sing low

It is from my father, also an August baby, who would always call early in the morning on my birthday, and sometimes I would let it go to voicemail even if I was, unusually, already awake, because I knew he would sing, low and maybe comically fast in the middle, one verse of the birthday song.

“Oct is the Latin root for eight. So the space between low D and high D is one octave. Can you all show me and sing low D to high D?”

“Then one day I found I could sing low. At first I thought I had lost my voice forever. I could either sing a breathy high part or a raspy low part. Then the two came together by themselves. It was uncomfortable for a while, but I worked on it, and now I’ve got this voice.”

“Like, ‘oh, you think I sing high, I can sing low’,” he said.

Miig took her other hand, and she began to sing, low, sweet words depleting breath that wasn’t being replaced.