A song for a lifetime

We had drunk a champagne toast and were getting ready to cut the wedding cake when Karen arrived (I thought) at some kind of private moment of decision and said, “Wait,” and turned to face our 25 guests.

“I want to do something,” she said to them. Her eyes were lowered, nervously. “And I am going to do it. I want to sing Michael a song.”

Cheers went up, and I acted out embarrassment, reached for an afghan off the back of a chair and draped it over my head. There was a time I would not have been acting, but thank God for the stability of being 62 years old. Karen laughed with everyone else, and I told them, pulling off the afghan, “Hey, I’m not embarrassed. I love it,” and I turned to Karen and hugged her.

But this story is not about me. It’s about Karen. “I wanted to surprise you,” she said to me. I was already learning that life with Karen is a series of sparkly little surprises, but nothing like this. She turned me to face her, our living room became quiet, and she took my hands in hers. She sucked in a deep breath, a draught of determination, and let it out slowly. Then she turned her face up to me and began to sing.

There were bells on a hill
But I never heard them ringing
No, I never heard them at all
Til there was you.

I had not heard her sing, and the beauty of her voice surprised me. It was very clear, very steady, with all her heart in it. I looked at her and could not believe this was happening to me. I started to sing, too, so much did I love her, very low, underneath her, until she got to words I didn’t remember. Then there was only her voice in the room. If she had been nervous, it had gone away. Her voice was as luminous as her eyes and her smile.

Then she got to the chorus, with its odd little note twist, and it threw her out of key for the last verse, but nobody cared. It was better, sweetly genuine, that way. She didn’t care, either. She had decided, somewhere in the preparations for our marriage, that she wanted to sing a love song to me.

At the moment, I thought about the challenge she must have carried, from the day it occurred to her to sing a song to me at our wedding. If it had been me, it would have become pure anxiety, learning the song, hoping I would remember the words, and at the crucial moment, having the courage to sing. I would always know that when the time came, I actually wouldn’t have to do it, and no one, except me, would ever know.

That’s not the way it was with her. From the moment she had the idea, she knew she would do it, and she practiced and practiced. But in all the excitement, she almost forgot. She knew there would have to be a right moment for her song, and she didn’t know when or how that moment would arrive, or even if it would.

Then came the toast, and I responded to the toast, saying, “I’ll go first,” as if Karen would go second. As I was saying my response, it came to her. “I had forgotten all about it until then,” she told me later. But she said she realized the right moment had arrived, and as it did, she remembered her song. And when she did, there was no doubt she would sing it. No decision to be made. She may have been nervous, but there was no option of not singing. “That’s not who I am,” she said.

Admiration for this woman routinely pours out of me, and when she said that, I wanted to be just like her. For me, the option would have been there. I might not have sung, and I would have regretted it forever. Not Karen. She turned to me and sang, and took into possession a memory for a lifetime, for her, and maybe even more for me. God, I love who she is.