“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor, will you be mine…”
The music had been recycling from her head to her lips and back in through her ears all day. It took her a little while to remember where it had started. Sybil was still refining her schedule for working at home, being a person used to a set routine for all things. One of the new routines that she had been trying out was taking a break for lunch at noon, and watching the Charlie Rose rebroadcast on PBS while she ate. It gave her a respite from her close manuscript work, and the current topics gave her some news and background she probably wouldn’t get any other way. If it was interesting, she stretched out on the couch for a real breather; if it involved movies or other celebrity babble, she ate her lunch, straightened out the den while she listened a little longer, and turned it off to go back to work. She often listened to the beginning while preparing her lunch in the kitchen. This morning she had turned it on a little too early in mad impatience to get away from an infuriatingly ungrammatical manuscript and catch the end of Mr. Rogers. That’s where it started.
“It’s a neighborly day in this beauty wood…”
Even nonsense lyrics stuck in Sybil’s mind and came back easily. Even if she loved a piece of classical music, she had to add a libretto in order to remember the melody. Her husband Bill, on the other hand, could hum whole symphonies. Sybil was a woman of words, however, and music without language was nothing to her. The younger Sybil almost always had a song gurgling up through her windpipe. When her kids were babies, Sybil had crooned to them in a voice that was meant to be reassuring if not always on pitch, with each having their own songs (augmented by the season, the weather). Dan’s was, of course, “O Danny Boy” (but with ridiculous lyrics that no Irishman would recognize), and Jane’s was “Good morning starshine,” which morphed into “Good morning my sunshine” or “Good morning Janie-baby.” But she sang less as mother and children got older.
Now that Sybil thought about it, the same had been true of her parents. When she got together with her siblings, Sybil, as the oldest, was the only one who could remember the folks singing around the house. Her father had a song (“My Silly Sybil”) for her (which was totally made-up in both tune and lyrics as far as she could tell) and a host of other favorites, mostly expressing some kind of dissatisfaction with the working world: “Lucky Old Sun,” “Old Man River,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and “Sixteen Tons” were all regular selections. It worked; he retired early. But, strangely, she did not remember him singing in retirement, although he puttered around the house all day and had plenty of opportunity. She clearly remembered from her childhood that her mother sang very softly to her and her brother at bedtime or when they were sick, but she did not have any recollection of such lullabies for her sister who was born nine years later. Her mother must have stopped singing sometime before then. For some reason, singing around the house did not seem to survive the friction of life over time.
She was semi-retired herself; more specifically, she was at home and taking on editing jobs to keep busy and supplement the household income. Staying home had been a harder adjustment than she had anticipated. The kids had long since left home, Bill was gone at work for long hours, and the house was isolated. She had no desire to make an effort to see people, but she had had some trouble keeping her spirits up – particularly in the long, gray winter. Her sister and daughter both kept pressing the latest antidepressants on her, but she had a firmly rooted belief that this would not be good for her. It had nothing to do with the efficacy of pharmaceuticals; clearly her family members were happier and easier to deal with when they were on their meds. And it had become increasingly clear that she needed to do something to stop the growing gloom. Still, she had resisted and continued to struggle with the winter of both New England and her spirits. But, today, as she started to put dinner together, she realized that she had felt great ever since noon.
“Won’t you be my neighbor . . .” She chirped and chopped onions and green peppers. And she realized it was the song that was making her happy. She felt great. She had gotten a lot of work done too.
The next day, she watched the clock at the bottom right hand of her computer screen and turned on the television a few minutes early. Mr. Rogers was just hanging up his sweater and was well into the song. “So, let’s make the most of this beautiful day…” She sang along while she mixed up enough tuna salad for a couple of lunches, and then sat down with Charlie Rose to learn about the implications of the new nuclear agreement with India.
She could not keep her mind on international politics, however. She felt like she had really discovered something. Obviously, music was powerful, but music attached to words seemed to be very powerful. It made her feel better; it made her less fretful and more efficient. It made her feel terrific. She remembered her kids watching Mr. Rogers regularly – had this song had this effect on her then? Is that why she continually sang to them? She knew something about the power of music. Brought up as a regular churchgoer, she missed the communal singing, but not enough to leave the house on a weekend morning. She had captured some of the reassurance of the church ritual, however, by pounding out old hymns on the piano for an hour or so on Sunday mornings. She realized that she had been getting some of the same kind of comfort from Mr. Rogers that she got from the hymns. It worked, but could she control it? She could certainly keep listening to the end of Mr. Rogers, but it seemed that there might be an even better way to harness the power. She had a feeling that “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” might get a little tired after a while. She mulled it over for a week, while continuing to tune in the end of Mr. Rogers. She even downloaded the song onto her computer so she could listen on weekends when the show did not air. She had been right; the beautiful neighborhood started to cloy, and the effect seemed to diminish after a while.
