I’m so excited to meet all the new living people, and I want to talk about all my beloved dead. Breathing them in for a moment before breathing them out, thinking of all the love I remember from long ago.
How I remember you,
- Tessa
* Though I should note that The Echelons were recording in the late 1980s, not exactly the heyday of doo wop.