SOLITARY AND SINGING

"Singing a Happy Song", oil, by Karen Margulis

“Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.”

       -- Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok”

       I live in the East of the U.S. and the West of the world, and, like Whitman, I see myself as a singer of sorts, and as a solitary guy getting up each day to do some traveling in a fresh, new-fangled world. I am happily married and I can’t make any real music with my songs, but I still prize my solitude, and I sing my heart out in the earnest and, with a little luck, pleasant-sounding sentences I compose each morning. A person can be deeply in love, like me, and still love the peace of being alone in a wondrous world, and a person can have a voice like files and razors and still sing with a silver-tongued spirit. I feel lucky and honored to have newly-made mornings greet me again and again, and I try to return the greeting by giving back some modest but maybe musical sentences. These letters and words I type this morning make up my song for today, a melody made for an unused, state-of-the-art world, a tune I can take with me to make this day, perhaps, like a special show full of songs.