The Poem I Wrote As A Love Letter To My Vocal Cords

 

My Dad singing with his cover band "Beach Road" in the 1970's

In April 2016, I wrote a blog entry entitled, "Finally - Dad. (Part 1)."  I said that it was very difficult to write about my dad who died when I was fifteen but that eventually I would write more entries about him.  So here we are, six years later, with Part 2. In Part 1, I wrote about my dad's love of Walt Whitman's poetry and said that he wrote his own version of Whitman's collection of poems, "Leaves of Grass,"  by changing the words and setting the poems to music. Here in Part 2, I would like to share a poem that I wrote years ago, "Lifedream," and the story behind it. 

Even though my dad was a talented songwriter, his true love was singing.  His favorite singer was Teddy Pendergrass whose albums he often played at family gatherings, exclaiming, "Listen how Teddy sings this note! Nobody can sing like Teddy!" This prompted teasing from my aunt who told him, "You talk about him like he's your friend! 'Hey Teddy, let's go outside and play ball!'" My dad loved Pendergrass, but he judged other singers very harshly, and I could never understand why.  They all sounded good to me, and I figured that since they were on TV, they had to be good!  I never had the courage to actually sing in front of my dad.  Instead, I blared albums on my record player and sang along with my favorite singers at the time, Donna Summer and Diana Ross, behind the closed door of my bedroom.  I'll never forget the thrill I had on a car ride with my mom on the way to applepicking when she mentioned that my dad told her he had heard me singing in my room, and if I studied, I had the potential of becoming a really good singer.  My dad didn't throw singing compliments around lightly, so the joy I felt at that moment was monumental.  I immediately enrolled in singing lessons and continued them even after he died.  I knew singing was the closest I could be to him, and it was a way to make him proud of me. When I turned eighteen, I moved to Boston to study singing and songwriting at Berklee College of Music. I needed to know what truly made a singer good or bad.  Otherwise, I feared I'd become one of those singers that my dad would have hated!

College life and living in the dorms were not kind to my voice.  The stuffiness of the dorm rooms exacerbated my allergies, and the beer drinking and late nights roaming the halls screaming and being silly made my voice hoarse.  At one point, I was limited to a three-note range.  My voice teacher recommended an ear, nose and throat specialist to examine my vocal cords.  The diagnosis wasn't good. I had the beginnings of vocal nodules, simply called "nodes," which are benign growths on the vocal cords that develop when people abuse their voices.  The struggle to heal my voice was difficult and depressing. I stopped drinking beer and staying up late.  I stopped singing and screaming in the hallways.   But I kept on writing.  The following poem, "Lifedream," is a metaphorical poem I wrote to my vocal cords, expressing my sadness and disappointment and my fear that my voice would never come back:

"Lifedream"

I will shelter you like a thin sheet of ice./Put you in a tiny box./Preserve you till I'm ready.  

No, I'd never give you up./Never give up skating.

But you and I don't think alike./Never meant to hurt you./And up until the end of time,/I'll never give up skating. 

But maybe I can't save the ice./My body crushed and crumbling through./If I can't live my life on ice,/I'll never love you true.

I will shelter you and hold you tight./Together we will move.

If I fall through this sheet of ice,/My life's dream I will lose.

Slowly, my vocal range came back.  In fact, my voice teacher told me she had never seen anyone overcome vocal damage to the extent that I was able to with no outside medical treatment. But I still felt I would never be able to sing as well as my dad would have wanted me to.  Anytime I had a late night or was run down, my sensitivity to hoarseness acted up.  My voice teacher also told me that my speaking voice was harsh and very different from my singing voice.  She said you must speak the same way that you sing but that trying to speak in a way that wasn't natural to me might change my personality. I didn't want to do that, and eventually, I just decided that if I couldn't sing as well as my dad, there was no use in singing at all.  It all turned out okay though because I'm happy now writing novels.  Plus, it's been beautiful to rediscover my poem and to remember those days when singing was so meaningful to me.

My Unintentional Evolution To Unique Artist

 

Me at the Walt Whitman Exhibit at New York Public Library, NYC 

When I was in elementary school at P.S. 53, either third or fourth grade, my teacher asked us to analyze the Harry Chapin song, "Flowers are Red."  These were the days before the Internet, and I didn't even ask my parents to help.  Actually, I thought I would have no problem figuring out the meaning of this simple song, so I just read it and analyzed it the way I was sure Chapin meant it.  I forget exactly what I wrote, but I said that the color red symbolizes something, and the color green symbolizes something else, etc.  After the assignments were graded, our teacher presented two essays to the class.  One essay was the correct interpretation of the song, and the other was the one that she said she wanted to show us because it was so creative and unique.  Mine was the creative essay, and I was embarrassed when the teacher read it to the class because I felt like a failure.  I wish I still had that essay today, but I threw it away after class because I didn't want to remember that feeling of not being able to comprehend the assignment the way everyone else was able to.  

