A Letter to Yo-Yo Ma

Six years ago today, my father died. In the years since, I have written this letter in my head many times, as I have wanted to tell you what a profound and lovely part your recording Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone had in the last days of his life, and how it continues to connect us to him even now.

My father, Larry Vonalt, was chairman of the English Department at the University of Missouri at Rolla. I wouldn’t have mentioned that except that teaching was such an intrinsic part of everything he was. He was very interested in film, and loved music, though he himself was not particularly musical.  When my son Julian turned five, Dad suggested that we sign him up for cello lessons, and offered to pay for them. Julian’s father is Chinese American and Dad noted that Julian could look to you as an excellent role model. Surprisingly, we were able to find a cello teacher in Livingston, Montana. We bought our son a half-size cello and he began to learn. He did not turn out to be a virtuoso, or even very disciplined, but he stuck with it for several years.

In the meantime, my father was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. He took an optimistic view and we followed his lead. We should have seen that if the disease didn’t destroy him that the treatment surely would. In January of 2005, they took out the larynx, robbing him of his voice in an attempt to save his life. He went on teaching, using a little box that buzzed when he held it up to his throat to “speak.”

That summer Julian, then age 10,  and I went to spend a few weeks with my Dad and stepmother. Julian dragged along the cello– now three-quarter size. We have dozens of photographs Dad took during that visit of Julian set up in the livingroom, all knees and elbows, glasses sliding down his nose, lost in concentration as he played. He would play until he made a mistake and then he’d say “Wait, I messed up, let me start again.”

In September, Julian turned 11 and among his many presents was a copy of Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone, a gift from my mother. I don’t know when Julian started playing it, I don’t even remember hearing it until I finally heard it, if that makes any sense. We had learned just before that there was nothing more to do for Dad’s cancer. I don’t know if they told Dad to get his affairs in order, or if they suggested an amount of time that he might have left. All I know is that one day late in August he’d sent me an email asking if I wanted his poetry books, and when I read that I began to sob.

My husband and I went with Julian out to Seattle one weekend in November. Driving home on a gray Sunday afternoon, through the Bitterroot mountains of western Montana, Julian leaned forward and asked if we could play the CD that my mother had given him for his birthday. I said sure, and he handed it forward. For the next four hours, we listened. We listened to it through the dying light of evening, and we listened through the star-spangled darkness of a Montana winter night. If we spoke at all, it was only a word or two. My husband stopped to put gasoline in the Volvo; Julian and I remained in the car, listening.

When we arrived at our little farm, I got out of the car, unlocked the door, walked into the house and booted up the computer. I did not even take off my coat. When I found the CD on Amazon, I ordered a copy to be sent to my father by next day mail.

By some miracle, they actually got it to him on the next day, and the email I received read “Thanks for the Yo-Yo Ma CD. I like it very much. I’ve always liked the music Morricone did for spaghetti westerns, but I had no idea it could sound like that. The piece from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly reminds me of that t-shirt you sent me when you were in school in Boston. You know, the one that says ‘The Good, the Dad and His Money.’ Thanks again. Love you guys, Dad.”

We drove from Montana to Missouri see my father for the last time that December. When we walked in the door, he was listening to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone.  He listened to it every single day we were there. Sometimes his wife would go to put on something else and he would shake his  head. No, he wanted to hear the Morricone.  He was failing quickly. He went into the hospital briefly to have a feeding tube placed, and he wanted to hear the music in the car as we drove him home. It was on all the time. It was as if that music gave him the courage to accept his own death, which was coming for him, whether he was ready or not.

You’d think we’d all have grown to hate it. You would think that none of us would ever want to hear it again. But we went on listening. On the 17th of December, we went back to Montana, promising to return in a few weeks. The doctors assured us he had at least that much time. Hospice made it possible for him to stay in his home, but on the morning of the day after Christmas, pain management became problematic. The ambulance came to take Dad to the hospital, and when they closed the door, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone was still playing on the stereo.