Sybil had rarely listened to music at home before. She needed quiet in the house to do her close editing. She knew from past experience that any distractions resulted in embarrassing lapses in her work, and she was not a person who took criticism well. Control was the word. She needed to be in control. It was what made her a good editor. But she also wanted to be in control of her emotional state and not put it in the hands of the pharmaceutical companies. Maybe this was a way to do it. Technology was ready to help her too; manipulating one’s listening would have been more difficult in the days of LP’s, eight tracks, or cassette tapes, when one was at the mercy of the songs that the artist had strung together. Now that she had downloaded the Mr. Rogers’ music, she knew how to do it. She could listen to music according to a schedule she set for herself. She could sing along. The question was: what music to listen to? What would work? Maybe she should figure out what was bothering her the most these days.
Money was a good place to start. She had left a regular job because the office politics and the wasted time at meetings had driven her to a constant state of frustration and anger. Very destructive. However, the editing business was hit or miss. She kept busy by doing low-paying work for academics and graduate students when nothing else was available, but the bank accounts were definitely not as healthy as they once were. She worried about money. Bill thought she was being silly, and in any absolute terms she probably was. They had enough to live on. They couldn’t go on big vacations, and Europe was going to become a once every five-year proposition, but they lived very well in comparison with 99% of the world’s population. But that was all too rational, and it was her emotional side that worried her. Her emotional state kick-started her imagination which soon had her cast as a homeless person. It was all irrational, Sybil knew, and she wanted to do something about it. What to listen to?
She thought about “Side by Side” (We ain’t got a barrel of money, maybe we’re ragged and funny…), but decided convincing herself that she was “ragged and funny “would not help. She thought about “All We Need is Love” and knew that she could not swallow that no matter how hard she sang. She finally settled on “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” She downloaded it from the net and listened to it once mid-morning and once mid-afternoon and learned the lyrics well enough to keep it in her head. She continued to tune in the end of Mr. Rogers once in a while, just for insurance.
It worked. Instead of “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” she was soon singing: “The moon belongs to everyone, the best things in life are free.” She wasn’t worrying about money, and as it was April and there started to be some warm days, she found herself dragging a chair out onto the deck to do some of her reading – definitely not like her. “The flowers in spring, the robins that sing…” she twittered as she watched the crocuses come up and the robins hop around on the brown lawn. She was amazed at how successfully and easily she had harnessed her emotions. Had someone written a book about this or had everyone always known about it except her? Probably not, she decided, or the drug companies wouldn’t be making so much money.
A few weeks later, she went through a spell when her mother seemed to be calling her hourly. Her father had died a couple of years earlier, and her mother had seemed to do fine for a year while she was getting a lot of attention from family and friends, but the second year was not going so well. She was in Florida for the winter, but the phone calls started to become so frequent that it seemed like the Gulf Coast was getting closer all the time. Sybil’s siblings worked in offices during the day, but her mother knew Sybil was at home. Sybil tried to be patient, but was getting increasingly irritated and short with her mother. When the phone rang, she gritted her teeth and hissed out a string of expletives before she picked up the receiver. Although the expletives were over, the teeth stayed gritted through the required chitchat that made her mother feel connected. While she didn’t want to spend any more time on the phone with her mother than was absolutely necessary, she also did not want to waste time and energy fretting about it. She needed some song therapy.
“M is for the million things…” would not do. She loved her mother, but even to music she couldn’t quite believe those sappy lyrics. It took some searching, but she thought about her mother’s bedtime repertoire, which included Brahms’s “Lullaby” and “Mr. Sandman.” Then she remembered another favorite, “Never, Never Land,” culled from an old album of Mary Martin doing Peter Pan. It reminded her of the best side of her mother. “Just think of pleasant things, /And your heart will fly on wings…” Not that her childhood had been all that idyllic, but she certainly felt a little kindlier toward her mother while she was singing the song that her mother tucked her in with. In any case, it helped. She still did not talk to her mother any longer than necessary, but neither did she do it through gritted teeth. Even better, she did not fret about it before or after, and stopped cursing every time the phone rang. She was also more patient with the kids when they called, even when Janie wanted to whine about putting on a few pounds or Dan was hinting at a loan.
