"What?" She squinted.
"It means 'it is you.'" (Or, 'you are,' if used literally)
"Oh."
"It's supposed to be kinda romantic. Like, in the way I said it," I explained.
"Oh, that's nice."
Okay, I wasn't explaining it well. I wanted to say that there was a kind of poetic beauty in the way the words themselves were spoken, regardless of what they meant.
So I tried again. "It's more than that. It's the sound of the words themselves. It's... I don't know. It's like in that song."
"The song?" Shaking her head, her wavy hair flew about the car, from the open window, as if her medusa of curls were as confused as she was.
Oh, that's right. It was written when she was 4 years old, by the Spanish singer-songwriter Juan Carlos Calderon. I couldn't blame her.
The song was "Eres Tu," by Mocedades, in 1974. The lead was sung by Amaya Uranga. It was a musical era when now-immortal musical legends dominated US charts.
It was a Spanish-language song. No translations. No English. And how it found its way to #9 on 1974's Top 100 is telling. It needed no translation.
Apple Music found me another Amaya song. It was 'Tomame o Dejame'. Unlike 'Eres Tu,' it wasn't pop. With no translation (especially without it), it was emotionally and melodically stirring. Amaya Tomame o Dejame
Today, Spanish-language artists still perform covers of the timeless "Tomame of Dejame." Artists like Thalia. Thalia Cover.
And now, to the other point. I think I was unwittingly entranced by this stuff as a child; hypnotized in an old Victorian living room.
It was my father. I remember it now.
"John!" Dad's eyes would open wide, and he'd point to the stereo, the needle dancing across the vinyl, the sounds of violins and cellos and pianos filling the high-ceilinged living room, reaching a certain crescendo he'd been expecting. "Right here, right here!"
He'd point again, close his eyes, and sing the lyrics, along with an opera singer, like Maria Callas, as she finished the final stanza of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma, "Ah, reidi a mi..."
My father would be passionately singing, word for word, with the opera diva. But in Italian.
Then, he'd open his eyes and look for my reaction - or agreement - to the beauty of Bellini's masterpiece.
Well, I didn't speak Italian. And I'm absolutely sure he didn't. But he was my father, and he was sharing a kind of mystical musical joy with me, so what could I say?
"Ah, that was beautiful, dad."
While sometimes it was orchestral arrangements, it was mostly - and (at the time) painfully - opera.
I am now reasonably certain that, in the sixties and seventies, I was the only child within at least a few hundred miles who spent time listening, patiently, to hours-long piano concertos and full-length operas in languages I couldn't understand.
My father was hoping I could feel what he did, even if it was not just then. Not when I just wanted to go up to my room.
He had found bliss - in his ability to summon a kind of entangled, intuitive human resonance to harmonics, frequencies, and linguistic consonance - and become mesmerized in its poetry.
Looking back now, I'm sure he wanted to share this joy. Maybe teach it. Help me feel the magic that he did.
Now, I better understand that words carry way more than letters.
That sounds are words, that words are sounds. That music is language, that language is music.
Well, dad, it took me a while. But I'm glad you made me listen with you. Even if it was both sides of every album and even if it was more than one opera in a single night.
Tomame o Dejame. "Take me. Or leave Me."
Ahhh. "Dad, that's it! Right there."
