love songs

Slow down and love someone. You’re listening to Delilah.

We didn’t always have a car when we were little. I remember getting up extra early on Sundays, even in the depths of Minnesota Januaries, so we would have time to walk up the Eustis Street hill to Peace Lutheran Church. Me struggling alone in one of my well-loved frilly dresses and my brother or sister in a stroller. If we were lucky, last week’s paper would have had a coupon for Toaster Strudel and I would be warm and appeased by award-winning artistic frosting design. I don’t really remember complaining.

But there were times when we did have a car, a little red Honda with a sunroof in good years, and after Asha some 6-seater sedan. Sometimes we would be out late, and on the way home I would drift in and out of sleep listening to my parents talking in hushed voices and two languages, and then my dad would start seeking through the radio to find Delilah’s evening show on B95.5. I could barely stay awake, but I’ve always had trouble sleeping in the car so I remember her syrupy voice through the fog of stars and blackened street-side snow.

You could always tell when Delilah started going through one of her divorces because she started giving terrible advice and her laugh got really bitter. My dad would make one of his frustrated noises and change the station, probably eventually settling for off, maybe humming his way into our parking spot behind the apartment buildings. And then Delilah switched stations and we didn’t find her again until New York.

In the secret, in the quiet place, in the stillness you are there.

In the secret, in the quiet hour I wait, only for you, ‘cause I want to know you more.

Green and Andrew dig through Liz’s guitar case, sifting through the mess of camp songs and hymns for ones they recognize. Green stumbles upon “In the Secret,” the song I loved in 8th grade at Beaver Camp. “This is a really creepy song,” she says. “I always thought of it as a love song,” I said, “so it’s not as bad.” “Yeah,” she says, “but it’s about Jesus.”

In 1998, as Hurricane Georges gathered strength over the sea, we went to church. The air was heavy like my baby quilt is heavy: soft because it’s worn so thin, torn in places and tearing more by the moment. Constantly seeming on the verge of complete destruction. Like God had both hands on the place where the sky and the sea meet, waiting for the perfect moment to rip them, vertically, into battling sea-sky pieces.

The little whitewashed church building filled right up – at first with the regulars, the core congregation; then long-absent relatives and families and random other people started cramming the seats. Our sweat mixed with the sweat of the sea and we knew the storm could break at any second and we would all be trapped in the unfortified house of God.

My dad decided not to follow the liturgy or give a sermon. (I don’t remember if he wrote one, or if he was too busy readying our house for the coming hurricane and was hoping for a way out.) Instead, he asked the congregation for hymn requests.

To this day he marvels that those poor islanders, fearing for their lives, couldn’t have cared less about pleas for aid and assistance. They did not want to sing hymns begging God to spare them. To this day he speaks with the awe that proves to me that God exists, about the faith that proves to him that God exists: that poverty-stricken, hurricane-threatened island congregation wanted to sing about God’s strength and compassion. Their relationship with their God was not defined by an anxious attachment; they did not expect their God to abandon them. They wanted to sing love songs.

I love you, you love me. We are one big family.

With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?

I actually had to look up the lyrics to that song just now. Which is amusing, and surprising not because I watched Barney religiously as a little kid (I don’t remember if I really did or not), but because my family adopted it as a sort of theme song when we were a family of four little kids.

I think it started when I was a baby. I don’t remember, of course, but from what I understand I didn’t like to go to sleep when I was supposed to. Someone suggested to my parents, or they somehow stumbled upon the successful strategy of singing songs to me when I was in my bed with the lights off for the night. Maybe it worked, maybe it settled me down enough that they could go do their own thing for the night, or maybe it was just a nice bonding experience. (After they put me to bed, I used to sing my own lullabies: “My eyes are sunny, my eyes are moony, my eyes are dark, I cannot see!” My stuffed friends probably enjoyed the songs with me in my crib.)

However it started, it stuck, and my parents always took time to sing to each of us four kids at bedtime. How many songs we got depended on how long it took us to get to bed after the official bedtime call, and how late it was. Whoever got to bed first got first choice of songs, and if there was a tie, well, that’s why we had two parents. We got to choose what songs we wanted from an arsenal of Sunday school songs, camp songs, kid-choir car tape songs, and old folk songs. My favorite is a song my mom taught my dad when he studied abroad in college – they were always spending summers and semesters on different continents from each other, and yet somehow it worked. My inner romantic credits it to this little ditty:

I see the moon and the moon sees me.
The moon sees someone I love to see.
God sees the moon and God sees me.
God sees the one I love.