So, it was working. And yet, there were still things that were bothering her. Bill, for example. Bill himself was wonderful, but he spent more and more time talking about Caroline, a woman that was in the office next to his. Bill and Caroline often ate lunch together, and Bill was often full of stories about Caroline, her kids, the problems with her car, and other such lunch time conversations. She ascertained that Caroline had a husband, but heard little about him from Bill’s secondhand information. She called her friend, Sue, at one point to talk about this – evidence that it really was bothering her as she was loath to ever reveal her problems even to her best friend – and Sue had rationally pointed out that the time to worry was when Bill stopped talking about Caroline. And hadn’t Sybil eaten lunch with male friends when she was working? True enough. And Bill had never given any suggestion of wanderlust; he seemed more than happy with their life together, and if he saw a naked woman once in a while on the movie screen, that seemed to be enough variety for him.
Still, Sybil worried. It was probably because she had too much time to think. She didn’t believe in confronting people on these kinds of issues; it might only give them ideas they had never had in the first place. But she needed to do something to get her mind off these negative fantasies. She needed a song. Which one?
Well, there was “Bill” (“It’s surely not his brain that makes me thrill/I love him because he’s wonderful/Because he’s just my Bill”). No, Bill was nothing like that. Sybil loved his brain; he was brilliant. And in any case the lyrics did not give her any assurance that Bill loved her back. A self-sacrificing love like “As Long As He Needs Me” wouldn’t work. If Bill wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t self-sacrificing. “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar”? She didn’t want a song that would convince her that she didn’t need him anyway. No, she definitely needed him. She needed something to convince her of what she thought she was sure of. He loved her.
“True Love.” She adored that song. Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly – Grace Kelly’s only hit song. She hadn’t liked High Society as much as Philadelphia Story, but it did have this song as well as Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong. “While I give to you and you give to me, true love, true love…” That might do it. There was even divine intervention. “For you and I /Have a guardian angel /On high, with nothin’ to do. /But to give to you/ And to give to me, /Love forever true.” She looked up at the little angel the kids had given her, stuck by its sticky bottom to the top of her computer. She’d try it. She downloaded the song and crooned along: “While I give to you and you give to me/ True love, true love.” Oh, yes. Bill loved her and she loved him. All was fine. In just a few minutes a day and with no pills, she felt better. She stopped having fantasies about Caroline, and she fell more in love with Bill. Should she tell people about this?
Life was going well. Sybil was still too embarrassed to share her secret with anyone. It seemed all too simple, but it worked. She thought about the kind of music she had listened to as a teenager and was not surprised that young people were often depressed and that the girls of her generation had been so eager to get married. How well she remembered the Fifth Dimension and “The Wedding Bell Blues” – “Will you marry me, Bill?” Well, that was when the local AM station was in control, but now Sybil was in charge of her own destiny. She varied her music according to what was on her mind, and even toyed occasionally with tunes designed to bolster the quantity and quality of her work (“Whistle While You Work”?), but the songs did not work as well when aimed at productivity as they did for shaping her moods. Mood-shaping was more than enough, however. And good moods led to good work. Sybil was into a solid, disciplined routine at home now; manuscripts being turned around at a pace that let her cut off her low-paying graduate students.
So all was well until Bill came home one day, stopped, stared at her for a minute, dropped his gym bag on the floor, and told her that he was leaving her for Caroline. Sybil did not believe him.
“You can’t. You just eat lunch with her. You don’t love her. You love me.”
“I care about you. But I love Caroline. She needs me. You don’t need me.”
“I need you. You need me. We love each other. True love.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sybil grabbed her keys and ran out of the house without her jacket. Bill’s truck was blocking her car. She got in and turned on the ignition. The CD player came on and the voice of Neil Diamond enveloped her:
Sweet Caroline
Good times never seemed so good
I’ve been inclined
To believe they never would…
She put her head on the steering wheel and wept tears that seemed too hot to have come from her body. They burned her face and warmed her cold hands. She’d forgotten. She could only control what she listened to. She only controlled a small world. It had seemed otherwise.
When I Come To Be Old 