Read this Kurt Vonnegut quote today and it made me smile. My father has always sung for pleasure - never a professional but good enough to perform at smaller venues. It was always his escape from all that he did not like or could not control or both
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
He created my earliest taste in music on which everything else was layered and built over time. I associated the sound of his voice with the ability to escape to a happier place. To this day, it is his way to disrupt a difficult situation - he can break into song unexpectedly and suddenly there is a diversion from the problem at hand. I do believe those are all things created as Vonnegut says.
I often ping him requests to send me recordings of old Hindi songs I grew up hearing him sing. It is my way of clinging to a time long past and forcing him to engage with the world instead of checking out, feeling old and redundant. I don't know how much of a reward he finds in music but there is certainly a lot it gave me all my life.
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