Monday night I visited the crazy land of insomnia. If you’ve ever had the experience of trying to fall asleep, but your mind won’t downshift into the final stages, and you try as you lie there to attempt every meditation technique, bedtime prayer, or sheep counting strategy you’ve ever heard about, then you might be able to relate to the strange and diabolical torture of not being able to sleep.
5:30 am yesterday morning was the last time I glanced at the clock before I finally entered a surreal land of dreams where my boss came to my house and brought me a cup of coffee. That was about the time my dog pushed her nose into my face wanting to go out at 7:15 am, and that was the end of my night’s sleep. I had to be at work at 8:00 am.
I arrived at work 20 minutes late, but as it turned out, my boss had suffered from insomnia too so we were on the same team and all was well. Fatefully good irony!
By the time I got home from work I was in that trembly state of too tired to wind down but too tired to do anything. We had a nice dinner and I was on my way to bed about 10:00 pm when my 26 year old daughter called me into the spare room where she’s staying, waiting for a new apartment to be ready at the beginning of the month. Having her home is just a joy. We share so much of the same love of literature and music and sense of humor. She said to me, “Sit down, Mom,” and I did, and she hit the play button on her phone and I was embraced in the opening notes of the theme from To Kill a Mockingbird.
I hesitate to even try to put into words the emotional effect of that music. Full of longing, sweetness. I felt the stress and tension of the day leave me, magically I shifted from being stuck in the chronos march of time and schedule, into the kairos realm of timelessness and softness and relaxation, as if a big hook had been removed from my being and I was set down in the pleasant waters of a forest glade. I don’t know how Elmer Bernstein works but he really found a mother lode of heart in this work.
He captured the feeling of the South in the summer, in that time in history, of Jem and Dill and Scout, and Boo Radley, and the bravery and heart of Atticus Finch.
The theme sounds “American” to me, when I think of what could be considered the goodness of America — that comes from music like this, and the music of Aaron Copeland, the books of John Steinbeck and Willa Cather, the poetry of Wendell Berry and Edna St Vincent Millay, New Yorker Magazine when EB White was writing for them. I don’t know, it brings up all these feelings in me of the good and the beautiful and the innocent. It makes me think of World War II and my parents’ role as ordinary people who did their part. It makes me feel grateful.
And all these thoughts wound back in my memory to the moment in the movie when the camera is panning back and you see Scout through the window on Atticus’s lap, and he looks like the finest, warmest, strongest, bravest father who ever lived, and she, the luckiest little girl to have such a Daddy.
Of course I was a puddle by the end of it, and the effect of the relaxation of all the tension of my day melted into the sound, like falling into the arms of my own mother when I was little.
Sometimes I forget when I’m on a trip to crazy-ville when I have insomnia, that maybe I should listen to some music that moves me, because it really changes everything.
My daughter said she had thought of that theme yesterday and listened to it about five times herself. I kissed her forehead and thanked her, so grateful for music, and so grateful that my family are people who love music so much, and tap into it when things are hard. It is such a healer. I’m most grateful of all for the composers who were able to take the inspiration of their emotional feelings and convey them in such a way that transform the rest of us so profoundly. And it can happen over and over. What a miracle.