Returning to the songs we need to sing

I shared the story below three years ago this week. It’s about a walk I took with my son in 2020, during the first Autumn of the pandemic.

My dad told me last week that my email from three years ago randomly popped up in his inbox while he was searching through his deleted messages for someone’s address. Strange the ways we’re still sorting through the clutter and mess of those pandemic years, with some things we thought were far behind us just turning up again, right? Strange the ways we remember those days, and the things we forget until we’re reminded. I’d forgotten that I’d even written this one. But reading it again helped me recall something essential about that season. So I’m sharing it again this morning.

It’s not like I went looking for grace today. I just went for a dang walk. My eldest son and I needed to get out of the house. So we got out of the house, down the front steps, and aimed ourselves in the direction of his buddy’s abode half a dozen blocks away. The sun was shining, the wind knocked the red and yellow and orange and pink leaves off of their branches and they flutter-spun all around us on our path. The day felt decent, no doubt. But grace? Wasn’t looking for it. Wasn’t aware of the need to.
 
Then the sound. The nasal hum, the bleating, the harmonics of multiple bagpipes — you know the way a bagpipe begins a song before the song begins?
 
Where was the sound coming from today? And what on earth is today anyway? This random day I don’t even know the name of due to all days leaching into one another. These days of pandemic and closed doors and angst. Cancelled plans and isolation. The bedtime tears. The extra ten pounds lounging around my navel. These days of so much unrest and commotion, the grief and the grievances. We rarely know a Monday from a Thursday anymore. My children now call every day Dayday.
 
We rounded the corner on Jefferson Street and saw a bunch of people sprinkled around in the vacant lot behind Browne’s Irish Market, people in lawn chairs, on picnic blankets scattered about, distanced to keep the virus from spreading but almost close enough to be called a congregation. On a large stage at the far end of the lot, five pipers piped and one drummer drummed. One drummer drummed his bodhran, sometimes not quite on the beat and yet still as if drumming with his entire body, like my son used to do when he was a toddler, banging pots and pans on the table in his undies. My heart ached; the sound filled more than the air.
 
When the song ended, we paused on the sidewalk to join the applause. I looked around at the crowd. A child ran and tumbled across the lawn. Two women on blankets six feet apart leaned a few inches closer to chat. A masked man carrying two beers suddenly stopped, placed one beer in the crook of his elbow, pulled down his mask, took a solid Sláinte-worthy swig of the other beer, slid the mask up again, and carried on. The drummer on stage just kept drumming, as if to a song only he could hear.
 
And then another nasal hum, another bleat, another song beginning so another song could begin, this one softer and slower. When the lone piper at center stage released the first two notes, my lips couldn’t help but form the accompanying words: Ahhhh mmmm -azing grace.

Amazing grace . . . how sweet the sound . . . 
 
After some long weeks of hearing hourly on the news how hopelessly divided we are, I looked around and I couldn’t find one splinter of division for that brief moment, and I believed it. Even the distance between us felt filled with hope that we might be our very best for a moment, through as simply human as a song, some wobbly song leaping out of each of us, our own weird rhythms and voices, our idiosyncrasies and oddities, our quirky commotions finding a rhythm together.

A Tibetan Buddhist or a Hindu might say that the combined sounds of Ahhh-mmm — a.k.a. Om or Aum — form the sound that energy makes as it vibrates throughout the universe, the chant of creation itself. A devout Baptist or Presbyterian might say they’re just the first two phonetic sounds of this old beloved hymn.
 
But maybe one always shows you to the door of the other. I mean, isn’t that often why we sing the songs we sing? To get these mortal busted bloating lonely skin-flakey tired beautiful bodies of ours connected to something beyond us? And at the same time bring what is beyond us deeper into our bones?
 
It is for me. Or at least it was for me today when I least expected it, which is what gives it the name of grace, this unexpected arrival. I stood there on the sidewalk in the glow of our sun, struck by grace, this respite from the grief, release of the grievances, taut jaw loosened into sudden song: through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come, ‘twas grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home . . . 

My son asked if I was crying and why. 

Why was I crying? I tried to think of how to say it. Perhaps: Because mumbling the first syllable of this song just opens a portal to a brief encounter with the divine . . . and when it's grace it just arrives . . but no, perhaps it wasn't even the words, but just the sounds and the melody alone . . . why in the moment can't I find a way to describe all of this? . . . how about, Augustine says that to sing is to pray twice, and by that I think he means something like . . . Goodness, my son is going to think I sound off the rocker again and call me weird . . .
 
Maybe I’ll find a better way to tell him. Maybe I’ll find ways to teach my son some explicit things about grace, while other things I’ll just leave breadcrumbs along the path that I’ve found, knowing that he has his own path scattered with encounters of his own. But for a brief moment today, on this Dayday of all days, we shared a path, a busted sidewalk adjacent to a vacant lot full of a bunch of Americans drinking and dancing and applauding at varying distances from one another, a sweet sound stitching them together like a trembling constellation.
 
Why was I crying? he asked again.
 
Because, I said, Ahh . . . ummm . . . It’s beautiful, that’s all.

What I’m currently reading: G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium

What I’m currently listening to: The Weepies’ Say I Am You, Ray Lamontagne’s Trouble

It’s that time of year, y’all. My annual concert rocking the 90s tunes is coming up December 15th at RecordBar, and this is the year for Party Like It’s 1998. My band is getting ready to throw one hell of a 90s party and we want you there! Get your tickets now, since there’s a good chance this year’s RecordBar show will sell out.