At 18, I was a songwriting student at Berklee College of Music, and I resisted following the advice of my teachers who taught us formulas to use while writing. I had already studied piano since I was 6, so I just took to the keys and composed my own way.   At the time, I thought my songs were great.  In total, I have written nearly 100 songs and recorded at least half of these, all between the ages of 16 and 21.  However, years later, when I listened to a CD of several of them, I noticed how similar many of them sound to each other.  Although I utilized different key signatures, I often used the same chord progressions. Still, I think they are catchy. They are sometimes melodic, sometimes dissonant, and they don't sound like anybody else's. I like my art to be unique.  My songs sound like me: upbeat with singing that is slightly off-key. During that same period, I worked at Tower Records in Boston.  One day, a coworker of mine told me about the rock band he just joined, and as he explained their typical "rock band of the moment" style to me, I had a revelation.  Why even bother putting in the work with the band when they weren't creating anything new?  It made no sense to me to make the effort when his band was just going to sound like everybody else's.

In my early twenties, I shifted from writing songs to writing stories because I felt confined by the songwriting format.  I believed the music was more important than the lyrics in songwriting so I focused more on the music, and that made the words of my songs take a backseat.  In turn,  I felt a need to express more and more of my thoughts, but I didn't want wordy songs. My other dilemma was that I couldn't stop rhyming!  The same problem happened in my Women's Writer's Workshop when I wrote rhyming poetry.  My teacher told me people aren't rhyming that much anymore.  Walt Whitman had the opposite problem in his day as the first non-rhyming poet.  He got rejected by publishers and had to publish "Leaves of Grass," his masterpiece, on his own.  That's also what writers who wanted to do something different did in the past: writers like Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin.  Writers still do it today which brings me to mention the independent publishing company, New Pop Lit, run by the very unique and talented writer and publisher, Karl Wenclas.  

New Pop Lit is doing what I've always strived to do which is to create and publish a new type of writing.  Why not invent something new? They keep it clear and relatable.  They don't just mimic what everyone else is doing.  Just like how the MFA creative writing programs grind out identical writers, Berklee can grind out identical songwriters which wasn't the songwriter I wanted to be.  I am proud to have my writing featured in two of New Pop Lit's zeens: "Zeenith" and "Literary Fan Magazine." New Pop Lit's zeens redefine the Literary Journal.  They are "technicolor literary journals" and feature really cool artwork as prominently as their stories, articles, novel excerpts, and poetry. They make literary journals fun to read. They bring uniqueness back to the writing business.  Because what is the point of spending all this time writing if you're just going to sound like everybody else?

You can find unique, original and talented writers and artists featured at NewPopLit.Com and purchase their zeens at NewPopLit.Com/Shop/.

Reading "Moshi Moshi" And Sharing Tea, Grief, Hotels, And Smiles With Banana Yoshimoto

"I nodded and sipped my cocktail. The taste of fresh fruit spread over my tongue.  This was all that being alive meant, really." - From the novel "Moshi Moshi" by Banana Yoshimoto



The first novel I read by Banana Yoshimoto was "Kitchen." It is a short novel about a woman in her twenties dealing with grief. I was also in my twenties at the time, and it hadn't been that many years since I had lost my dad at the age of fifteen. In "Kitchen," lead character, Mikage, has just suffered the loss of her grandmother to whom she had been very close. To deal with her loss, she takes to sleeping on her kitchen floor because the hum of the refrigerator makes her feel less alone. "Kitchen" is what hooked me to Yoshimoto's novels and solidified her as my favorite modern author. Yoshimoto's newest English-translated novel is called "Moshi Moshi," and it continues to display her genius in describing twenty-something women suffering early loss. What is different about Yoshimoto's novels is that although her characters are hurting, each of her novels shows a glimmer of optimism. I haven't come across any other writer who accurately depicts the devastation of dealing with grief while simultaneously describing the protagonist's ability to maintain a positive attitude. Each of her characters finds happiness in the simplest of things. This trait matches Yoshimoto's "deceptively simple" prose, as her writing has often been described. Her language is simple, yet the meanings underlying her novels' themes are deep.

