The Landlord's Assistant, Part 7: Sing, Sing
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Sandra Tsing Loh's dad turns 89, and still going.
My father, who turns 89 this week, has, like many of his generation, become leafy-fragile. He is fluttery with Parkinson’s. It is with effort that he collapses into, and rises up out of, a car. I have to literally pull him up out of the passenger’s seat, both feet planted hard on the sidewalk – while I pinion myself against the Volvo to keep from dropping him.
And yet my dad keeps going, week after week. For what? His weekly routine.
I used to laugh, at my dad’s weekly routine–
And yet as a 47-year-old woman who, in these winter months, tends to endure a little... oh, what’s it called? Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD... I mean, look people, it’s mid-January, it’s been a monsoon out there, the sun goes down at 3
I realized I was maybe taking it too hard when, the other night at dinner? A writer colleague cordially asked me what new project I was working on and I flatly declared: "Nothing at all. Winter makes me sad."
Anyway, I’ve come to that notion that anything on this whirling blue marble that helps a human being cope is good – particularly if it’s free and not cruel to animals and done without drugs.
But then there's my dad’s singing class. Well – My dad’s singing, anyway, and the enthusiasm, or rather the aggressive and snarling obsession he brings to it. It's rather trying!
Here is a fragile leaf-like senior in checkered pants with a floppy plastic UCLA sack housing an empty Frosted Flakes cereal box which holds, in a large Ziploc bag, sheet music. Along with, carefully housed in yet another Ziploc bag, an ancient, rather crusty cassette tape player to record himself singing said sheet music.
And to hear my dad sing – well, he does a version of Ave Maria that goes on for so long – perhaps 47 minutes – it's not so much sing as Sing, Sing! The thing is, my dad, who's a little deaf, and as I’ve said, quite frail? His preference is opera arias so difficult Placido Domingo might demur, saying, "Oh but, that is a young man’s game!"
But no, my dad loves complex arias – always in a foreign language – Italian, German, French. His recent favorite is the Russian Eugene Onegin, with lyrics that are in Cyrillic. It's got seven flats with a kidney-splitting register so high that to hear him attempt it brings to mind the sound of an ox being gored.
And yet, when I went to his singing class, at the Emeritus College in Santa Monica? It was I who was in for a surprise! More next week.
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