Everything’s all right…

…with a little light a shinin’

A successful memoir isn’t just a randomly remembered collection of thoughts and happenings.

The reader has to be able to recognize pretty early on the patterns and themes of the work, and the writer has to keep those patterns and themes in mind, page by page.

Even now, with the draft of my memoir completed, I keep remembering new things. They mostly don’t fit with my patterns and themes, but are wonderful memories nevertheless. It’s nice that I can write them here. Is it age or is it that I have spent several years now working to remember and make sense of the patterns and themes of my life that I can’t stop remembering?

This morning I heard Seals and Crofts singing their once-popular song, Summer Breeze, and the words brought back a memory of my father’s that is now my own memory of him describing his memory to me.

The Seals and Crofts first stanza is:

“See the curtains hangin’ in the window

“In the evening on a Friday night

“A little light a shinin’ through the window

“Lets me know everything’s all right.”

“A little light a shinin’ through the window” is all I needed to hear to bring back the feelings my father once conveyed to me.

I think of my father’s memory as more a winter memory than a summer one, and not romantic as Summer Breeze is, but the feelings of safety and comfort — “lets me know everything’s all right” — are just the same.

My father’s memory takes place on Troy Street in Dayton, Ohio, in the days of horses and trolley cars. It was sometimes his responsibility to deliver his father’s dinner bucket to him in the saloon that Max ran down at the broad intersection maybe a half-mile away.

In the winter darkness, my father said, it was scary to have to carry the dinner bucket all that way by himself, and what he so appreciated was the families who did not close their front windows with draperies or shades or curtains. He liked the houses where he could see inside to the lighted living rooms and know that someone was there.

His ability to describe quite poignantly his young boy’s fears and the reassurances provided by the lighted windows is surely why I remember his descriptions and why those few words in the Seals and Crofts song carry such power for me.

The song was released in 1972 in Hollywood. My father’s dinner bucket walks were probably in 1916 or thereabouts in Dayton, Ohio. My first hearing from him the story of his walks in the dark was probably around 1950 in Detroit. These mixtures and layerings of times and places and their varied and complex emotional weights are what give memoirs their uniqueness as a genre.

Why was my father alone? What about his brothers and sisters? Did they have other tasks and couldn’t walk with him? Did my father volunteer to be the one? I don’t think I ever asked those questions and they were not part of his memory.

What lingers still are those feelings of safety and comfort and gratitude that Seals and Crofts captured so beautifully:

“A little light a shinin’ through the window

“Let’s me know everything’s all right.”