“Without music, life would be a mistake”
The fabric of the Old World had dissipated. How quickly habits give way to the realities of quarantine, of lock-down, of government enforced isolation.
Lockdown evolution.
Desert islands, tropical hideaways, luxury bunkers, super yachts.
Eat the rich. Somebody. Please.
Violence was down. Memes were up. There’s always a trade-off.
Isaac Newton worked from home and discovered gravity.
Day four? Might as well be day 400.
“How does it help…to make troubles heavier by bemoaning them?”
Alice wasn’t showing signs of mental anguish or fatigue. Was that an adult reaction to the strange new world? Instead she was intrigued, curious, ravenous for more.
“Alice,” I said as we hit level seventeen of the bleep test. The sun was already high in the spring sky. Pollution was at levels not seen since before the industrial revolution. Nothing like a respiratory disease to clear the air. “Today we sing. Talk to me about music.”
“Jazz music is like cake. But I prefer Frank Zappa. Zap, zap, zap.”
She sprinted to the end of the garden, did nine push-ups, ran back to the centre of the lawn, span enigmatic circles around me and sang, “Let it go, let it go, can’t take it back any more. Let it go, let it go, the cold never bothered me anyway.”
Somewhere a genius was born, a dictator, an astronaut, a farmer, a charlatan. Scientists made wonder and catatonic despair in global research labs, in hidden basements.
“Frank Zappa,” I said, “did not write the music to Frozen.”
Alice stopped dancing and looked at me, suspicion flowering in her brown eyes. “Why not?”
“Disney didn’t ask him.”
“Why not?”
Doe, a deer, a female deer.
Should you have an answer for every question? If you don’t know, should you say as much? Embolden your child to look for their own answers. Arouse their inquisitive nature, perhaps that is the greatest gift you can bestow. Teach them to look under rocks, look around corners, to search out their own answers to mystery in places hidden from view, in places that take time and effort and consideration.
“Daddy,” she said, “you don’t write music, you write ABC, you sing music.”
Ray, a drop of golden sun.
Back in the classroom which was temporarily the kitchen because Apocalypse Mommy was doing Thai Chi in the living room, we looked at musical instruments from around the world. She named them all. I was impressed. But I had no frame of reference.
She spoke of jazz and be-bop and nursery rhymes on an endless loop and I listened and I listened and I listened to the melody of the universe. Live.
Spotify had a Coronavirus warning. Was that necessary? Where there people out there whose only connection to the whole wide world was a music application? And if there were, wouldn’t their musical isolation be spoiled by such bad news?
We listened to music. If Alice liked the opening bars, we’d listen to the whole song.
She liked Jimi Hendrix.
Didn’t like Elton John.
I was winning the parenting game.
Until she grew tired of dad music.
Mi, a name I call myself.
What style of music will the first band called Coronavirus play? Metal? Blues? Reggae? I hope it’s lounge jazz. Or a barbershop quartet.