Embraceable you

One of my recurring childhood memories is of my mother’s radio.  It was on top of a cabinet in a corner near enough her bed.  It had a gold face with little holes and a rather big circle with numbers with a knob in the center.  You turned that to select a station.  Ever since I was small, my mother would send me to turn on her radio and look for her favorite radio station, which, if I remember right, was DZMT.  If it was nighttime she would ask me to look for Jo San Diego, who had a real sexy voice.

Mommy had also taken voice lessons and she sang very well.  She loved singing with the songs on the radio and she never sang out of tune.   Her favorite song was Embraceable You, composed by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin.  It was composed sometime in 1928 and released around the 1930s, when Mom was around nine years old.

 I can still hear her sing:

Embrace me, my sweet, embraceable you

Embrace me, you irreplaceable you

 Just one look at you, my heart goes tipsy in me

You and you alone bring out the gypsy in me.

I love all, the many charms about you

Above all, I want my arms around you

Don’t be a naughty baby, come to papa, do

My sweet, embraceable you.

 She knew all the words to that song.  When she sang it she sort of stared into space and stars would sparkle in her eyes.  I would look at her in wonder and awe.   I wanted that look.  I suspected it came from a deep, delicious feeling.  I wanted to sing as well as my mother did!

The love for DZMT stayed until I grew into a teenager, rapt in hormones, harboring millions of romantic illusions.  I would also sing Embraceable You in my own flat tones and think of whoever I had a crush on or fancied myself in love with at the time.  Often I would sing it alone at home, dreaming of the boy of the moment.  We would be on a terrace, just my love of the moment and me.  In the sky there would be a moon and stars and we would be dancing cheek to cheek.  We would feel like we were dancing on clouds.  Of course, this was transferable to the next boy and the one after him, but it never diminished my passion for the song.

The music of my era was different.  We liked Jimmy Rodgers, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley — rock-and-roll belonged to my time.   So I would sing and dream to Embraceable You and similar romantic songs alone because if my peers heard me, they would think I was corny.  “Corny” was a word fashionable during my time.

Nevertheless, every time I heard Embraceable You, I would get transported to another hopeful, romantic realm.   The older I got, my emotions toward the song very slowly changed but consistently it brought a nostalgic smile.  I remembered when I was small and turning on my mother’s radio.  I thought about DZMT and Jo San Diego.

There was a point in my life when I stopped falling in crush, stopped feeling lusty or love-y for a long time.  But I would fiddle with my radio until I would find a station that played songs from my mother’s era.  I loved them:  My Foolish Heart, The Very Thought of You, Sentimental Reasons, You Go to My Head, among so many other songs.  Listening to them would transport me to a time of my innocence, to the throes of my heartbreaks, but this time viewed from a distance.  It would sweep me up in a huge wave of sentimentality and I loved every moment of it.

Then my mother got Alzheimer’s disease.  First she fought with my daughter and demanded that I throw my daughter out of the house.  I told her I could not.  She went to Vancouver instead.  During those years, every time I heard her songs I would change the station.  Her Alzheimer’s progressed and she began to hate me more.  Then I would listen to her beautiful, sentimental songs and remember her before Alzheimer’s took her, how we used to sing together, play four hands on the piano together, laugh a lot together.  Those were the days when these songs saw me through.  I began to treasure them again.

Then Mommy crossed over and today these songs are among the things I hold close to my heart because they bring her back.  Sometimes I hear her unique laughter and I grin, remembering when I was a child, the mischief we would get into together, the fun we had, the depth of the enjoyment in each other’s company.

My mom was a wonderful woman and a great singer.  At this moment I would like to sing to her:

 Don’t be a naughty mommy, come to your baby, do

My sweetly perfumed, embraceable you.

 * * *

Please text your comments to 0917-815-5570.