Music at My Mother’s Funeral
During the weeks when we all believed my motherwas likely to die she began to plan
her funeral and she wanted us, her children,
to consider the music we would play there. We remembered
the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept
the floors to the sound of an eight track cassette called Feelings,
the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album
about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months
each errand was accompanied by some kind
of dramatic movement. After my brother was born,
there was a period during which she wore a muumuu
and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his
African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted
to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused
to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music
of an automated bell going off every few minutes,
which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter
to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval,
its insistence that someone was unsafe.
My parents would have been listening to Frank , Bing , and Ella when I was born. My older siblings were listening to Elvis. And I discovered the Supremes. Through H.S. and my early teens, I listened to the Disco Saturday Nite Fever and Springsteen. In my early twenties I thrived on Whitney and Patty Labelle. The 90's were horrible so I switched to country and discovered George Strait. I continued w/ country until Adelle.
Chaps? I wonder if they are birch bark or leather...........ummmmm 
