Love Songs

I wrote my father a song for his wedding. I finally had the computer software capable of recording my original music, and had burned him a disk over a month before his wedding, but I still needed the packaging. I had to buy blank CD cases, blank CDs, and that funny, glossy paper that CD inserts are printed on. I bought all the stuff, and printed up 10 CDs of their song as gifts for the wedding party.

You see, I have always been a writer. Prose, poetry, speeches, even music. As a teenager, I would enter the annual PTSA arts contest, sometimes in the poetry category, but always in the music category. I did so for rather selfish reasons, of course: the rules for entries in that category were the strictest; a student had to write an original piece of music, one that fit the theme for that year, had to put it in sheet music form without electronic aid, and had to record it onto cassette tape for submission. I won every year. I was the only one who ever entered from my school.

I knew how to read and write sheet music; that was the easy part. My sister Sue had a pink boombox that had recording capability, and I had an old Casio keyboard that I couldn't actually play. I never learned how to play a piano or keyboard. I could record a song into the Casio, though, one note at a time, and play it back, one note at a time, recording my background music first, then playing it back on a second tape player while singing along with my homemade karioke tape into the boombox. That extremely complicated process is how I recorded my music in the dark ages, i.e., the mid-nineties.

I wrote several songs for this contest over the years; one year, I even wrote two. I tried to write real music, songs that would be worthy of winning, and not just win by default, but I failed. I was only a teenager, and I suppose I lacked the experience to have any real music in my heart. I think that the real reason, though, that none of my songs seemed to be music was because I was trying to write them. The real songs just came. I only "wrote" them in the sense that I put them on paper for others to read. They flowed out of my heart like love itself.

The first real song I ever wrote was for my mother. Her birthday was the first of the month, and I always seemed to forget it. My last few years of high school, I would write her a poem in homeroom or study hall, when the loudspeaker announced the date and I realized I'd forgotten her birthday again. My senior year, I actually remembered it, and a few days before her birthday, I sat down to write her a poem. Instead, what came out of my heart was music. I gave her the lyrics that day -- I couldn't wait until her actual birthday to give it to her -- but I put the song to paper, with piano and flute accompanyment, and had two friends play while I sang it at our select choir's spring fundraiser. For years, it was my masterpiece. Then I met Michael.

I wrote our wedding song two months after we'd started dating. It was True Love. Correction: it was young love. But when you're young, it's always True Love. One night, late in June, we were walking along the dirt road by his dad's house. It was little more than a path, really, and I was concerned that we might get lost in the woods. "There are bears out here, you know," I said, jokingly. He said the most romantic thing he'd said to me before or since. He gestured at the fireflies, twinkling in the bushes along the road. "They're our guardian angels," he said to me. "They are lighting our path." That night, on my drive home, I wrote our song. When we were married, I had my best friend from high school sing that song, while we danced our first dance. My dad said he expected to hear it on the radio. Later, I tried to write music for other occasions: people would get married, babies were born, including my own, but nothing seemed to inspire me like that Michael did.

I wrote a handful of others, some that were worthy of being called music; others that weren't. I wrote a poem for my sister's wedding, and tried to set it to music, but it was better spoken than sung. I wrote one for an anniversary gift, and a few more over the years that got stopped and started and were never quite finished. I thought about writing a song for my mother's funeral, and Sue and Aunt L even asked me if I had, but nothing came. I ended up writing a poem instead, that was perfect for her, just the way it was.

I wrote a song for my father's wedding, this July fourth. Technically, I just reworked one I had written previously. I wanted him to understand that it wasn't among the inspired. But it was for him, and it is a love song. All of my music, all of my songs, are love songs. Because that is what came out of my heart. That's why I couldn't write a good break-up song about Michael. Because I didn't want to turn my heart to spite. I didn't want to become embittered. Or hard. But I haven't felt like writing music in a long time.

I want to be innocent again. I will never be innocent again.

I don't think I'll be writing any more love songs.