Flashes of My Childhood in the Music

By Nancy Colasurdo

I’ve said it to my mother many times since my father died four years ago – “It’s always the music, Mom.”

She nods.

This is what I thought of last night as my friend Susan and I chatted before the start of our town’s annual contest to find a Sinatra-style singer. As people filed into Sinatra Park on the Hudson River with a Manhattan skyline backdrop, there was music coming out of the speakers that instantly put me in my childhood home.

Sentimental Journey by Doris Day.

That certainty would have earned me a quarter from Dad, who would often quiz us on the singers and bands he was playing.

Soon after came a big band tune, one that I should have known but didn’t. Was it Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller? Which one played which instrument? I had watched the movies on their lives with Dad multiple times. Darn, which one developed “the sound” when a guy called in sick to practice?

It was one of them, I think.

Then Susan chimed in with Duke Ellington on another song (quarter for you!) and we both got all warm and fuzzy over Nat King Cole’s Unforgettable.

All this before the Frank Sinatra songs even started.

Sinatra lit up my father like no other, so I do think of him every year during this contest. When he was still here, I’d show him some of the videos of the contestants.

But there was something last night about those other tunes I mentioned above that put me in my head in a different way for a few moments. The pieces of our lives that are left behind when people die. We wind up with not just memories, but ourselves infused with parts of these people who raised us or meant a lot to us.

Who am I because of my father’s passion for music?

Even though our musical tastes mostly diverged (no classic rock for Dad), he did appreciate seeing his grown children develop a taste for “the good stuff.” I have many freeze frames in my mind of him reacting to a song or artist. He couldn’t sit still when something he liked came on. Mom says when they went to see Bobby Darin at the Copacabana he almost led the band from his seat.

In fact, the best stories over the years that make up my parents’ life together are almost all connected to music. They met at a dance in Bayonne. My aunt, Dad’s sister, revealed to my mother while they were dating that Dad was playing At Last over and over. He rolled his eyes at that until his dying day.

Their wedding song was Day by Day by Frank Sinatra. They both sang at their wedding (none of their three children inherited their ability to sing, incidentally). They argued over who introduced who to the singer Don Cornell until my mother produced her high school yearbook; she had named one of his songs as her favorite.

We have a huge extended family and attended lots of weddings in the 1980s and ’90s. I always got a kick out of my parents dancing, from a lindy to a cha cha. For the real upbeat numbers – let’s say Mack the Knife – Dad might go for his younger sister, Nancy, or Mom’s “little” sister, Elaine, as a partner.

In later years, when my parents moved to a gated retirement community in Toms River, Dad had the spare room set up as his little musical retreat.

I will always treasure seeing Bobby Caldwell in concert with my brother and father. Live music with a jumping big band. Dad didn’t enjoy most “covers” of Sinatra music, but for whatever reason we all took to Caldwell. Even his version of Beyond the Sea gave Bobby Darin a run for his money (the arrangement!).

During last night’s Sinatra contest in Hoboken, I noticed in the program that one contestant described growing up listening to the Fridays with Frank and Sunday with Sinatra programs out of Philadelphia with Sid Mark. Yes, indeed. On Sundays, the garlic and tomato scents would waft upstairs to our bedrooms and wake us up and, before long, Frank’s voice would fill the house.

I recall visiting my mother months after Dad passed and asking where the CD/cassette player was. It always sat on the kitchen table and was rarely quiet.

“I haven’t listened to music since your father died,” she said.

I turned away slightly so she couldn’t see my face. Wow. I had no idea. My mother can encase herself in a pretty hard shell sometimes, so this hit me.

A short time later, I went in the other room to find a mixed CD of hers, one that didn’t have their shared taste but just hers. I figured that might ease her back to at least some enjoyment of music she loved.

But the second song had significance to her and Dad and the next thing I knew my mother, whose back was to me as she tended to something on the stove, had head bowed and shoulders shaking.

Major fail on that experiment, but I consoled myself with the idea that maybe it was healthy for her to cry.

“See?” she said when she composed herself.

Thursday night as the contestants took their best shot at songs like My Way and Fly Me to the Moon, I mostly enjoyed myself, but I had tears behind my sunglasses, too. Flashes of my childhood and a growth realization of sorts.

Where does it all go?