80 some-odd years kept fears at bay
late nights imagining stage sets and back-up singers but never mustered the tough, lucky courage to tell anyone, much less learn to sing in earshot or view. Caught her voice in her throat when the door creaked, as doors do when fear chills households and dreams fall frozen on floors. But she had this one tune, wrote it when she was 17, left in boxes that smelled of coffee and laundry, stuffed into moving vans, lost in luggage carts and finally found after her kids left the house. Her husband couldn't stay, and had left the house alone and no longer a home. She lost her throat to cigarettes until she couldn't tell a gas station receipt from a lyric sheet, but still she could never muster the tough-luck-lost-love-and-dreams mentality to throw her song away the way she did her voice. stage 4, hateful hours and minutes, and the second her grandkids left she let the regret show through, she could hardly speak but she could listen, to all the little silences. And one day, dark against the hospital whites, and smelling of precocious perfume that cut through the sterile air of the stale ward, her granddaughter approached the bed, hardly big enough hands to grip the guitar, she looked into her grandmother's yellow eyes and said, in a voice so loud it seemed wrong in that still stale air, "Grandma, someday I'm going to be a star, so maybe right now can I sing you a song?"