"Moshi Moshi" takes this grief theme full circle from "Kitchen." "Moshi Moshi" is the story of a young woman in her twenties named Yoshe who has just lost her father by carbon monoxide poisoning. Her dad had recently begun a relationship with a bewitching woman without Yoshe and her mom knowing.  This woman wanted to die but needed someone to take along with her, so she coerced Yoshe's dad into a car parked in the forest and poisoned them both.

Yoshe is an only child, just barely a woman, who is living on her own. She is fresh out of culinary school and now has a job helping out in the kitchen of a bistro. Yoshe tries to deal with her grief, and as she is "finally starting to be able to feel the joy in sitting down to a cup of tea or just getting up in the morning," her mom decides she can no longer bear living in the condo the three of them had shared in the town of Meguro. Instead, she wants to move in with Yoshe to the city of Shimokitazawa which has younger residents and many tourists. She tells Yoshe that Shimokitazawa reminds her of the first city she and Yoshe's dad lived in when Yoshe was a baby:

"Back then both your Dad and I were happy, for no particular reason - maybe because we were young, or it was just that kind of age.  We'd shop every day in Yanaka Ginza - we'd get deli food for dinner, savory preserves, roasted rice crackers, and then a cup of tea. If we had time, we'd stop at the traditional dessert parlor and have a beer, or some isobeyaki."

Yoshe realizes that her mom needs this time to heal. Yoshe absorbs herself in her cooking and waitressing work at the bistro and begins dating a customer she meets there named Shintani-Kun. But her grief overwhelms her.  Still, she shows up to work every day at the bistro no matter how badly she feels:

"Even so, come tomorrow morning, I'd be kneading bread dough, boiling water, shredding salad vegetables, mopping the floor. My body would know what to do, and I'd smile and greet customers when they came in."

Pretty soon, Yoshe and Shintani-Kun start going out for drinks after she finishes her workdays at the bistro, and she feels a sense of hope:

"I felt joy. Working at the bistro, Shintani-kun feeling at home there. Seeing my apartment across the street. I knew it wasn't going to last forever - things changed and moved on, and if you thought they could stay the same, they got ruined, like our family had done. Still, I desperately wanted all of this happiness to stay, just the way it was."

My Banana Yoshimoto collection of books on my couch

When your parent dies while you are still in childhood, a part of you remains arrested in that state because the only place you can be with them throughout adulthood is in your memories. I definitely related to the solace Yoshe seeks in her memories that she relays throughout "Moshi Moshi." Yoshe remembers her childhood vacations this way:

"The light from the TV dappling the dark room made me think of family vacations of old. I felt as though I was back in a room in a traditional inn, already asleep, while Mom and Dad watched TV lounging on the mat floor."

I particularly liked this hotel memory because my happiest memories from childhood are the times my mom, dad and brother took family vacations to Disney World or the Poconos, and we had our parents' undivided attention. We explored the parks and swimming pools by day and then shared the same hotel room by night.

Yoshe believes that memories of her dad are etched not only in her heart and mind but also in the places he walked through: "Of course, there were some things that didn't change - the familiar and nostalgic colors and smells, tastes and places in our memories.  But we could no longer relive them as things that were real to our own bodies."

These lines remind me of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" poems which were a favorite of my dad's. He even wrote his own rock opera in the late 1960's-early 1970's by composing his own versions of Whitman's poems through several original songs, often titled the same as Whitman's poems.  The main theme in "Leaves of Grass" is how we are all connected as entities who live the human experience. This includes all of us now living in the present, those who have lived in the past, and those who will walk this earth in the future. Whitman talks about how all generations have physically walked over the same grounds as each other, and when blades of grass grow, these blades are nourished and grown out from the bodies of our ancestors. There is a connection between past, present and future generations because we walk the same steps over the same parts of earth together. The following line from "Moshi Moshi" reminds me of Whitman and also of my dad:

"I started walking again, and even though I was wearing grown-up shoes on a grown woman's feet, the lightness of my step felt just the same as they had when I'd walked in my favorite childhood sneakers, which Dad had taken me to buy."

My dad and me

As the seasons pass, Yoshe's mom embraces the fact that there are so many young people living in Shimokitazawa, and she seems to be returning to a previous youthful self that Yoshe didn't even know existed.  My mom did that too after my dad died. Suddenly, she started hanging out with friends who were in their twenties, and she listened to pop music on the radio and went out dancing. It makes sense now because she was so young back then: my dad was only forty-one when he died, and my mom just turned forty the next month. I remember one of my mom's friends gave her a birthday card that said: "Life begins at 40," and my mom hung that card up in our kitchen.  But I didn't like that card. I wasn't ready for anyone to have any kind of new life other than the childhood I had grown familiar with.

