When I was young we used to sing a lot. "We" means everyone I remember back home. My parents. Their friends. My friends. Such was the way of life, sitting in the kitchen, or on some old log when camping out in the woods, or at a work party, playing the guitar and singing together. The songs were sad sometimes, cheerful sometimes, but always philosophical somehow. They were about life: not the everyday kind but the underlying truth: about people, good stuff and bad, feelings, relationships, and ultimately the meaning of it all. The meaning never showed as some moral at the end. It simply took the shape created by the magical combination of music and words.
A good song is when music and words are put together to amplify each other, to become one organic whole. A good song is like a sniper's bullet, the music propels the words and the words propel the music and together they pierce the listener once and for all. A good song cannot miss your heart.
So we sang everywhere. As a child, I remember the night campfires, the swarming bugs, cigarette smoke dissolving in the starry air, people sitting around wearing sweaters because Russian summer nights are cold, faces taken out of the dark, so different but all equally beautiful, touched by some higher meaning, eyes staring into the flames but in reality turned inside the soul, all united by the power of a song, all reflecting the fire within.
A song is a wise monarch. It doesn't need to divide us. It reigns up there with the stars, always traveling light together with the tiny sparkles from the crackling firewood. It reigns in the hearts. A criminal puts his gun down, a mother hugs her child, a lover takes his love's hand, a bickering couple makes peace, a sinner repents, and a wronged one forgives to the sound of a song.
If I miss anything at all from that life, it is the songs. They made everything so clear: the life worth aching for, the one and only true reality, which was so different from everyday lies big and small. Things made sense. Everything was bearable at the end of the day, was a means to some end, had some purpose, happened for a reason. Nothing was in vain. Life was beautiful just because it was life.
Much has changed since.
Where I live now people don't sing. They joke and laugh, they are nice and know to smile and say how are you and what's up. They take the window seat first, then the isle, and no one would ever sit next to me if there are other free seats around. The middle one is for those checked in late. To sit in the middle of other people is uncomfortable. To sing is awkward. Because baring your soul is an odd idea. And baring your soul as a group, so the souls could flow together as one, is a thing for maybe a psychic session. But not for friends sitting in the kitchen. Although nobody sits in the kitchen anyway. People have living rooms and enough space for privacy. Each one's privacy. They listen to songs on YouTube. They cry in private.
So do I these days. It's my next best thing after the memories of songs. But every time that I pay tribute to those memories, I know that my life is still there, at that campfire, and I am still that very same child, surveying the singing people with my round eyes, listening, learning, loving.
And never having to leave.