When I Hear That Song

Some songs never really leave us.

The curtains were drawn against the darkness outside and the stove was lit. On Saturday nights we were allowed to stay downstairs for Dallas, which felt like the first truly grown-up programme we had ever been allowed to watch. We followed the fortunes of the Ewing family as though we understood every twist and turn. I suspect we understood very little. I couldn’t tell you half the storylines now, or remember who was feuding with whom, but I can still remember the small thrill of sitting among the grown-ups when I might otherwise have been sent to bed.

I heard the opening theme again recently while I was driving. The road was still stretching away in front of me, but the sitting room had returned with it: the curtains, the stove, where everyone sat.

I was ten when Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in the autumn of 1979. For weeks beforehand Totus Tuus seemed to be everywhere. We learned it at school and sang it until we knew it off by heart, coloured pictures of the Pope and learned about his life while the visit seemed to occupy the entire country.

At home the television was rarely switched off. There were crowds gathering, helicopters arriving, choirs singing and roads lined with people waiting for him. Many of our neighbours travelled to see him for themselves. We stayed at home. Little yellow and white Papal flags had appeared outside houses all around us, fluttering along the road whenever we went outside.

Almost fifty years later, I can still sing much of Totus Tuus without having to think about the words.

Around the same years I was singing in Scór na nÓg. I knew The Sally Gardens by heart, including the line “As the leaves grow on the tree,” where the melody climbed steeply upwards before settling again. I never thought about reaching those notes. They were simply there, waiting to be sung.

Then, one year, they weren’t.

The first time it happened I was more puzzled than embarrassed. I opened my mouth for the note I had reached every other time and my voice broke underneath it. The next time I knew it was coming. I could hear the melody making its way towards that line and was already wondering what would happen when I got there.

The same thing happened again.

Nearly ten years later, I was sharing a house on the North Circular Road in Limerick with a college friend Karen, Paula an air traffic controller, and Deirdre a Bean Garda. Paula and Deirdre already seemed wonderfully established, as though they knew adulthood worked while I was getting used to having my first classroom, my first proper salary and, for the first time, no college term waiting to send me home again.

Saturday nights usually meant Ted’s, the queue stretching onto the pavement and that little surge of excitement arriving before you had even stepped inside. Once through the doors, conversation became half-heard sentences, broad smiles and exaggerated gestures, because nobody could hear very much anyway. At some point the opening guitar of Friends in Low Places came booming through the speakers, and before Garth Brooks had sung more than a few words the whole room had joined in. Glasses went into the air. Arms found shoulders. Long before garlic chips became commonplace, Deirdre introduced us to what felt like the greatest culinary invention of our young lives, and afterwards we stood outside Kranks Corner with steaming trays of them, replaying the evening while the cheese slowly disappeared into the heat beneath it.

By Monday morning Karen and I were standing in classrooms trying to look as though we had been doing it for years.

There are plenty of songs I remember from our wedding, but The Road to Amarillo is the one that still opens the room. I see the bandleader stepping down from the stage with a tambourine in his hand, weaving between the tables, gathering people behind him one by one until half the room was following. Young and old joined in. Some danced; others were laughing too much to dance properly. Every time he passed another table, somebody else got up.

The years have changed the guest list far more than they have changed the music.

Lara’s calls often began in much the same way.

“Dad… have you heard this?”

Sometimes it was a song or a singer I had never come across before. Other times it was a book, a poem or a writer she thought I would enjoy. Lara hears the words. I hear the melody first. One of the songs she sent me was Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, and after a while I began hearing what she had heard.

Lately I’ve found myself listening to My Way more often. Retirement probably has something to do with it. Thirty-four years in education gives Sinatra plenty to work with.

For years Jillian’s phone calls often caught me driving home from school. We always seemed to be on the road at the same time. Somewhere along the way sharing the journey home became part of our week.

I don’t drive home from school anymore.

Jillian still rings. Lara still sends me things I haven’t heard. Claire and I drive roads we’ve travelled hundreds of times, and there is usually music playing somewhere.

Most of the time I don’t notice what it is.

If this story brought a song, a room or a moment back to you, you might enjoy Heron & Moss. Subscribe to receive new stories about the homes, places, food and objects that quietly become part of our lives.