Words too weighty for a grown man, let alone for children
For a couple of days I have been obsessed with a song I never heard before, a song written by composer and musician Kurt Bestor some 30 years ago in the wake of the dead and orphaned children of war-torn Yugoslavia. The song, “Prayer of the Children,” has been performed by thousands of choirs, both high school and college, yet I didn’t know it, until a recent warm Friday night in a Mississippi River town when, of all musical groups, the band Three Dog Night performed it.
The show itself was pleasant, maybe a little pedestrian, and I wasn’t really "getting into it," even though I enjoyed their music in the late 1960s and early 1970s until the group began the four-part acapella “Prayer,” originally brought to their stage performances in 2012 in response to the killings of elementary school children and their teachers in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. I was in Munich, Germany, when I saw the news about the killings and I recall not knowing how to feel however, that’s a story for another time. But the song, oh my, the song; none of the “Jeremiah-was-a-bullfrog” nonsense. This was breathtaking.
Anyway, I immediately thought of my wife when Three Dog Night (actually One Dog Night these days) sang lyrics in the tune taken from “A Child’s Prayer,” a prayer many of us recited as children, a prayer my wife told me frightened her every night when she went to bed as a child when she and her mother spoke the words, words that comprise lyrics, slightly changed, in the song, “If I should die before I wake, I pray my soul to take.” I cried. Why in the world do we make our children think about such things, as I can barely handle them as an adult? It is, however, a reminder that the difference between the quick and the dead is very tenuous, and not to be ignored.
One day the technology will be such that I can provide you with a link within a column, a link upon which you can touch it, and the music we’re discussing will begin playing on a speaker somewhere in your house. I’ll work on that, as I’d like you all to hear the song.
In addition to being smitten by a work of music, I’ve done something not accomplished in many years. I’ve taken my old rope hammock out of what I thought was its final resting place in the garage, cleared the ground over which it swayed for many years, and hung it between two cedar trees in the dark woods behind my house. My late father-in-law used to visit frequently, to tour my hollow on his daughter’s John Deere Gator, and to nap in the hammock like he was hanging out on a beach in North Carolina with no worries in the world. Later, he had plenty of worries, taking care of his wife who had Alzheimer’s.
Spending a bit of late-summer-early-evening time in a hammock, under a canopy of cedar branches, with a taste of autumn in the air thanks to a slight breeze out of the northwest, is not to be seen as anything less than a bit of heaven on earth. So, if you have a hammock, make sure it’s out. And, if you can, share the hammock with someone, someone who knows you well enough to reach over to brush aside the hair that may be blowing across your face, or is comfortable with a hand resting softly against a flank, while you talk of life.
Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book "The Iowa State Fair" is available from the University of Iowa Press.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Words too weighty for a grown man, let alone for children
