Old Love, Old Tunes

Technology today has stolen away our voices and robbed our children of memories. I have been keeping count of how often people sing around the house these days. The fact is, they don't.

My earliest memories are of my mother crooning lullabies as she rocked each infant in turn. She said she "didn't have a singing voice", but her low, wavering alto will always mean comfort to me. Every time I have sat through the night with a feverish baby or held a pre-schooler through a nightmare, the melodies returned, words appearing and disappearing like fragments of a dream but held together by the hum of love.

Today, young mothers are routinely presented with lullaby tapes at the baby shower. When baby cries, the idea goes, they will be able to switch on the high-tech audio system and the little one will drift off—the voices of strangers in his ears, perfectly on pitch. If I had my way, new parents would learn the songs themselves, throw out their stereos, and give their child the gift of their own sleepy voices through the midnight hours.

These days, when we go on a trip, my daughters take along tiny personal stereos and headphones. They are lost in their private worlds, and I can't help wishing that at least here, in the car my girls would be obliged to listen to their mother's voice, and I'm sure they might then.pass down the out-of-tune songs to another generation. Those sophisticated earphones have robbed them of something I think every kid should carry from childhood car trips into adulthood.

When my father turned 70, my brothers and sisters and our kids gathered for a weekend of celebrating. My sister Mary hired a banjo player who knew all the old tunes, and in the autumn sunshine we sang away the day. The words returned to us as we heard our father's voice sing them again, and by the end even our little ones were learning the words and joining in.

I drove away from that party humming, and all the way home the good old songs kept tumbling out. Damn it, I thought, why did I ever stop singing in the car and start tuning on the radio instead? Why don't I sing anymore while I'm doing the dishes? I'm going to yank those stereo wires right out of the wall when I get home. We're going to sing grace before meals, sing carols around the piano, sing in the shower instead of switching on that waterproof radio that stole away our voices and our souls.