The day Lou Reed died shouldn’t have been particularly relevant, but I remember it. I remember the way the afternoon sun made shadows on my daughter’s fingers. Graceful and elegant.
Just a twinkling ago, my baby girl first discovered her hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, her little fingers in constant motion.
Her father and I called it “hand ballet.”
Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears. To fly, fly away . . .
Her dad’s favorite Lou Reed song.
I don’t know why Lou Reed was always relevant in my life. I first heard him on Radio One when I was just a little girl making daisy chains on the field in front of our house. The characters in “Walk on the Wild Side,” were on another planet. There was Holly, from Miami, FLA, and she hitch-hiked her way across the USA; Little Joe who never gave it away, whatever it was; and, Jackie who thought she was James Dean for a day. Just a child, I couldn’t possibly have known what the “hustle here and the hustle there” was all about. Had I known, I wouldn’t have been singing it within earshot of my parents. This was provincial Northern Ireland in the early 1970s.
Recalling this, I’m reminded of author, Neil Gaiman’s story of how he braced himself for almost twenty years for the inevitable conversation with his daughter about the story behind her name. Holly. When the day arrived, here’s how it went:
You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Reed started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “Shaved her legs and then he was a she …? He?
That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation.”You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.” She grinned like a light going on. “Oh dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it.
I’m not sure that I’d ever expected The Conversation to go quite like that.
If I’m honest, I have always been a tiny bit afraid of whatever truths awaited me on the wild side , but I still took that walk. And, I have never once regretted it, because there was always a book of magic in the garbage can to take me away. To take me back.
The first time my daughter clapped her hands, it was for her dad on his birthday, on this day twenty six years ago. It was perfect.
Suspended in the one thought this morning are my daughter and the late Lou Reed, their elegant hands in motion. Laurie Anderson writes that her husband, Lou Reed, spent much of his last days on earth:
. . . being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
My baby girl saying hello to her hands. Lou Reed saying goodbye. Discovering and rediscovering that we cannot have the magic without the loss.
