Roberta and Me

March 7, 2025

Today I stood in the parking lot of a small brewery in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and shed a tear. Maybe two. I was looking at a building mural, a painting of Roberta Flack, who just passed two weeks ago.

I was cursed and blessed with a gene for sensitivity. My brothers used to tease me about it, which made me feel bad. I think they’re just as sensitive, but they’re more guarded than I, and it comes out differently. I have found it to be inconvenient at times. It’s embarrassing when you can’t watch an insurance commercial, or the highlight reel of Fran Tarkenton’s career, set to “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra. They make me cry.

I once attended the funeral of a woman who was old, old enough to die. Directly in front of me sat a couple. They were even older. Clearly married, for a long time. They were both so slow and careful, She looked as brittle as thin ice, and he struggled to hold her up. Just an old couple? Oh no, not at all. I could see them sixty years earlier, dancing like athletes. His kraft and her freedom, how they moved and en-joyed each moment. I could imagine their children, now in their sixties, living in their places, heavy into grandparenting and preparing for challenges like their parents.’ Really, all they showed me was careful gestures and movements, their fragility, a kind regard that will outlive them for millions of years. But I could see everything. And yes, I have a strong imagination. So this chokes me up.

Roberta Flack. Mom brought that album, First Take, home one fine day in 1974. As I was wont, I judged it. It wasn’t Led Zeppelin, or the Rolling Stones. It was not cool. I didn’t get it, because I hadn’t developed, at all. But the record made it into the Sunday rotation, that stack that would fall one at a time on the spring-loaded turntable, inside the great console. At our family dinner table we could hear six sides in a row without getting up. When Roberta sang, first “Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” that’s when the haunting started. You were in a different realm. Leonard Cohen’s piece, her arrangement, similar like a kangaroo and an orange (they’re both orange, except for the kangaroo). But it was orchestrated, with a tanging Spanish guitar, crisp cymbals, sympathetic piano, a voice that made breaking up sound like the most glorious thing that ever happened to true love.

Here's the warm-up song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz38Vxkyow4&list=RDkz38Vxkyow4&start_radio= 

A few of the records from the parents' collection, with First Take in the top row. Some of them, e.g. Zeppelin and Cat Stevens, were inserted by their children.

The next song might be the greatest love song ever written. All credit to Ewan MacColl, who wrote it for his mistress, Peggy Seeger. Their duet was the first performance, and it is beautiful. But Roberta takes us directly out of the range of human possibility and the five senses. Haunting, again. Other worldly.

I emoted in that parking lot because this was my parents’ song. Their love song, of a love story that is too long to tell here. But they were married in a fever, had an extra-long shiny newlywed-looking period, and then a slow fade and separation, caused in part by a brain tumor in my dad that went undiagnosed for three decades. He passed twenty years ago, and in some ways, Mom’s love for him just grew. As though his death and absence helped her to put their troubles aside.

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, so, that was their anthem. When I was fourteen or so, and I could see them falling away from one another, I set a table for them on their wedding anniversary. What dinner I might have served, I’m not sure. I remember lighting candles, and putting that song on their old stereo. A kid thinks he can light a candle and play a record, and that feelings of passion in his parents will be reignited, and no separation or divorce will come, because things are simple like this. I was trying to save them.

Sweet and bitter, is my true love song.

Mom and Dad eventually separated. They lived apart. While Dad declined, Mom regenerated. He watched sports and ate cookies. She bought art and toured China. When Dad’s “softball sized” tumor was discovered, she turned her attention back to him. The behavioral changes of the past thirty years began to make a little more sense. She was with him when he died two years later.

Jay and Marge on their wedding day in 1958. Photo credit to Richard Hanger, Marge's father, my grandfather.

After that, the healing began in earnest. Hard things were put away. Fond memories found new life. Mom lived her version of old age, staying active and engaged into her eighties, then choosing the slow fade and decline. “It was time,” she said. The song was slowly re-elevated to its place back in the early years of their marriage. And it felt the same way for the four children they had. Now we raise our glasses to Mom, one year gone, and Dad, twenty. We hear those sounds, that song. Standing in the garage in Eagan, driving down Highway 5 in LA, visiting a parking lot mural in North Carolina, feeding the dogs in Shakopee. You hear that song, and it just stops you. I bet my sister, and my brothers too, are crying.

Thank you, Roberta Flack, for that Side B, First Take. And thank you for Killing Me Softly, and Where Is The Love, and thank you for joining the all star cast of Free To Be You And Me. But this one, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, I have no words for these words, for these sounds.

Your Herre is a link to Roberta Flack's cover of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqW-eO3jTVU&list=RDVqW-eO3jTVU&start_radio=1

Just listen to it.