Always There, Always Gone is a genre-bending, experimental memoir that tells the story of being raised by a mother in protracted mourning. It’s also the story of my grandmother, whose voice finds its way into the pages of my book through her personal letters, which I read throughout my writing. The structure is fragmented, and the brief chapters skip around in time and amidst generations.
Music plays a significant role in my memoir. It is used to set scene, to harken back to a time and place, to suggest mood, and to foster familiarity and connection. I am delighted to present my book through the lens of a playlist, taking note of the places where music appears in the writing. Through beats and melodies, lyrics and instrumental works, take a journey with me on this soundtrack path from tragic loss and grief to a place of truth, discovery, and healing.
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” by Mister Rogers
“The sweet bells of the celesta opening to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood call from the RCA Victor color television set in its wooden console against the wall, followed by Mister Rogers’ humming voice, his kindness, songs, trolley bells.”
At the beginning of Part One, just a few pages into my book, I am two in this scene, watching TV while lying next to our snoring Saint Bernard. I adored Mister Rogers as a child, and even now I find myself immediately transported to that place of peace, quiet, and calm when I hear his voice. Fred Rogers wrote the song in 1963 after his program began in Canada, and then it was kept once the show was transferred to the United States. The result is a couple generations of Americans whose heartrates relax when they hear those sweet bells of the celesta opening.
“I Got You Babe” by Sonny & Cher
“The five of us sit on the tweed sofa to watch The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, seven-year-old me for the bright colors and clothes, my younger brothers for the popcorn, my parents for the togetherness. As the hour closes, I perch on the edge of the sofa with enough room to sway to the rhythm of the bassoon beat and gentle guitar opening of “I Got You Babe.””
Moving through Part One of my book, this song offers another nostalgic connection to childhood television watching. The simplicity of the song connotes simpler times. I would argue that anyone who knows it can identify it within its first three notes for sure. Written by Sonny Bono and released in 1965, Sonny supposedly woke Cher late one night to listen to the lyrics, and she didn’t like the song and went back to sleep. Once he adjusted the bridge to fit her voice, she was sold, and fans are all the luckier for it.
“Country Gardens” by Percy Grainger
Part Two of my book is almost all steeped in music. This is because I tell the story of my grandmother’s early life using her letters in this section, and virtually all the letters from this time are between my grandmother and her parents when she was a student violinist at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, during the summers of 1937, 1938, and 1939. These are also years when Percy Grainger, famous composer and pianist, was in residence at Interlochen. He worked with the campers, and my grandmother sent home a picture postcard of Grainger complete with his autograph and the words “keep this” on the back, a memento from her summer. When I found that postcard amongst her letters, I searched Grainger’s name and found “Country Gardens,” a sweet melody strong with familiarity. It is a folk tune that had been around for over a century before Grainger created a piano arrangement for it in 1918. He would often use it as the encore piece at his piano concerts due to audience demand despite feeling resentful that this little ditty was what brought him his greatest fame. Since discovering it, it seems I hear it everywhere.
“Symphony No. 2, Op. 30, Romantic” by Howard Hanson
While writing my book, I spent time in the online Interlochen archives in search of any photograph of my grandmother that might be there, and I found one. She is seated in the middle of the large student orchestra performing under an outdoor shed. The photo is labeled “Howard Hanson,” which refers to the conductor in the photo, and I learn from the internet that Pulitzer-Prize-winning Hanson was a visiting composer at Interlochen since it opened in 1928. An excerpt from this beautiful symphony, at once both haunting and soothing in its gradual development of melody over time, became a gift to Interlochen from Hanson and was deemed the “Interlochen Theme.” I can hear my grandmother’s violin melding with the many other instruments surrounding hers. Perhaps this is one of the Sunday afternoon concerts captured weekly on the Interlochen radio show for eager listeners across the country.
“Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran
“I spend my time alone in my small bedroom, the doorknob pop-locked, the sound of security, sitting at my student desk or on my round royal-blue fringed area rug, procrastinating and then study-cramming for exams or writing long handwritten notes to my friends. We fill loose-leaf lined pages, up, down, and across the margins; pencil words of party plans, crushes, and the fashion results of mall shopping; scribble teenage angst and woes to the electric sounds of Duran Duran and Adam Ant before origami-folding our hearts into precious paper rectangles.”
