I was in cottage country and popped into a little church in Coboconk, Ontario for mass. Every time we sang a hymn, I was shaken by the beauty of the voice of a man in the pew behind mine. He sang quietly but if I cocked my head and stopped singing myself, I could hear him. He sounded almost exactly like Cliff Edwards did in his later years. It was a voice full of all humanity; there was sadness and joy in every word. I couldn't believe my luck.
At the end of the mass, I turned to shake his hand. He was an old and little man—one of those guys who grew up in the depression and went straight from school to war. It's always a shock to see how small they are—they never recovered from that depression diet—and to think that such small men accomplished such a giant task.
But here is the thing that shook me. When I told him how wonderful his voice was he was taken aback. He didn't believe me at first but two or three others from nearby pews chimed in to agree. They were there every Sunday and had all heard him but it had apparently never occurred to any of them to say a word to him about it.
"My wife always told me I couldn't sing. If she'd been here today, she would have told me to shut up."
And then he talked about singing and talked and talked and talked. He'd sung on his tractor, he said. He sang along with the radio in the car and he sang whenever he went fishing. He'd sung every moment he'd been alone. And he sang quietly at church thinking that his voice was drowned out by the rest of the congregation. He loved singing and had been doing it since he was a boy. But, when he got married, his wife told him he couldn't sing and he believed her, so he stopped singing when others were around.
He really didn't believe me at first. If others hadn't spoken up, I might not have convinced him.
Afterward, in the car, I wondered if it had been a good thing to tell him. Then again, maybe he had already figured out that his wife hadn't loved him. In any case, she was dead and he had the rest of his life to sing.
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