9/04/11 Church: My Sacrifice (guest starring Paul Robeson)

Two Sundays in Italy and I’ve been to two masses.  I suspect I’ll attend a third next week which will make it some sort of record since I went rogue from the church so many years ago.  However; I was here as an observer and observe is what I would do.  I sat apart from my family not wanting to bring “shame” (oh, the very thought of it) on them if it became obvious that one of their own was not praying.  I sat one row back from them just so I could hear my dad sing.  Church is the only place where I’ve ever actually heard him do this.

His voice is strong and deep and carries across long distances.  Think "whale songs in the ocean" and you’re halfway there.  I remember when living in the same house as my parents that you could hear dad talking to mom at night; but he lacks the ability to whisper and the walls of the house weren’t built to contain his voice…whale songs, exactly as I described, you could hear the cadence and intonation of the conversation, but the actual words were muffled.

And it was there, amongst howling old ladies trying to sing their way into heaven at a church in Camino (“Cjamin”) that my dad began to sing hallelujah.  Reserved in his participation, it amounted to little more than a whisper from him.  But to those around him it was deep and powerful.  Like Paul Robeson had come back from the dead to sing “Old Man River” in a small Italian town…lost in the cornfields.