Dad’s favorite songs

Tower Bridge, London 2001

The third Sunday in June is declared for Father’s Day, first celebrated in 1910 in the USA but not proclaimed as such until years later.

Coincidentally, June 21st is also Summer Solstice, the longest day in the year, and thus a very important milestone for those who have traversed the long winter months. It’s the one day in the year that I’d target a concert.

On Maui, every day is a warm summer day. I stopped celebrating summer solstice because it’s an endless summer no matter which day it is.

Instead, I shall look for my dad’s favorite songs.

Fourteen years ago, I gave a “concert for dad” in London. It was a typical classical music house concert, with different combinations of instruments and a variety of genres. Three years earlier, in my third-floor flat near River Thames and Westminster Abbey, I invited two classical guitarists to a gathering of my friends to welcome my dad. After their virtuosic performance, my father asked, “How about songs by Joan Baez or Nat King Cole?” I was stunned that he would request songs that were not in the classical repertoire.

House concert in London, May 1998

It didn’t register until recently just how much he wanted to hear familiar songs that he liked. As my father aged, he expressed his love for the oldies in various emails. I’m certain that he got introduced to many of these American songs the year he spent at the East West Center. Below are email extracts:

Besame Mucho (I first enjoyed it in Brunei 1964), Scarborough Fair, Sound of Silence (theme songs in Graduate shown in Honolulu 1968), Unchained Melody (theme song from Ghost), Don’t Cry for me, Argentina by Madonna, Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Maria’s I’ll Be There and Whitney’s I Always Love You.

Concert for dad, London July 2001

I didn’t know he was fond of opera, until I found the following text.

The best songs I love to enjoy are those from operas. Simply click “Carmen” on YouTube and you’ll be entertained by the Toreador Song and Habanera dance music. And you can never feel more overjoyed when you click La Traviata or Drinking Song by Verdi. Also sweet to our ears are “Un Bel di Vedremo” and “La Boheme” (Si mi chiamano mimi).

He even added the context in which he learned of opera.

I for the first time “contacted” the above songs by turning on Grandpa’s radio on weekends In 1949-1953, when we resided in the dwelling quarters of the Air Force Staff and Command Academy in Tungkang (East Harbor in Taiwan), where he was one of the three English instructors. The radio announcer would introduce the background of those operas before each of them was broadcast. Grandpa, however, preferred symphonies broadcast by US military radio station in the Philippines, which was a US colony and whose location is much nearer to Tungkang than Taipei. Those were hard times when the Communist army (they had no navy or air force yet) still threatened to attack Taiwan and there were no TV, PC, cinema, not even a Shanghai restaurant around.