Yoshi expresses similar thoughts. It appears to her that her mom suddenly doesn't need any help with her grief while Yoshe is still struggling so much. It feels like a blow to her when she finds out her mom has landed a job in a tea shop. Yoshe wants to be happy for her mom but realizes she is initially unable to:

"I'm the one who didn't want Mom to get better, I realized. I was shocked at my own immaturity. I was the one who wanted her to stay at home in my apartment, who wanted to keep my mother to myself.  Now, standing in this shop, she was back in the wider world, among everyone else."

I can relate to those feelings too.  All children believe that even as life changes, and they leave school and move on to work life, at least their family will still remain intact. It was a rude awakening for Yoshe and for me when our lives suddenly changed before we properly reached adulthood.

Yoshe tries to follow her mom's example to move forward, but she is still very vulnerable and not in the proper mindset to enter into a healthy and mature relationship with Shintani-Kun. When she finally allows herself to take the next step in their relationship, she's not really into it: "We're probably going to sleep together now..., but so what? What's it going to change?"

Yoshe's nihilistic attitude is a common example of the depression that often hits young women after a major loss in the family. Your entire world has been turned upside down and everything you thought you believed in as a child has suddenly changed due to that one event. I remember sitting in a movie theater in 1990 watching the film "Sweetie" and relating to one of the lead characters, a woman named Kay. She analyzed everything but felt nothing. She looked for symbolism to try and make sense out of life and find messages in things while performing obsessive rituals. In her case, she was obsessed with trees and cracks in the sidewalk. But her anxiety only increased. I also suffered from obsession, anxiety and a feeling of meaninglessness. Looking back, I see I was still trying to make sense out of life and to heal from my grief. Life is frightening when you have to recover from loss. You long for the security you knew as a child.

At the end of the novel, Yoshe visits the scene in the forest where her father and the woman were found dead in the car. She tells her dad it is alright to let go, and he can be at peace. She realizes that she must now focus on the present. Once you suffer a loss, you always fear it will happen again. It's probably more on your mind than someone who has never experienced a significant loss in their life. But we have to be thankful and mindful of what we have in the present. We don't have to worry every single minute. The people we have in our lives are still here:

"My father was gone now, but my mother was here. I could be with her today, for certain, at least, and hopefully much longer than that. I'm coming home now, Mother - Mother, I'm glad you're here - I'll be coming through the door in a moment."

My mom put this yellow happy face in her car to cheer herself up on cloudy days

While getting ready for the paperback version of "Moshi Moshi" to come out, Banana Yoshimoto lost her own father unexpectedly. For years, people had criticized her for not writing about grief in a realistic way. After all, many of her novels are about losing primary family members, but she had never lost one. I remember after I'd read "Kitchen," I was shocked to learn that she herself had not lost a parent. Yoshimoto says that after she lost her father, she realized that she indeed had been on the right track all those years. She said her own writing in "Moshi Moshi" gave her the answers she now looked for as if she somehow knew what she was going to need to help her heal.


Recently, I posted my Goodreads Review of "Moshi Moshi" and was thrilled when Banana Yoshimoto responded to me and thanked me in English for my "beautiful review!" Previously, she had only communicated to me through emoticons and emojis because she doesn't speak or write in English. But just like how Whitman believed previous generations can communicate with present and future generations through shared experiences, language is not a barrier either. I will forever treasure the time that Banana Yoshimoto sent me this smile:

I'm still dreaming that one day I will take a trip to Japan and meet her in person. Why wouldn't I want to meet my favorite novelist?

Finally - Dad. (Part 1)

I prefer to remember my dad the way he looked as a young man. The way he looked in the pictures I saw of him taken in the 1950's and 1960's. Not when I knew him when he had that wild, curly, 1970's hair that used to reach the roof of his car even though he was only 5'10." In the 1980's, he lost that 70's hair.  Not because of the cancer treatments he started in 1981 (oddly enough, he never lost his hair like the majority of patients do) but rather because the styles changed, just like the best things in life always do.

After he died in 1984, I took out his college graduation picture and made a conscious effort that any time I thought of him, I'd only think of how he looked in the 1950's and 1960's. Somehow, it made thinking about him less sad.

