Major Sevenths

Major Sevenths

For Pop

I remember lying in my bed. Summer, 1954. I was five.  The Virginia night drifted through my room and carried with it the low-pitched thrum of newly emergent cicadas. Sounds from the backyard garden party mingled with quiet conversations from the floor below where my parents were having drinks with a few friends.  Little stick-on stars and planets and comets glowed pale green on the ceiling of my room, their phosphorescence competing with the shimmering flashes of light reflecting from the pool beneath my window.  The evening was fading to blue-black.

 

I was listening, sleepy-eared, to the muted laughs from the patio and the clinks of ice in tumblers as martinis were refreshed when my father came to the bedroom door, the click-flash of a Zippo lighter announcing his arrival.  He’d brought his guitar. 

“Can’t sleep?”

 “Nope, not too much.”

“Want me to close the window?”

“Uh unh. I like it open.”

“How about I just sit here with you for a bit?”

“That’d be nice.  Will you play a song?”

“A couple, if you’d like.”

“Yes, sir.”

My dad placed a small, square glass ashtray on nightstand and sat on the edge of my bed, his weight drawing me off-center.  He slipped the guitar strap over his neck and shoulder, carefully avoiding the cigarette dangling on the right side of his lower lip.  He spent a moment or two twisting the ivory-white tuning keys.  As he gently turned each key, I could sense the tension increasing or relaxing along the length of each glistening metal fiber. String by string, my father coaxed the guitar into tune.

From my angle in the bed, I studied my father’s left profile, limned by the hall light. In his world, he was young man, just 33, and on the rise in rank and position. In my world, he was just Pop, or Dad. Tall, lean, black hair, brown eyes, Roman nose, gifted with a warm smile and a genuine laugh. And never without a cigarette.

I watched wisps of exhaled smoke curl toward the ceiling as the sweet smell of heated tobacco drifted down across the bed.

  

My father fondled the cigarette with his thumb and index finger, took one last deep inhalation, and placed the Camel in an indentation in a corner of the ashtray.

“Okay, let’s see if we can make a noise with this.”

 He pulled the guitar close and leaned his head forward, eyeing the instrument’s neck, surveying the proper sites for his fingers to press the strings to the frets.  Satisfied with his starting position, he softly pulled one chord and then another and another from the taut metal strands. In sequence, he played a C, an A-minor, then an F, and finally a G.  The universal progression.

“Learn these, old buddy; maybe toss in a D and an E minor, and you’ll be the life of any party for at least a dozen good songs.”

Once he’d settled in with the guitar, my father began humming old songs, then whispersinging the tunes of his own youth and retelling the warrior ballads from the war he’d fought.  His fingers shaped little ditties about frogs on lily pads, and it ain't gonna rain no more, no more.  No more.  He sang one song I didn’t understand at all. For years, I only recalled the last three words of each verse, “…the foggy dew.” It was the most melodic of my dad’s repertoire, hills and valleys of notes, climbing and descending with the chord changes, but he did not give it full voice. Instead, he sang it so softly that most of what I remember was the quiet sadness of the music.

It is a song about the Irish rebellion, also known as the Easter Rising of 1916. Tired of being treated like second class citizens in an oft-maligned country, Irish rebels attempted to push back against British troops and lost badly. The song tells of the attack of the small band of determined fighters, and of their defeat under the big British guns in the foggy dew. But of course, I knew nothing of such things while I listened to my father in the gloaming of my room. And the chords, A minor, G, E minor, A minor, D minor, fit themselves in neat slots in my brain and locked themselves in. They stayed there, teasing me from behind the closed door of imperfect memory, a door I would unlock only after my father’s death.

Sometimes only chords came. He softly swept through a major seventh scale. Strummed slowly, the notes were on the sad side of mellow, and rose and fell like boats at a restless anchorage.  The major sevenths feel incomplete and unresolved to me; they have no beginnings or ends. They enter the heart like the cool precursor winds of fall that sweep unexpectedly into the middle of a summer day and depart just as suddenly. When those chilling breezes have gone, summer doesn’t feel the same; an end is coming.

Although the five-year-old me did not understand any of this—I heard only the soft strokes of my father’s thumb across the strings—the sounds from that evening would become the melancholy tones of my youth.

He ran through his simple repertoire, then stood up and propped the guitar on the side of the bed, its keys near my pillow.  I reached out to touch the tips of the strings, wound tightly about their key stems, and the sharp, clipped metal ends scritched across my fingertips.

 

My father pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, turned the pack on its side and tapped out one unfiltered cigarette.  He lit the new cigarette from the smoldering stub of the old one, walked out of the bedroom to the hall bathroom and flushed the dying butt in the toilet.  I listened to the gurgle of the water swirling away as my father came back.

The quiet of the room was startled by a peal of laughter from the party below spilling through the bedroom window. After a few lingering chuckles played themselves out, the room was still again.  My father laughed softly as if, even from this remove, he had shared in the poolside humor. 

“You know,” he said as much to himself as to me as he returned to his place by the bed, “there is something nice about that sound…a little laughter among friends.  Your mother is awfully good at that sort of thing.” 

The dull ember of the Camel suddenly blossomed bright rich red, and I heard my father exhale with a soft puff.  Stepping back a few feet from the bedside, my father tapped off a flake of ash and began to write in mid-air with a scarlet cursor.  He spelled my name in script, suspending a fiery rope of undulating cursive in the middle of the night-filled room.

I was entranced with his simple art of great arcs and inflowing and expanding spirals, dozens of flowers and polygons, and every letter of the alphabet. One image barely dimmed before a new one hovered in its place. Persistence of vision, the trick of the eye to “remember” an image, kept my room filled with vibrant red-orange streaks and dashes and dots.

  

As tobacco fire images swirled around me, I began to fade, fighting the night, losing to sleep.  My eyelids slowly descended like the curtain on a final scene – the stage lights dimming, the show at its end. From somewhere the covers were pulled about my shoulders and a soft goodnight was whispered from the hall.  Outside my window a night bird murmured and the patio door was pulled shut.

I remember that night probably better than any other night of my life, though more than 22,600 nights have come and gone over the intervening 62 years. It was the last night of feeling absolutely secure, of having unquestioned confidence in my father as a living god, capable of everything. It was also the last time I can place my mother in a happy context, without any intervening veil of doubt or curiosity about her motives or direction.  

That is not to say that the very next day everything fell apart. Hardly. I’m sure the next day was normal; the next evening may have been a replay of the one before. But that night, that night of stars on the ceiling, music in the air, and fiery nicotine script has held me in thrall for the unattainable perfection it came to represent: a Brigadoon of the heart, a safe haven.