If you haven’t heard of the musical Fiddler on the Roof’s signature song, “Sunrise, sunset”, stop what you’re doing and watch it on YouTube. Whether or not you have seen the musical, the movie, the wedding scene here captures the silent feelings floating around while a young Jewish couple is married.
Many, many years ago, when I worked as a dental assistant in Brooklyn, I received the gift of the most poignant music I had ever heard via the long-gone radio station WQEW 1560 AM. Gorgeous songs by The Ink Spots, Judy Garland and Nat King Cole poured into my ears directly into my consciousness and molded my early adulthood years. It was during the late 80s and early 90s that I also eloped and became the mother to two beautiful girls. That music allowed me, a Gen Xer, to delve into a bygone era that I would have preferred to live in. A gentler era of courting, of chivalry, and of, well, romance.
As we have begun the 21st century with an explosive roar, I have an impossible nostalgia for a decade I could live in. The decade being the 40s. I have even considered that if humans do indeed live many lives, I must have lived then in this one. How could I explain that I felt the lyrics so profoundly that my palms would perspire, and my heart would race because I could recognize a song about to play that I had never heard before. Never, I promise.
What was my soul remembering? Who was I? And then, inevitably, am I delusional?
“One season following another, laden with happiness and tears.”
“Sunrise, sunset” never played without coercing a tear from my eyes. If you watched the scene, you could understand why so many others have played this song at weddings in part perhaps, to evoke the same sentiment. But there I was. A first generation American of Cuban parents who never saw the movie. But the words, oh the words, just played into my deepest thoughts and feelings and, dare I say, my most elusive memories. Sometimes memories don’t carry details or have a semblance of reality. Sometimes memories are disguised emotions of what once was your heart in the making.
“Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, blossoming even as we gaze.”
Perhaps we are all still in the making. Precognitive and amorphous, imperfect and inexplicable. These days, the desire to time travel 80 years has lessened. I am past middle age with one married daughter and another dating. I myself, after many heartaches, feel no less certain or hopeful that love, which is also precognitive, amorphous, imperfect and inexplicable, was, is, and will forever be the song that we animate. And in turn, it animates us.
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