His wife called early in the afternoon to say that he probably wouldn’t make it through the night. I did my damnedest to find a way to get there. They’d hold the only flight for me leaving Billings, Montana if I could get there in the next 40 minutes. But Billings was 120 miles away. My husband said “Just get in the car, I’ll drive you straight through to Missouri.”  Missouri,  1481 miles away. It might as well have been the moon. Julian put on the CD and we sat together for the rest of the day. When the call came at 8:30 that night to say that my father had slipped away, we were still listening. If we’d gotten in the car to drive there we would have only made it as far as Denver.

I did go back the first week in January. That evening, as we sat down with a glass of wine, my father’s widow put on the CD. Perhaps I looked stricken, because she paused and said “Oh, I’m sorry, wouldn’t you rather not hear this?”

My voice cracked when I answered her. “It’s fine. Please. I’d like to hear it.”

“I just couldn’t bear to lose the music too,” she whispered.

Julian stopped playing the cello. He said that after his Grampa’s death it just made him too sad. I only listened to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone in the car, because hearing it was so intensely painful and so intensely beautiful and it forced me to embrace my grief. Sometimes I cried so hard I just had to pull over to the side of the road until I could regain my composure. It’s a funny thing because even though I was so sad, the music made me feel connected to my father, as if when I listened to it we were still together. Ecstasy of the Gold was particularly difficult because it always reminded me of that dopey t-shirt, and it was the track I listened to the most.

Not too long after we left Montana for good and moved to Ohio so that Julian could attend a performing arts high school. He was admitted to the 8th grade after auditioning for creative writing. One day, though, he stopped to talk to a boy carrying a cello case– and the boy invited him to try out for the orchestra. Julian was pretty rusty– it had been two years since he’d even picked up the bow. But he did try out and they did accept him, and he did make his way up through the ranks. He’s a senior now, and his major area of study is music.  He plays the cello every single day, sometimes I fall asleep hearing him play into the night. He has two private teachers, plus the cello instructor at the school, and daily orchestra practice. I imagine he will play the cello for the rest of his life. We have talked about the music from Ennio Morricone’s films, but of course, the printed score is not available to the public. When I hear him picking out passages by ear, I don’t know if my heart will break or burst, but I know my father would have been very proud of him.

With time, the grief has eased a bit, it’s less ferocious. I can listen to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone now without falling apart, and I do choose to listen to it quite often still. Thank you so much for making this wonderful recording that allowed my father music for his last days with us, a score by which to leave this earth,  and years later, still a way of staying in touch. It has been a most remarkable gift, and we are forever grateful.

Night Hawks

“Night people, funky but neat” – John Cooper Clarke

More than one person has advised to write in the morning. Only one of them is a writer, and she happens to be a morning person.  The last thing my husband says to me before he goes up to bed is “Don’t stay up so late tonight.” I can’t help it.  This is when I write.

I’ve tried to write in the daytime. Writing on deadline would have been a lot easier if I could somehow focus on the matter at hand during the daylight hours. I could do the interviews, make the notes, fact-check and peel back the layers of research, but I had the damnedest time getting the words down on the paper in some kind of orderly fashion, let alone words that would dance, take flight, suspend disbelief.

Some of the absolutely most brilliant things I’ve written have been crafted long after the rest of the world has gone to bed–and some of the worst dreck too, which is why although it’s good to write late at night, it’s wise to edit in the daytime.

I am less guarded at night , which allows for the literary blood-letting that seems to have become an essential component of a number of these personal essays. It also allows me the quiet and the solitude to work out complicated issues and present them in some kind of halfway coherent manner.

It’s been this way a long time. In college, I once wrote a poem about defrosting the refrigerator at four in the morning, and I wrote it after I finished defrosting the refrigerator. And not just for the writing, but most social interaction too. In the old days, we didn’t even get ready to go out until 10 o’clock, closing down the clubs and finishing up with breakfast at the Varsity, or whatever all-night diner was available. Then, as now, I did try to go to bed before it was entirely light out. Last night was a squeaker in that regard.

At home or out in the world, the night feels comfortable to me. The risks seem better calculated, the interaction with other people more immediate, the night its own soft, safe velvet cloak. Even online, there is a sense of camaraderie at finding that someone else is also up in the middle of the night.

Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, has become a kind of icon for night-crawling, and the scene with its four figures has been the subject of many short stories, poems and cinematic homage. Fluorescent lights were quite new when Hopper made the  painting in 1942, and they seem a beacon out of the diner. After seeing the painting as a cheap print, it was quite shocking to come face to face with it in the Chicago Art Institute.  For one thing, it’s quite large– five feet long and almost three feet tall. But more immediate to me was the sense of wistfulness it evoked. Not that the figures were experiencing “existential loneliness”  (as suggested by one self-important art critic) but that Hopper had captured that late night blend of melancholy and magic. I wanted to be at some counter in the middle of the night, eating pie and drinking coffee from a stout mug.

Sister Wendy Bennett, an English nun who has been trotted out for a program in Art History on the BBC (honestly, even the premise sounds like a Monty Python skit) wrote in her book Sister Wendy’s American Masterpieces that the figures in the painting symbolized caged and miserable birds of prey, but it was unclear if the woman was preying on the men or the men on the woman. She loaded on more tripe about only the counterman being able to experience freedom by having a life outside of the diner. She thinks perhaps Hopper based both the male customers on himself (not the case) and that this indicated that he thought of the men as clones. Clones?

It’s not my place (or anyone else’s) to tell you what the  painting’s about. That’s the nature of art. Experience it for yourself and make your own interpretation– but in my opinion the English nun is heavily layering her own negative feelings about late night perambulations on top of whatever Hopper intended.

There is a very definite sense  in our culture that it is virtuous to be up early, and degenerate to be asleep at noon, even though there should really be no difference.  Ben Franklin, echoing earlier philosophers wrote “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise,” and those prejudices linger, generating all kinds of pop culture studies, medical research and unending zeitgeist that it is better to get up early. Sometimes that moment of awakening and leaping from the bed is referred to as the heroic minute. Heroic! But apparently not so heroic when the minute of your rising is after 11 a.m.

Studies over the last forty years have shown that there are “differences in the fundamental property of the intrinsic period of the circadian rhythms” that will determine whether someone is an early bird or a night owl. These differences then are hard-wired, but can be adjusted through habit, will, and light therapy. There is sometimes a bias against “night people” in the workplace, where they may be regarded as undisciplined or lazy. In January 2007, “night people” in Denmark began a serious campaign to end discrimination against those who stay up late. Forming the “B Society,” they argued that the “Early Bird Model” was less relevant in a post-agricultural society and sought to attract the support of “trade unions, politicians and policy makers interested in making a more flexible workplace.”

I don’t consider myself “nocturnal,” but rather “cathemeral,” like a lion– an animal that is active night and day, depending on the circumstances. We night-hawks are in good company, though:  James Joyce, Winston Churchill, Marcel Proust, Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards.

A few years ago, a high school classmate rekindled our acquaintance. She and her husband both did shift work for the Canadian coast guard and often we were all three up in the wee small hours of the morning. I think those late night online conversations helped us to forge a much better friendship than the one we enjoyed in high school.Since then they have both retired and no longer have to deal with shift work (which neither particularly cared for) and I’m glad for them. But I miss seeing Jeanne pop up on my computer screen when I am noodling around after dark.

Tom Waits’  1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner was inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting, and the song “Eggs and Sausage”  is a brilliant evocation of late night in a diner. For years though, I mis-heard the line “Now the paper’s been read” as “Now the paper’s put to bed,” which for journalists is a lot more sensical. The paper’s “put to bed” when it’s sent to the press, a nocturnal exercise everywhere– it’s close to daylight when the day’s edition hits the streets. (And if it was the previous day’s — why bother reading it?)

There’s a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee urn tonight
All the gypsy hacks and the insomniacs . . .

I could get up at, say 5 a.m. and try to write. An hour into it, my son would be hitting the shower. My husband would be up soon after, and then downstairs making coffee, and letting the dogs out. The television would snap on for the morning news. Julian would stick his head in the study to ask if I know where something is, or can he have ten bucks, or did I  make an appointment for the dentist? They’d be out the door to school — I’d have 30 glorious minutes of peace and quiet and then my husband would be back. The mailman rings the doorbell, the dogs bark, everything pulling at my attention from fifty different directions.

If I start writing about midnight, I can write for four hours with very little to interrupt me. Four glorious hours, my family snug in their beds, the dogs snuffle, feet twitching, chasing rabbits in their dreams.