I have been thinking a lot about the two songs that I was asked to sing for the memorial service of renowned children’s book author Florence Parry Heide, one of Kenosha’s brightest shining stars, who passed away a little over a week ago at the age of 92. Florence had mentioned in more than one of our Morning Show interviews over the years that her writing career actually began in her forties when she and a dear friend, Sylvia Van Clief, wrote more than a hundred songs together. Some were children’s songs while others were sentimental ballads. “They were absolutely wonderful songs,” I remember Florence saying, “and no one was interested in publishing them.” And indeed, over the years, not a single one of these songs was ever published. But they did inspire Florence to under- take what turned out to be a glorious career as a published author with over a hundreds books to her credit including some of the most imaginative children’s books of their day.
From time to time, I wondered about those songs from a half century ago. Did she even bother to keep them? If so, were they just gathering dust in a desk drawer someplace or up in the attic? What did they sound like? Were they as good as she proclaimed them to be?
Little could I have imagined that someday I would have the opportunity to have those questions answered – and that I would actually get to sing a couple of them. It turns out that she did indeed keep these songs- and in fact a number of these songs have been sung by the family quite a lot over the years and have become an important part of the family’s life together. So when it came time to plan this memorial service, it felt perfectly natural – indeed, essential – to include some of these songs in this celebration of her life. One of them, “It’s so Easy to be Easy with You,” was sung by three of Ms. Van Clief’s children to open the program, and their spirited performance to guitar accompaniment brought to mind the lovely, joyous singing of Peter, Paul and Mary. It was a beautiful and moving way to begin the program.
I’m pretty sure that they opted to sing one of their mother’s more light-hearted songs because they were nervous about being able to sing any of the more serious and emotional songs without crying. That’s probably why I was asked to sing “When It’s Time To Say Goodbye” and “I’m Home When I’m With You,” two songs that were perfect for the occasion but emotionally-laden for anyone in the family.
I have to share a story about getting these two songs printed off so I could look them over and learn them. Someone from the Heide family e-mailed them to me, but something about the format in which they were sent was screwing up my efforts to print them off. What was especially frustrating is that I was at Carthage at the time, and my printer is actually upstairs in the music department office – and after three trips up and down the stairway and finding only blank paper to show for my efforts, I was ready to scream. Fortunately for me, during that third fruitless trip up to the office, I ran into Mark Petering, one of the young whipper snappers on the music faculty and among the most adept computer users in the department. If anyone could get these blasted songs printed up, he could. He graciously accompanied me back down to my office, clicked a few buttons, hit print – and then actually offered to run upstairs himself to make sure that it printed. A minute later, he was back down in my office with page one of “When It’s Time to Say Goodbye” in hand, printed clear as day. I thanked him profusely, left everything as he had set it, hit print, ran upstairs to retrieve page two, and was rewarded with yet another blank piece of paper! I made several more attempts to no avail and finally decided that it would be less frustrating to actually write the whole song out by hand. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, thanks to my wife Kathy- who had no trouble whatsoever getting the songs printed at home. (Don’t ask me how.)
As I was struggling with all this, I was struck by the odd juxtaposition of all of this modern technology with these sweet old songs that were actually hand-written. (What else could they have been? When these particular songs were composed in 1960 and 1961, there were none of the computer programs that would allow someone to produce their own “printed” music. Unless a song was published, it had to be painstakingly written out by hand.) Here we were, e-mailing these pieces to each other, dragging and pasting them into documents, and printing them out on state-of-the-art laser printers. And in another odd juxtaposition, here was Mark Petering, our composition teacher, helping me print off these songs that were sweet and lovely but could not have been more different from the kind of cutting edge, highly original scores that he creates on a regular basis. I couldn’t help but think of how delighted Florence would have been by all that! And by the way, I found it interesting that at the top of each score, there was this notation in what appeared to be a hand stamp that she had made especially for her:
This property belongs to
Parry Heide
6910 3rd Avenue
Kenosha, Wisconsin
It seemed that she was astute enough to understand the notion of intellectual property- and that even though these songs were not published, they were more than just the quaint creation of a middle-aged housewife. These songs had value. And indeed they do. And for as beguiling as the music is, what is the lyrics that are truly praiseworthy. For instance, here are Florence’s lyrics about home:
Miles away from places I’ve lived and people I once knew
I always feel I’m coming home the moment I’m with you.
(I got to sing this at the memorial with Betsy Van Clief, one of the composer’s daughters. What an honor that was for me.)
And the following tender lyrics could not have been more perfectly appropriate for the memorial service:
When it’s time to say goodbye,
you’ll not be afraid – you’ll hold your heart high
for thought I have to go from you,
you’ll never lose me – I’ll never lose you.
Though I wish I might have stayed,
love will be a bridge we’ve made.
Love’s as strong as lovers are.
I may be gone long; I may be gone far
but you will know that I’m close by.
Whenever there’s love, there’s never goodbye.
Those words had to been so comforting for Florence’s grieving relatives and close friends, and I felt so incredibly privileged to be the person singing them on that day.
As I hold these songs in my hands, I am remembered of one of the neatest things that I was said at Florence’s memorial service. I think it might have been her grand niece Leslie Parry who said at the close of her remarks that if the people gathered at the service wanted to honor Florence’s memory, there was no better way to do that than for each person there to think of something they had dreamed about doing but never actually attempted. . . . and getting out there and finally doing it. That is what Florence did as a woman in her forties when she wrote all of these songs. And when nothing came of them in terms of success with a publisher, she did not shrink back into her shell. She took her creative gifts into a slightly different direction and her spectacular success speaks for itself. But ultimately, this is not about success and failure . . it can’t be, because success is not entirely up to us. What this is about is courage….. taking the plunge….. not merely playing it safe….. and being able to say at the end of the day that you were not content to stay on the sideline, but got out there on the field and played your heart out. That’s what these songs by Florence mean to me.