When I was younger there was a man I called
uncle who always insisted he was a pirate. I say now that I never believed him,
but, every time I say that, I am lying. I believed him with my whole heart. I don’t
remember much about that man. He is definitely not technically related to me.
He must have been a friend of my parents. I can’t even remember his name, but I
remember that he had a glass eye that he could take out but he never would do
so in front of me, even though I begged him to. Oh how that eye used to
transfix my poor ignorant child mind. The only other thing I remember about
this man is that he was an excellent story teller. I must have shelved away
most of the stories he told me in the same forgotten and lost file of my brain
as the one in which I stored his name, but there is one story that somehow got misplaced into
another folder which inadvertently get’s opened from time to time.
This is how that story goes:
Once upon a time there was a town very much
like the one that we live in except that it was smaller and that the people in
this village all had the same goal, unlike here where no one can ever seem to
agree, even about something simple like which is the best breakfast cereal.
That goal was to make a song that could always be heard from all around the
village. People would wear tap shoes all day long and everyone walked in an odd
jaunty way so as to keep the rhythm of the song. When a child passed a fence
he or she would slap the bars of
the iron gate for added percussion. Pencils tapped on tables, dogs barked in
tune, people would stand and wait to slam their car door until just the right
moment, and someone, somewhere in the town, was always singing. His or her
friends would join in with harmonies, du waps, whistling and hums, but there
was only ever one person singing the main song and it was never the same person
for more than a few minutes. No one said when they would sing and when they would
sleep and when they would be busy brushing their teeth, there was no big
schedule, but somehow it always seemed to work out just right that just as a
singer felt the need to go do something else another person would suddenly feel
the need to sing.
There lived in this town a lovely little
boy named Oliver who was eleven years old and had never sung the song, EVER. You
see, Oliver HATED the song more than I have ever hated anything ever before in
my life (even more than you hate spinach). Oliver hated the song, and he hated
the people who sang it. He did not see a point in it all. He was always
jabbering on about the need for a point. “Darling” his mother would say at
breakfast “your brother is trying to sing. Please dear won’t you bang your
spoon in time with him?” “I don’t want rhythm mother!” the boy would yell in
fury “I don’t want music! I don’t want beauty! All I want in this whole wide world
is for you all to wake up and realise that you don’t make sense! WHY are you
singing? There is no point!”
One day poor old Oliver had finally had
enough, so do you know what he did? He RAN away. It was hard at first to kiss
his baby sister goodbye and think of how he’d never see his brother again as he
tripped upon his stupid toy drum, but he would do ANYTHING to get away from
that song! Oh how he longed for a beautiful silent place where no one ever sang
and everything made sense.
So now what do you think happened to Oliver
when he left the village of song? Do you think that he went back because he
missed his family or because the silence drove him crazy or do you think he
climbed up to a silent mountain where no noise is ever made and lives there
still cherishing the silence and looking up at the stars?
Well if you think any of those things, then
I regret to inform you that you are wrong because it just so happens that the
world he discovered was not silent at all and he never could escape from the
song. He heard it everywhere: in the screech of a rusty door hinge and the
squeak of an old swing. He heard it in the honking car horns and the laughing
children. It got to the place where he could even see the song in the twinkling
stars which had an oh so familiar rhythm and the smiling mailman who seemed to
breathe out the song from somewhere deep within him.
He could not escape the song and at first
that drove him mad. There was a time when he wanted to yell at the top of his
lungs every time he encountered it, but that soon passed because before he even
realised it was happening he was feeling this odd surge of joy every time he recognised
the song. And then one day he suddenly realised that he had been singing the
song out loud for quite some time. That is the day that he decided to go back
to the home of his childhood.
Well he was so excited to go back that he
just danced right into the town singing at the top of his lungs until he suddenly
realised that no one else was making music and for one small moment his voice
faltered and the song started to die out. Then as he glanced around and noticed
that everyone was trudging about their business in the most dejected sort of
way something deep within him told him not to stop. He later found out that no
one in the town had sung the song once in the last 10 years since he had left.
Apparently it had started out slowly enough with one or two people voicing the
opinion that the runaway might have had a point, but then before anyone really
knew what was happening the whole town had given up their song. Until the day
when Oliver returned a grown man and he stood in the middle of the town and,
for reasons he couldn’t quite comprehend, he kept on singing that song. A few
people yelled at him to shut up a couple kids ran over and threw rocks at him,
but he kept singing. Then his mother came out of a store and stopped dead in her
tracks. She knew immediately that it was him and for a few short minutes she
was so shocked she could not move, but then she ran to him and she held his
hand and he switched to humming and she took up the song. They walked together
down the road towards their house and by the time they finally made it home someone else was singing and a small child was
banging out a rhythm on her neighbours fence while her brother teased her for
it and her grandmother looked on and whispered thanks that the song had finally
come back again.
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