Singing to the Stars
When I was little I would lean out the window of our second floor Mexico City home and sing to the stars. I made up little melodies as the evening lingered. My little brother joined me in my serenade to the “little lights up in the sky.” Even though we could not sing on key, we continued every night. Sometimes during the day, if we happened upon a rainbow, we would also sing. This was a detail which puzzled some American kids that we visited once, prompting them to ask, “Why do you sing all the time?” It left me quite startled. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else but sing especially when coming across a beautiful rainbow. My brother and I continued our nightly singing with my mother sitting and listening.
As all good things bring it upon themselves to do, in a way which is most devastating to the human experience, they end. Shortly before my tenth birthday, we moved back to the USA, permanently halting my Mexico City evening reverie with the stars.
A few years after that major life change, while driving through a rural part of Georgia one night, my brother suddenly started singing. Stunned, my mother turned to me and asked if he was on key. He was. My mother celebrated with much excitement since her own lifetime dream had been to one day sing on key. Little did I know, for many years that nighttime drive marked a death sentence for my voice.
Being an education-minded and devoted mother, I was fortunate when she went out of her way to get me voice lessons. I was in my senior year of high school. Even though I was no longer a little girl gazing at the stars in Mexico City, I had an overwhelming desire to sing. And not just sing in the popular sense, but to really sing with the beautiful pure tones of classical vocal technique. My brother joined in on the voice lessons. While our voice teacher struggled with me, she really shone with my brother’s voice. She brought out the lyric quality in his voice while giving mine harshness as I struggled to keep the “ee” vowel sound throughout my upper and lower registers.
My brother was a masculine young man with inherent leadership qualities. Whenever he would hush me up at home, or anywhere else I would sing, other people followed his lead. It was completely devastating for me, resulting in my already somewhat fragile self-esteem plummeting to the depths of the ocean floor. Yet my desire to sing remained fervent, leading me to practice my singing in secret whenever I was home alone. I would brave the silence in the hopes that my brother’s absence would be prolonged and sing along to my Charlotte Church cds. Progressing from her to Maev from Celtic Woman, Deanna Durbin, Maria Callas, Cecilia Bartoli, and Kiri Te Kanawa.
Having survived several natural disasters including earthquakes, hurricanes, and Tuscaloosa tornadoes, I knew surviving against all odds was possible. But nothing, not even these natural disasters, made me feel like the walls were closing in on me as much as the shunning of my singing voice. Once, while in Ohio, my mother recorded some of my grandfather’s compositions as a gift for him. I was the designated singer, much to his chagrin. My brother was my grandfather’s first and only choice, but he was busy with his own ventures. So I filled in the gap at my mother’s command. My grandfather ranted the entire time about my singing. He carried on with his complaints so much, that at one point the sound engineer pulled me to the side and told me how much he “loved my voice.” It was a sincere and noble gesture on his part. But by this point, I simply had no self-esteem and found myself puzzled by his kind gesture.
Throughout the years, my brother remained as unrelenting as ever. The day before an important audition I was fortunate enough to be granted, I made the mistake of warming up my voice. He banished me outside during a rainstorm complete with thunderclaps and lightning. Undaunted, I practiced “The Trees On The Mountain” from Susannah in the car, struggling to hear the melody in between thunderclaps. As I looked out of the car window through the heavy raindrops, I hoped fate would spare me from being struck by lightning.
My mother unwittingly played right into my brother’s hands. One time, while driving back from a family wedding in Tennessee, I found myself carried away by my zeal for singing. I unconsciously began singing along with my brother. True to form, he right away opposed my joining him. And since it had been awhile since he had been around, my mother stated that she had been waiting a long time to hear him. When we finally arrived home to our apartment, my mother commented on how quiet I had been. My brother merely laughed.
With a determination that must have stemmed from my childhood singing days, I entered vocal competitions and improved my classical vocal technique. Different competition judges described my voice as “beautiful” with a quality that “harkens back to the Golden Age for singing.” In a rare moment, I even had the opportunity to sing “Vissi d’Arte” from Toscaat the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall, as the winner of the classical division of the 2012 Golden Voices of America International Vocal Competition. Thrilled with this vocal victory, my devoted mother came to hear me sing while my brother refused to even consider the frightful notion. Thankfully, we met a lovely lady in the deli where we ate before the recital. I gave her the extra ticket my brother had most vehemently turned down. Although we had just met, this lovely lady went through the trouble to come with her niece and enjoyed the performance.
Afterwards, we moved back to Tuscaloosa, Alabama and I continued my vocal studies with a retired university opera professor. Hearing a beauty in my voice that I didn’t even know existed, he trained me with the focus of bringing out this unknown magnetic aspect. He pointed out that, because of my nervousness and a need to prove myself in voice, I was forcing the sound outwards instead of letting it simply flow with the natural oval shaping required for classical singing. Once I learned to relax and not let the past consume me, I delighted in the beautiful free tone I achieved. It was more like my childhood singing voice, the voice I had so many years prior used to sing to the stars.
Encouraged by this rediscovery of my original voice, I began singing in public more and more. People praised my “perfect” renditions of the National Anthem, begging me to sing the classic Irish ballad “Oh Danny Boy.” My naysaying brother graduated from college and moved far away, becoming so distant emotionally and physically it was hard to recall he had ever featured prominently in my life. My maternal grandfather eventually grew to appreciate my voice, although he still had moments when his demeaning comments resurfaced. Nonetheless, shortly before he passed away, he mentioned to the nurse in the hospital how he had a granddaughter who sang. Slowly the pieces of my fragile self-esteem that had been crushed, crumbled, shattered, and scattered all over time and place, came back together. It lead me to fondly recollect my early childhood love for the stars.
-Luisa Kay Reyes
Luisa Kay Reyes has had pieces featured in "The Raven Chronicles", "The Windmill", "The Foliate Oak", "The Eastern Iowa Review", and other literary magazines. Her essay, "Thank You", is the winner of the April 2017 memoir contest of "The Dead Mule School Of Southern Literature” and her Christmas poem was a first place winner in the 16th Annual Stark County District Library Poetry Contest. Additionally, her essay "My Border Crossing" received a Pushcart Prize nomination from the Port Yonder Press. Two of her essays have been nominated for the "Best of the Net" anthology with one of her essays recently being featured on "The Dirty Spoon" radio hour.