Unlike last month’s music which had no melody, my music for June has an aching, bittersweet tune. Such melodies always sought me out; if I sit too long unoccupied at the piano, they emerge, literally hand-made, from the space between my fingers and the keys.
I first discovered my love of these love-soaked, desire-laden tunes when I was a teenager and dating the son of the very successful composer Robert Wright. One day I composed a gift for Geoffrey, and the boastful, competitive youth in me wanted to show his father I was no slouch in the area of melody-writing. The tune I wrote humbled me. As I am humbled by this expressive, resigned yet ultimately exultant melody for June’s calendar music.
It has me asking, what does it mean to say? As I previously said in the video commentary I made with Steve, this story is mysterious to me. I cannot tell it any more fully beyond the six words. The melody and the story are sharers of a secret. “Without fail, he’d visit, midday everyday.” Why was he visiting this tree? Or was it not the tree he was visiting.
In the absence of answers, at least one thoughtful fan of “Then, gently, the world began anew.” has shared with me a story that ‘fits’. I’ll repeat it here, because it’s very touching and inspiring, though nothing like what I had in mind when I wrote the six-word story. But that doesn’t matter; what matters is where you land.
“Bennett Cerf relates this touching story about a bus that was bumping along a back road in the South. In one seat a wispy old man sat holding a bunch of fresh flowers. Across the aisle was a young girl whose eyes came back again and again to the man’s flowers. The time came for the old man to get off. Impulsively he pushed the flowers into the girl’s lap. “I can see you love the flowers,” he explained, “and I think my wife would like for you to have them. I’ll tell her I gave them to you.” The girl accepted the flowers, then watched the old man get off the bus and walk through the gate of a small cemetery.”
As told by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen in the original Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Blessed are the storytellers of the world.
