To Hum or Not to Hum...

I don’t know when it was that I began to hum. I’d be in the shower, humming. Or in the car, alone—at least I thought I was—making my own music, or accompanying the best, or walking away from an argument with my wife, left with humming as the only graceful way to exit without conflagration. The weird part is that I wasn’t entirely aware of this. I mean, I knew I was tuning into a mildly eclectic array of songs from Bizet to the Beatles, from South Pacific to Janis Ian, or God Save Our Gracious Queen, to Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Usually the tunes were explicable in some opaque way, but so subterranean or tangential that it would seriously disrupt my reverie, in fact put the brakes on it to discover the origin. Naturally, I was partially cognizant of the transition from inaudible to noticeable. As often the case with deep distracted thinkers, it was my wife who brought all this to my attention.

I was doing what I’d seen many others doing on the streets, or what my mother did when I was very young, not quite singing because I seldom knew the exact words, but moving along the corridors of house and city, lips often moving, having full-blown conversations with myself. I once thought these people were all nut jobs, addled people. Now, as I stopped to consider it, so was I. Fever. Give me Fever, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone. They just bubbled up and out. There was a time when I would whistle the tune, because every time I dared to sing, there was no recognition. That I had all these strings of melody and lyrics lurking in me and now coming out, intrigued me, and even liberated me from a lifelong state of inhibition. What this meant was that I could not have cared much less what others thought anymore, or might think when they saw me humming. Screw them all, each and every one was close to how I felt. Had some judgmental whippersnapper like myself have hove in sight, I could not have noticed., and this was what was strangest of all: somehow, after a lifetime of acute self-consciousness I was now uninhibited. I was like after years of furtively closing curtains so people would not look at me from outside, of feeling watched, it did not matter. I felt free to do what I wanted without nary a thought.

I recommend this, all of you who mumble words in church or singing happy birthday, as I had done for many years, a lifetime in fact. Maybe it just comes naturally—it was not anything conscious on my part. Should you be a parent, too, I hope you will never laugh at your child, as mine did when I sang to them, passing on your own shyness for another generation. Or as educators, avoid singling out and embarrassing those who are off-key or groaning, as several music directors did to me. One told me to confine my vocal efforts to yelling at the crew out on the river, whle another suggested that I mouth the words. The song was On the Road to Mandalay, the sort of song that invited enthusiasm. All of this negative feedback had the impact of making this songbird cease to sing, silencing the canary in the coal mine. It was not good. It was not right. I am thankful that I now hum, one day, I project, I may find myself singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the newborn king.