Bridges

This is a familiar view in our lives. We cross this bridge several times a week. “Typical Northeast,” says my husband. “Beautiful setting, overcast sky.”

It always brings to mind “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which gets me thinking as well of my parents as young people. When I was a child, they had the Simon and Garfunkel album with this song on it. I remember listening to it and pondering the sailing Silver Girl. There was another song on the album, the highly rhythmic “Cecelia,” that my brother and I loved to turn up loud and dance to. But apparently the sight of us dancing to this song sharpened my parents’ awareness of the lyrics, and they put the record away. We didn’t understand why, but it was around the same time that sugared cereals disappeared — no more Lucky Charms. The killjoy era, I felt. Yet how well I understand now.

They had other records I loved too: Peter, Paul and Mary, over which I wept regularly in sympathy for Puff the magic dragon’s loneliness. All kinds of movie soundtracks, from The Eddy Duchin Story (which included a jazzed up version of “Chopsticks” that I loved), to The Music Man (from which I still have long tracts of Professor Harold Hill’s monologue preceding “76 Trombones” memorized), to Oklahoma! (where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain).

I’ve never seen The Eddy Duchin Story; my only knowledge of it is confined to that old record of my parents’. But writing this post I was seized by the desire to see whether that “Chopsticks” was lurking at YouTube. It is.

(Now I want to see the rest of the movie…)

Around 8th grade I delved into the more classical fare — Rubinstein playing Chopin, the extensive Reader’s Digest collection that included “Anitra’s Dance” and “The Moldau,” and Van Cliburn playing Tchaikovsky. I remember sitting alone in the house one night when I was around 15, positioned between the two large stereo speakers, blasting VanCliburn playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and dreaming of one day playing something like that. (I never have. The closest I ever came was in my single year as a music major in college, when I played Schumann’s A minor piano concerto. No comparison.)

It was a house full of music. Do I provide as rich and eclectic a mix for my children? Are they having the private moments of discovery that I remember so well? What recordings are they storing away to be released by some yet-to-be discovered stimulus — like, perhaps, the sight of a familiar bridge?