But you don't really care for music, do you?

My brother-in-law, L, never listens to music. He says it holds no attraction for him; in fact, he finds music a public annoyance because it's always destroying his train of thought. When he's not listening to music (ha!), L is one of the foremost philosophy scholars in Canada. He's also the National Champion for his age group in track cycling. Oh yes, my husband's genes are of the intense, purist variety. Of the four boys, two are professors, one's an anesthesiologist and the other's a stay-at-home dad. The SAHD dad is a Birkebeiner racer (that's x-country skiing for 55 kms while carrying a baby, fyi) and, as you know, MadDad is a marathoner. Like I say, intense.

I got to thinking about L's disdain for music last Tuesday night when my attention was briefly captured by American Idol. I used to be an Idol-head but the show has long since lost its brassy shine for me. In the few minutes the TV was on, I saw a frightfully inarticulate pretty-boy with dread locks do a passing karaoke imitation of Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah (ok, Cohen's Hallelujah but no one would ever try to imitate Cohen's vocal stylings, now would they?). The song was trimmed down, of course, to meet time constraints and wouldn't you know it the verses that were removed were the sacred and profane ones. The song became nothing more than a neat break-up song with Old Testament overtones.

The judges were very much pleased with Dread Boy's performance. In fact, Simon Cowell commended it saying, "That was brilliant. The Jeff Buckley version of that song is one of my favourite songs of all time."

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Yes, Simon Cowell, our greatest pop culture arch-villain, the man who gave us The Spice Girls and Hunky Tenors Who Sing Air Supply (aka Il Divo), the man who packages cult of personality entertainment and formulaic pap tunes, actually lists Buckley's version of Cohen as an all-time favourite. I need not mention that neither Cohen nor Buckley would have ever got a record deal under Cowell or that a 7 minute song of delicate timing and ethereal precision would never cut it in the Cowell industrial complex. Why, Dread Boy's version on YouTube is only 4 minutes and 24 seconds and that includes his pre-song interview and the judges comments. There's no grace in that. Yet, Mr. s'Cowell loves this song. As do I.

The Cohen version was on one of the first CDs I ever bought. I picked up Buckley's Grace in the mid-90s and, then, just before Miss M was born I treated myself to kd lang's Hymns of the 49th Parallel. When Miss M was a newborn, we would frequently dance together to lang's version of the song. While I suffered the psychic gashes brought on by lactation and all manner of deprivation, my daughter wooed me with her own cold and broken hallelujah. Her fathomless infant eyes never left my face as we swayed around the room.



Then one day, when she was three weeks old, I looked up from one of these dances and saw my husband looking at me enraptured. My sister was there too, having traveled a great distance to initiate me into the rituals of motherhood. It was there that I found grace: in love, in family and in a simple pop tune well executed.

I am no philosopher. The things that I have faith in need no proof. I can live without intensity or purity of purpose. I cannot, however, live without poetry, without music, without art, without veiled glimpses at all that is sacred and profane. Last night, Miss M and I listened to Buckley's Hallelujah while she brushed her teeth. She danced away from the sink wearing nothing but a pj top, her pale bum in the lamplight overthrowing all that I am.

My mother's hands

My mother died in December 1999. At her funeral my aunt, in an effort to comfort me, told me to touch her one last time, not to be afraid of her body now that she was no longer in it. So I did. I went up to the coffin and I touched her hand. I don't know why people use the word "cold" to describe the dead. Mom wasn't cold; she was hard, stiff. In the act of touching her hand I knew that she was gone completely, that I would never have her with me again.

Those hands should not have been stiff. My mother's hands were where she expressed her life. From my earliest memories those hands were on the move. She "worried" them all the time: moving them back and forth, gently wringing them, turning small objects over and over in them. Her favourite worry object was the humble bread tie. When we were kids and she was doing her damnest to raise us on her own, we would snuggle into bed with her and find hard plastic bread ties scattered all over the sheets.

She also had her own way of pointing at objects. Instead of holding her hand like a gun and pointing as most people do, she held her hand flat, parallel to the ground and gestured with a curve to her pointer finger and a curve to her arm. It's hard to describe this action of hers but it was all hers. No one had hands that moved like my mother's.

Until now. My daughter was born with my mother's hands. I noticed it right off when she was still making fists that she constantly stuck in her mouth. At seven weeks, I took her to meet my family and some of my brothers and sisters noticed it as well. Miss M has my mother's hands, their shape, their movements. The pinky finger is curved, almost as if she were missing a knuckle. This biological quirk was detected inutero at 18 weeks gestation. But it's not just the pinky that's curved. There's something about the shape and movement of her hands that is best described as "curvy".

Now that Miss M is eager to expand her vocabulary, she has discovered the utility of pointing. She points at everything, hoping that I will give it a label. And yes, she has my mother's flat-hand, curved-movement, finger-point. I don't know much about who Miss M will be yet but I do know this: her life and her birthright are in her hands.

The Sorting Shelves (for a description of what the Sorting Shelves is all about see the March 15th post)
The Frog Prince and Other Poems by Stevie Smith. Longmans, Green and Co. 1966.