My father only walked this earth for 41 years, and I only knew him for about one decade of those if you count the years I was an old enough child to have a clear memory of him. A few decades later, he has become an almost mythical figure to me, and I have to rely a lot on what people older than I am can remember, and I'm always anxious to hear stories about him. Luckily, my relatives and his friends are always more than happy to share what they remember of him with me.

One of my favorites comes from my mother's first cousin, Carol. My mom is an only child who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and every summer to escape the City, she and my grandmother spent the entire summer in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with her my grandmother's sister who is Carol's mom. My grandfather joined them on weekends. When my mom and dad became serious, she brought him along on one of the visits to meet Carol and her sister, Barbara, who were like sisters to her. Carol told me about the first time she "almost" met my dad. She said she went out to her country backyard to meet him where he had climbed a tree and was just sitting at the top it, enjoying the country air. She told me that when she spotted him all the way up there, she thought: "Well, I guess we're not going to be meeting him today."

Even though my father had what many people would consider a short life, he did a lot in those 41 years. He was a Language Arts teacher for 17 years at Prall Intermediate School, I.S.27, on Staten Island, New York, and he was also a singer and songwriter. He enjoyed teaching and often brought in his song lyrics to have his students analyze them as assignments.  One of the projects he had done in the late 1960's or early 1970's was an album based on Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" poetry book. Whitman was considered pretty "out there" for his day so he self-published and paid for "Leaves of Grass'" first edition and even did most of the typesetting. So basically, Whitman joins the ranks of today's indie writers like myself (or on my bad days, I choose to think of it this way). What my father did with Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is kind of like what Kate Bush did years later when she wanted to use James Joyce's Molly Bloom monologue from his novel, "Ulysses," as lyrics for one of her new songs and wasn't granted permission. Instead, she wrote "The Sensual World"  and just changed the words, writing her own version of the original prose, keeping in line with the feeling of the words, which in the end is all that really matters - what feelings pieces of music bring to its listeners.  

After my father died, I went through every single loose leaf paper he had in his bedroom dresser drawer, and there were tons of them. It took me months to go through them all, but every weekend when my mom and brother were out with their respective friends, my 15 year old self grabbed another pile from his drawer, sat on my living room swivel chair in front of the TV, and read through every single word. When I read the lyrics based on Whitman's work, I hadn't yet read the original "Leaves of Grass" that they came from. As a grieving teen, I don't think I was really ready for it. It wouldn't have impacted me the way it did when I finally picked up the book several years later. When I read through "Leaves of Grass," I was amazed, and I could see what the appeal of the book was for my dad. It is a celebration of life. It was written for people who enjoy sitting at the top of trees all by themselves enjoying nature around them. I imagined my father reading Whitman in college and embracing his days as a young man, enjoying this earth while it was still his.

My father was a well-liked person because he accepted everyone as being the same as him. He felt a connection with others and with nature around him so I can easily understand his identifying with "Leaves of Grass." Below is an excerpt from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" which is part of "Leaves of Grass":


“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."


My dad wrote this song version of Whitman's "Song of Myself":

My dad wrote at least 9 songs based on "Leaves of Grass." Once I read the original book, I was happy it moved me as much as it moved him because there was now another reminder I could forever have of him because these reminders keep his memory alive to me on those days when I really miss him. My whole life has been a quest to recapture what I can remember of him. Whitman wrote:


“Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.” 

 
Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is both a celebration of life and also a celebration of nature. He believed we should enjoy the little things in life and embrace the natural world that was given to us. His words are affirmation that every human being is connected to one another regardless of generation or even century of time.  He believed human life was carried on THROUGH nature because every generation walks the same green earth. He meant this figuratively AND literally, proclaiming that human beings once deceased eventually are "reborn" again through the growth of the grass beneath future generations' feet.  This passage below is simply beautiful and is one of my favorites from "Leaves of Grass": 


"What do you think has become of the young and old men? 
And what do you think has become of the women and children? 

They are alive and well somewhere, 
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, 
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the 
end to arrest it, 
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. 

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, 
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” 


That last line brings me comfort. I like to imagine my dad is in a happier place even though he can't be here physically with us. I know that I titled this blog entry "Part 1," and eventually I'll write a Part 2, but I have no idea when. Processing the loss of my dad has taken me a long time. In fact, it was not too long ago that I could finally display his school teacher picture in my house which is the picture I have that looks most like the way he looked during the years I knew him. So like I said, there will be a Part 2 one day. In the meantime, I, and hopefully now you, will celebrate Whitman.

Dad and Grandma in the 1970's