At some point (I remember being thirteen), due to a combination of later bedtimes, bigger scrambles to make bedtime, teenaged angst and embarrassment, and probably the beginnings of my religious crisis, I stopped getting sung to. In the chaos of six people trying to brush their teeth at the same time (my baby sister literally poking fun at my brand new “big boobies”) I would sneak into my room and get in bed. After everything died down, my parents tiptoed in and sat on the edge of my bed, asking if I was asleep. Sometimes I responded, but on a lot of nights I just pretended to be sleeping. Sometimes they sang to me anyway, but other nights they would just kiss my forehead and leave, shutting the door behind them.

I love you, always forever. Near and far, close and together.

Everywhere, I will be with you. Everything, I will do for you.

When I was seven I kept the radio tuned always to the popular music station, barely audible because my parents didn’t like popular music – but it was loud enough to hear when Donna Lewis started singing “I Love You Always Forever.” It topped the charts that year. At school my two best friends (whose names were both Melissa) and I would chase the boys around on the playground singing it at the top of our lungs, and they would scream and clamp their hands over their ears and run away as fast as they could. That is how I learned that boys hate mushy stuff.

When I was fourteen I fell in love with the movie Love Actually. I still can’t choose a favorite subplot or character, and I can still quote almost the entire movie from top to bottom, including the star-studded soundtrack. In one scene, to the sound of “Silent Night,” Mark silently serenades his best-friend-in-law Juliet with a set of posterboards confessing his undying love for her, and then leaving it up to Fate – an idea so brilliant that when I fell in love at fifteen I adopted it. I stenciled cryptic messages onto brightly colored card paper and flipped through them while Katya played the riffs of “Konstantine,” by Something Corporate, on a portable piano keyboard. The boy didn’t get it, but to this day the song reminds us of each other.

When I was sixteen I fell in love again and that time it stuck. He remembered that we had danced to Howie Day’s “Collide” and when I left for college I couldn’t listen to it for almost an entire year. When I was eighteen the King remembered that we danced to Chris Brown’s “With You” and a month later the song was overplayed and he skipped it when it came on when we were together. I started keeping secrets when a song reminded me of someone.

You’ll always be a part of me – I’m part of you indefinitely.

Boy, don’t you know you can’t escape me, ooh darling, ‘cause you’ll always be my baby.

Wednesday nights are poetry nights. Several weeks in a row I have read poems inspired by love. Everybody can relate, whether it’s a breakup piece or an I’m-excited-about-a-new-potential piece. We all write them and we all read them – after all, Jane, love makes art possible. Or do you say that love makes art good? And maybe that art makes love good too? Jim and I joke that we wrote a new song about love and relationships and then break into “What’s Your Fantasy.” A few weeks later I sing (terribly) an acoustic rendition of my all-time favorite Mariah Carey song with Ben on guitar. I’m in love with love but, with my heartbroken peers, I’m a little suspicious when it turns up. I pretend like I know what it looks like and tastes like and feels like. I look for it and then run away from it. It’s like hide-and-seek.

I’ve been alive for two decades now. The more moments pass, the more moments remind me of a movie scene or a song I danced to in middle school. I start to believe that movies and songs are based on real experiences rather than just overactive imaginations like mine. I start listening to Delilah again, and she’s getting over her latest divorce and directing her energies into her kids, her farm, her goodwill and her nightly radio show. I roll my eyes at her advice and her song choices and then smile and hum along.

And on Sunday nights, I become my own Delilah. I play songs for the people I love, and I play the songs that secretly remind me of them. I play the songs that make everyone roll their eyes and laugh and then hum along, the songs that make us believe in love again, that convince us that our gods will not abandon us in the week’s hurricanes and that our lovers fall asleep to our same moon, even if our sun is just now rising.

It’s a Monday night and we’re all buckling down, getting ready for the week ahead. I hope you’re not too stressed out, that you can take this time to take a deep breath and remember that you have what it takes to get through the week. I’m here to play whatever it is that you want to hear, so let me know what that is. Until then, I have a really nice lineup of feel-good songs to keep you from getting sucked in… You’re listening to the Queen of Sheba.