Well, anyway, there he is up on the stage, her oldest child, and it is crowded and smoky and everyone is cheering him on and happy to be there. She says -- to no one in particular, because it is way too noisy for anyone to hear -- how did we all get here, to this place on this warm January night near the end of the century, and why are the stars not falling down on all of us from the sheer fact of it all?
When he was two his father saved his life. One day her big baby boy quit breathing. Just like that, on a fine May afternoon. His dad, who will never get any medals for the attention he paid to his children, deserves one for this. He took one look at this child and grabbed him up in his arms, rushing out into the street to flag down a passing car. Within two minutes they were in the emergency room and a doctor was making a hole in the boy's throat so the air could get in. And because of that, and some other things along the way, though none of them as fundamental as breathing, here he is, no longer a boy, strumming his guitar and singing down the night skies and all around people are smiling and keeping time to the music.
He is her amazing son, this beginning-to-get gray man who writes intelligent, brave and funny lyrics and then sings them so others can nod and laugh and look at one another and say "yes, that's it. He's right." When he is up there singing he takes off his cranky armadillo suit, the one he inherited from his father, the one she herself sewed up the back so it would fit better -- he takes it off and puts on his guitar. And from his nakedness -- covered by that fig-leaf of a guitar -- he calls her to a truer place than the one she usually inhabits. She thinks of it as a rest, a little vacation from being themselves.
If his grandmother were here, she would turn to her, that needy mother of hers, look her in the eye and say "See? He's okay. He's fine. There he is singing the words he wrote about how important it is to have a good name. Hear that? He got that from you, but he put it into a song to me. That's the saying you dragged all the way over from Ireland, let it haunt you like a banshee from the Old Country, scared someone was going to rip yours away when you weren't looking. But see? He got that line. I mean, he really gets it, so much he gets it that he put it into a song, so now it lives on past you and past me...and even past him. Now isn't that enough? Now can you let it go?"
But who knows if her mother would listen? It seems to her no one pays real attention, no one in her family anyway. It's more like they keep quiet until it's their turn to interrupt. Seems like the only way they pay attention is when someone gets up and performs whatever it is that needs attention paid to it. Then somehow the performance makes it more real than real is, even though it's just performance and not reality. Or maybe the performance is necessary because it's the pointer to reality and everyone in that smoky, noisy place needs it, not just her. And she thinks maybe Aristotle said this all before. It certainly sounds familiar, like a lost voice from a class on drama or a philosophy lecture on catharsis.
So anyway her son is up there, singing his heart's tune, and she is down here watching him do what he came here to do. It is, at last, more than enough to be here in this crowded, expectant place. She is surprised as her hands, heavy with their abundance, open slowly and she lets him go, watching him sail surely, carried by his voice into the starry, smoky night.