Someone, I'd like to know who, bought my daughter an electronic songbook. It has four bedtime lullabies that can be played by pressing a button that corresponds to one of its songs. The only song that it contains that I knew already was Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. I have the Little One convinced that it's a song I wrote, btw. She's told people so: "Daddy wrote that." It was hugely funny to hear her say it.
There's one other tune that I recognized. I've heard it my whole life -- I just didn't know the damn song had words. Well... it has words. Like I said, I didn't know all of the songs before but I know all four of them now. By heart. Upside down and backwards. I find myself singing them at work. The words and the melodies come to me out of the blue, by no means on purpose. Like I said, I wish I knew who bought my sweet Baby Girl that infernal book of kiddie songs -- oh, how I would like to chat with THAT jokester!
Yet, there's a silver lining that comes with the torment of singing them with her, to her, to myself when no one's around but me. The bonus is that I get to hear HER sing them all by herself. Yeah, she forgets some of the words and sings too fast in places, but oh, that sound! That voice -- so young and pure and innocent... and free. I've heard my share of uplifting music. Spirituals. Sublime harmonies of all descriptions. Jazz and Big Band and the greatest Classical humans have ever produced, but nothing compares, at least to this untrained ear, to the sound that comes from my baby when she sings one of those songs a cappella.
It was bedtime, and we lay down together with nothing but the light of the TV illuminating the room. She was singing, as much to herself as to me, and in that moment I counted myself one of the luckiest people on earth. In the rapturous moment, interrupting my reverie, came from nowhere thoughts of NYC. Thoughts of the unimaginable carnage are never far from me these days, and without trying -- surely not then under the gaze of my beautiful daughter -- I happened to wonder what would make a man fly to his death, on purpose, with several hundred innocent strangers along for the ride to oblivion.
My mind played a trick on me, for as I saw and heard my precious baby, happily singing, snuggled close, right in front of me, at the same time my mind groped to find the meaning in the incomprehensible -- it was RIGHT THEN, quietly somehow, almost as if someone had thrown a warm blanket over me, that I understood.
I see, for my daughter, what still remains of a reasonable hope for a bright future here in America. But what if... what if...
What if the constant talk on the street was of a foreign superpower continually meddling in the affairs of my neighborhood? What if it was the same kind of talk I remembered growing up in my father's house? What if, because of this foreign power's meddling, there was rampant unemployment, sickness, disease, lack of medical care and an overall dismal and failing hope for the future? And not just for me, but also for everyone I knew? What if I saw nothing more but the same, not only for me and my generation, but for my precious baby, innocently singing lullabies before me now?
In this setting, with unrelenting hopelessness all around, what if... what if someone came to me and said that I could make a difference, but what was required of me would come at a high price? What if, after weighing the offer of greatness against the current and relentlessly unending nothingness, I was already convinced of the inevitability of my sorry end, but equally convinced of a better life hereafter? What if I thought that, by doing something drastic, in spite of my horrible surroundings, my country's history, and clear facts, my life could take on monumental importance after all?
What if, amidst this setting thick with hopelessness and despair, I was approached, "chosen," as it were, to "make a difference"? What if my way was paid, where I could receive training that would set me apart from practically every person on earth? What if I COULD make a difference, if not for me, at least for my daughter, well... at least for my cousin... or my neighbor. Whatever the end result, at least within seconds *I* will be in Paradise.
In that instant, as my Little One sang one of her cursed lullabies in a voice from a finer world, in the quiet of the night, I understood what would make a man fly to suicide.