It's Going to be a Bright, Bright Sunshiny Day

It's Going to be a Bright Sunshiny Day

Decades ago, Jazz great Al Jarreau recorded a  pick-me-up song  that even now I recall on especially dismal, down-in-the-doldrums-days.  "I can see clearly now the rain has gone," he sang. Not only that, he noted that all obstacles had disappeared; the dark clouds that had him down had dissipated; and forecaster that he now was, "it was going to be a bright, bright sunshiny day!"  The lyrics held such promise.   By that time, blood had  journeyed from the top of my head to my foot-tapping toes.  I'd be ready to face another day.

Not any more, my heart cries out, not any more

I hadn't even thought about Jarreau or that song for years.  Why would I?  I remember the times when a poem Langston Hughes wrote painted the mosaic of my life.  Writing during the Harlem Renaissance and living as bleak as mine, Hughes declared, "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair!"  I'd silently agree, with an "Amen to that!" In fact, I rarely listened to music and limited my singing and listening to Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. 

Life hurt back then, but forecast no legacy of hopelessness. My, how times have changed.

With especially difficult losses, I reserve the Dirge or the Keen, associated usually with Irish mourning. That kind of mourning describes Daddy's death from hard work, my Grandson's Sudden Infant Death, and the leave-taking of Mother, who could have written Hughes' "Crystal Stair." While my Father's death had been been a long time coming; Philip's had been the least expected; and Mother's, predicted to the hour by Hospice nurses, they rang with the same intensity---the inexpressible shattering of the same, fragile heart.

"Tho the clouds may hover o'er us, There's a bright and golden ray, It's the promise that in heaven God shall wipe all tears away.  When we reach that blessed homeland, Where tis everlasting day, On that bright eternal morning God shall wipe all tears away."