I have longed for decades to have the ability to sing on key.  I don’t mean an excess of talent or star power.  I don’t want to be Taylor Swift or Barbra Streisand.  I just want to be able to join in on sing-alongs.  I’d like to throw in some song to my spoken-word stuff. 

I would like to not be embarrassed by my voice.

My 7th-grade chorus teacher pulled me aside on the last day of school to tell me not to sign up for 8th-grade chorus.  I knew I didn’t have a great voice, but I hadn’t realized until then that I was hopeless. Did you see Meryl Streep in the movie Florence Foster Jenkins?

That would be me. 

Really. I once sang Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to my son when he was a toddler.  He put his tiny hand over my lips and said, “Mama, no.”

I’ve always said you can tell life is not a performance because no one breaks into song at the grocery store.  Well.  If I could carry a tune, I would dance and sing my way through the Kroger and everywhere else.  Every once in a great while, I will break into Onward Christian Soldiers at the office on a particularly frenzied day, but I’ve worked there for 20 years.  They’ve seen me vomit into my wastebasket.  There, I have no shame, though perhaps I should. 

My last best friend, the one who suddenly died exactly six months after my dad, attended Ohio University on a voice scholarship.  She very seldom sang – she said she had ruined her voice with cigarettes and nonpractice. I wanted to throttle her. 

Susan maintained that everyone could be taught to sing on key.  And I told her, “No, you don’t understand.”  But she insisted. 

So, we sat on the steps of her wonderful porch one beautiful day – I think it was about this time of year – and Susan tried.  She’d sing a note and tell me to listen and then match it.

I laughed. “Susan, if I could do that, we wouldn’t be here.”

But she insisted.

After about 20 minutes, she shook her head and lit a cigarette.  I could tell she was trying to find the right words.  Finally, she said, “The problem is you hear everything.”

I said, “Well, yeah.  What is your point?”

She said, “You can’t seem to separate the notes.  You use them all at once with a few extras thrown in.  I’ve never seen this before.”

I just laughed. I felt vindicated. But I also felt like a freak of nature.  

But I do hear everything. I am not a visual learner.  I am auditory.  Give me a good speech or lecture.  Forget the PowerPoint.  I can listen to you, or I can read the PowerPoint slides, but I cannot do both at the same time.

I do not use music as background noise. I may not be able to carry a tune, but I have a good ear, and that just adds insult to injury. When I listen to music, I sit and I listen fully lost in the sound.  I do not listen to music in the car unless it’s a long road trip with little traffic; otherwise, I would be a menace on the road.  Well, even more so than I am. 

[An aside, I do not confuse the sounds I dance to with the music I listen to.]

I would also like to play an instrument or two or three.  But that desire pales in comparison to the singing thing. 

Yes. I would be a one-woman show everywhere I went if only I could carry a tune.