Daron's Guitar Chronicles Vol. 13 (contd)

1096 Lift Me Up

Lift Me Up

I spent that night at the hospital. Ziggy went back to the hotel after midnight but I stayed through till morning, as I often did. There was a bed I could sleep in but I didn't sleep so much as nap at points when she appeared to be out cold.

Sometimes she didn't sleep, though, despite the opiates and her fatigue from fighting the disease. She would say to me sometimes, "Hey, sit with me." And a few times–at least twice–she even told me, "I'm glad that you're here."

That night she said, "Why isn't there a radio in this hospital?"

"Hm?"

"Every room has a TV, which I can't stand, but there's no radio. Why is that?"

"Um, maybe you could ask for one?"

"Well, I'm sure that I could." She was sitting up, with just the side lamp by the bed on. The room's main overhead lights were off. "But that is not the point. Music has been proven to be healthy for sick people."

"Um, has it?"

"Oh, sure. The therapeutic effects are well known. Not just to distract people from their pain, either, but real improvement in their conditions."

"Did Ruth tell you this?" Ruth had visited some time that week.

"The point is it would be beneficial to all patients to have music. It seems strange that they don't."

"Would you like me to bring you a radio?"

"I mean, I suppose they can't pipe the music in, since people like all different kinds and it would probably have the opposite effect if they were forced to listen to songs they hated. I mean, of course, that would be like something from a prisoner of war camp."

I hoped this conversation wasn't about to turn gory. "I'll bring you a clock radio next time I come from the hotel, how's that for an idea?"

She hesitated a moment, toying with the edge of the blanket in her lap. "How about you sing me a song?"

Oh. That was why the long buildup. She'd just wanted to ask me that all along, I think. "Um, okay." I tried to think of one I actually knew the words to. I couldn't think of how a single one of my own songs went. They weren't really good for singing by themselves, anyway, most of them. "I'm trying to think of a good one."

"I've been wanting to hear you sing ever since you told me about your vocal coach." She cleared her own throat reflexively. "She sounds like quite a woman."

"Yeah, she's a trip." I had to clear my own throat then. Power of suggestion. "I haven't been doing my exercises, though. There's a break between my chest voice and my throat and I'm supposed to be doing exercises to build up the weak part so I can sing my full range at low volume."

"Well, you should probably keep it down," she said, in a gently joking voice. "After all, we are in a hospital."

We both laughed a little at that. I mean, it was a weak joke–stating the obvious as if we didn't know it–but combined with the idea that we shouldn't be too noisy meant inevitable laughter. She took a kind of prideful glee in the fact that she could make me laugh, I think?

It beat having her make me cry, anyway. "Okay, how about this." When in doubt go back to the classics. One of the first songs I learned and that I played obsessively when I was 12-13, trying to perfect it. "Here Comes the Sun." Of course I can't reproduce the lyrics here because of copyright reasons, but you may have heard it. After all, we are in the English-speaking world.

"Here Comes the Sun" is almost like a folk song in a lot of ways, both in the way the chords resolve and in the simplicity and sparseness of the lyrics. It doesn't really have a lot to it, but you can kind of repeat it endlessly. And you can kind of make up verses on the fly, because the only part that varies from verse to verse is one line. It's really got nothing to it without the instrumental parts, but I sang it like you'd sing a lullaby or a nursery rhyme and she smiled.