I had fallen asleep watching my video-tape of the movie, The Ice Storm…it was an old tape I had taped off t.v., and not a good copy, even a censored copy. I had forgotten, since it was several years ago, that after the movie I had taped The Father of the Bride; the real one with Elizabeth Taylor…it was about three a.m. (as it always is) and I was awakened from my sleep with a start. Music had wakened me; a swell of music that made me want to cry out: “What is that…what is happening?” All I knew was something ripped at my soul and I didn’t understand. Now I was wide-awake and I tried to gather my thoughts. I had awakened during the last scene in The Father of the Bride when Spencer Tracey and Joan Bennett are sitting in their living room assessing the damage left by the house wedding. He looks at the record on the victrola, smiles at his wife, and plays the song. They begin dancing as the camera backs up and moves outside to show the June leaves moving in the breeze. The music ends and the credits go up.

I can’t breathe. I don’t know why this has such an impact on me but I can’t sleep for two hours. I rewind the tape several times and I’m heartsick over this song. Of course, being an old film, the music is un-credited. I have no way of knowing what it is or why it tore into my soul. Now, this movie was made in 1950; and the parents dance to this song which means it’s nostalgic for them, it’s from their time, so when could it have been written? The 1930’s? All I know is I’m a mess now, and I keep looking at my mother’s wedding picture. Suddenly I feel as if I know what matters and what does not matter at all…but that music! I just don’t get it.

I call my own father in Florida at 8:30 a.m. My eighty-seven year old dad will surely know the song; then maybe I can end the melancholy. It is November twenty-third, it is Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. I call my dad and say, “Now, Dad, listen, I’m going to play one minute of music and you tell me what it is.” “Go ahead,” he says, in his thirty-one years in the military voice that still says, “You don’t scare me.” No questions asked, he just says, “Go ahead.” But I go on to explain like he’s one of my students: “Now, it’s an old video tape of a movie on my t.v., so I don’t know how well you’ll hear it. I’m going to turn it up. Are you ready?” “Go ahead,” he says. I turn the volume all the way up and hold the phone next to the speaker and let the minute of Big Band orchestra sound play for my father; it finishes, and I take the phone back to my mouth thinking I’ll have to play it a few times. “Did you hear it?” I ask. “Didn’t you hear me singing?” he asks. I’m already starting to cry. “No,” I say. He begins singing:

I am sobbing now and I don’t want him to hear me cry. He tells me the song was usually played by Guy Lombardo as a sign-off tune for the last dance of the night. I know immediately that he and my mother must have danced to this countless times, but I also know this is not the reason I’m crying. “When was it written?” I ask, “In the 30’s?” “Oh, maybe even older than that,” he says. We say goodbye.

I’m heartbroken. I cry all day and night. I go online to research the song and discover it was written in 1931. I download it, read the lyrics, and hear a different arrangement with piano and strings. Then I walk into my daughter’s empty room and cry out loud: “AND WHERE’S MY DAUGHTER?” I know my daughter is still two hours away in rehab, and was just home for an overnight visit last weekend, but something is terribly, terribly wrong: the kind of wrong with the dread in it when you know nothing will ever be alright ever again. I tell everybody about it; starving for opinions and answers; no one has any, and I’m so angry that I can’t make any sense of it at all…can’t fill the hole in my heart. I’m so destroyed by the music that I wonder how anyone could have ever heard it, and then been restored to sanity, because I am in agony and I don’t know why. All I know is, it’s November twenty-third and the song was written in 1931. After my daughter’s death it was all very clear: this song was the prelude to my worst nightmare.

On New Year’s Eve (Guy Lombardo’s big night) my daughter went up to her room with her boyfriend. Shortly after midnight she told him she didn’t feel well and she’d go out for breakfast with him in the morning. He tucked her in bed and kissed her goodnight. She overdosed on heroin. She was twenty-three. Our house number is thirty-one. The torment I felt was everything that will never be. The scales ascend endlessly…painfully…into every moonlit sky that ever was…and will never be.