The Suddenness of Burt

The Suddenness of Burt The first time I heard Burt Bacharach I was a kid at a party slow dancing with a girl that years later I came to love. Karen Carpenter’s voice singing Close To You. But it was the sound under the words I felt whispering to me. Telling me something had suddenly changed. Something I had never felt before. Something entirely new that I had never heard before. It was a different kind of song, like it was written with different kind of notes. A new kind of math. The same old 88 keys but, like bricks, erected in an entirely new way. The first skyscraper in a land of Levitt houses. A cathedral rising from the bones of a one room pine pew church. They played the record over and over that night. And I listened to the voice under the voice telling me a secret about love. About what it could and couldn't do. About what I could and couldn’t expect. I felt changed. Suddenly. We are taught that history is gradual. A slow roll of events circling inevitably toward progress. But that night, the night I first put my arms around a girl, I felt a shift. A jolt no one else could feel. Like tectonic plates suddenly let go and everything was changed. And Burt was trying to arrange the notes to tell me about all that would come. Tell me that the world was different now. Singing to me about love I would know. About heartbreak I would endure. Promising to remind me, 3 minutes at a time, that for all the beautiful and all the terrible, he would always tell me the truth. As much as his sudden sound could carry. As much as something new could carry something ancient. Listening to the radio after one of Burt's songs was like hearing algebra suddenly humbled by calculus. Like watching marble, staring at the Pieta, and suddenly realizing what it might yet become. There will be other American geniuses, however few. Others that see 88 keys as a kind of stairway. Others that hear something divine pulsing beneath the pitch and sway of hope and desire. So I still listen for that new math. Close to You became, as it always does, Walk On By. The girl disappeared into another guys arms. And love, ever hopeful, as it almost always does, gave itself over for a time to heartache. Burt turned his new math on that well worn truth too. A House is Not a Home. Asking the forgotten way to San Jose...and happiness. Warning that raindrops keep falling on our heads. I don’t know where that girl disappeared to. Like many first loves she dissolved into the shadow of memory. But I still recall the feel of her arms. The weight of her head on my shoulder. The sudden epiphany that love is the grandest of all things the human heart is capable of. And I still hear the wordless voice of Burt, his meaning crafted under the sound, reminding me, no matter what. No matter what. To say a little prayer. Of thanks.