I am in high school at the beginning of Part Three of my book, and, like so many adolescents, nothing is more important than music and friends. “Hungry Like the Wolf” was released in the U.S. in 1983 and hit No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March of that year. That success was largely due to its dramatic MTV music video, which my friends and I watched as often as possible, fascinated by the scenes of Sri Lanka and dumbfounded by the beauty of Simon Le Bond.
“Strip” by Adam Ant
Seductive and beautiful, Adam Ant’s face adorned my teenage bedroom walls with bright make-up and shiny outfits, and the upbeat melody of “Strip” filled the space from speakers connected to my combo record/tape player. No one could be sad when this sweet, sexy pop song was blasting. It was impossible. Which is why I played it often, this title track from his latest album released in 1983. I remember feeling like the MTV video was unfortunate in its goofiness and could have better featured Adam Ant in all his glory, but I forgave him after seeing him live at Radio City Music Hall during a high school trip to New York, dancing from the back row with abandon.
“One O’Clock Jump” by Count Basie
“It’s the summer of ’41. Maybe you met through a friend, or perhaps he caught your eye across the dancefloor at a nightclub. Bill, tall with light wavy hair, saunters to your side of the room, dodging a sea of twisting feet and twirling skirts. Approaching, he asks if you’d join him in a Lindy Hop, and you take his hand. The swing sounds of Count Basie and his Orchestra bounce through your shoe soles as you find an open space amongst the dancers, air filled with carefree laughter and flying sweat.”
This is how I imagine my grandmother met one of her suitors, Bill, the summer between her freshman and sophomore years in college in Boston. In the latter half of Part Three of my book, I tell the stories of three suitors based on their letters to her and how she came around to choosing my grandfather, one of the suitors who was not Bill. A few months shy of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the threat of war haunted each letter she wrote, received, and unknowingly saved for me to read. I love imagining the young adults of the day working up a sweat on the dancefloor, taking a break from the worries of what loomed ahead. Count Basie wrote this jazz instrumental standard in 1937, a good example of his early riff style, and he would often use it to close his orchestra’s performances, leaving young, happy, hoppin’ couples trying to catch their breath before they call it a night.
“Elmer’s Tune” by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra
[November 11, 1941] Armistice Day crept around, and … I went around to pick up my Mary Girl and her knitting … we wanted to climb a mountain, … but heck, the only decent mountain around was Washington, so we put down the top and started. And I remember going down Memorial Drive and whistling something ~ ~ “Elmer’s Tune.”
I first learn about “Elmer’s Tune” from a journal entry written by my grandfather, recounting the moments when he and my grandmother fell in love, and I quote from it while closing out Part Three of my book. Written by Elmer Albrecht, Dick Jurgens, and Sammy Gallop, and made famous by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra in 1941, this big band classic was considered by my grandparents to be their song, with lyrics they memorized while driving up to Mount Washington from Boston and sang along with the table jukebox at Howard Johnson’s over frappes. The lyrics are hilarious and the melody uplifting, inducing the perfect state of mind for falling in love. The journal, a leather-bound book my grandfather gave my grandmother on her twentieth birthday, was titled “From Elmer’s Tune—On.”
“Amazing Grace” by The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
Featured in Part Five of my book, it is the sounds of bagpipes that I most remember from the fiftieth anniversary memorial event honoring the victims of the airplane accident that took my grandparents’ lives. On December 16, 2010, fifty years after the airplane collision, I attended a gathering at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn along with other survivors of the accident—grown children and grandchildren, friends and other family members. We were strangers gathering for a common purpose, to remember a tragedy that had happened fifty years before but had left a trail of trauma and loss for generations. There was beauty in that moment—a crisp, clear day, the lightness of birdsong above, a hymn that bonded us all through a sweet, familiar melody, and the humming, soulful notes of the bagpipes.