Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (4 page)

To be made to dress in such a way in the desert heat was nothing short of sadistic. It made it very hard for the sisters to observe us properly on the playground, let alone play with us, as a minute spent in the full sun would turn the black habit into a solar collector that could incinerate its wearer. It’s a wonder that the playground didn’t turn into
Lord of the Flies
.

In the front of every classroom, above the blackboards, was a fairly large crucifix, fully loaded with a suffering Jesus and complement of thorny crown, nails, and oozing side gash. Whoever had the idea to force six-year-olds to contemplate an image of a man being horribly tortured to death was a sick person indeed. I thought the whole thing was gross and tried not to look. We were instructed that our childish peccadilloes had been responsible for this guy Jesus being treated in such a cruel fashion. Furthermore, they told us, he had eventually died to atone
for what we did. I knew this couldn’t possibly be true, because when all this stuff happened to him, I wasn’t even born. This made me question the veracity of everything they ever told us.

An incident that stands out as a turning point in my ability to swallow any life-defining ideas not accompanied by data and published in a peer-reviewed journal occurred when I was in the second grade. Our teacher was Sister Francis Mary, a wizened old soul who had taught my father and Peter and Suzy before me. We actually liked her pretty well and tried hard to please her. She had established a point system to gauge our good behavior. This is how it worked: Sister Francis Mary hung a piece of paper on the wall. Sometimes she would leave the room for a short while, and if we were completely quiet and sitting with our hands folded when she returned, she would stick a gummed foil star on the paper. If we got ten stars, that meant we got to have a party.

In our class, we had a sweet girl, Bojanna, with thick, beautiful hair to her waist, whose family was Polish. Her mother made a traditional sweet called a Polish rosette, which was made out of fried dough and sprinkled with powdered sugar. When we had a party, Bojanna’s mother would fry up fifty of them and bring them to school for the party. They were the most delicious things we ever tasted, and we really wanted to earn those ten stars and have our party.

One May afternoon, after we had earned almost enough stars and were in the home stretch for the party, Sister Francis Mary left the room. We had set up the traditional May altar in the corner, with a large plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and some flat pieces of scenery made to look like trees in a garden. Each morning, a different child would be responsible for bringing in a little wreath made of fresh flowers. We would all sing a song to the Virgin Mary, she would be crowned with the wreath,
and it was a big deal. That particular afternoon after Sister left, we were being good, and we were being quiet. Patsy was walking up and down the aisles with her finger pressed to her lips as an extra reminder, and we were all thinking of the party and the Polish rosettes. The windows at the side of the classroom had been left open because it was a warm day, and a wind had kicked up. This can happen very suddenly in the desert, and the wind can be quite violent. The wind surged through the open windows and blew down a piece of scenery, which crashed into the Virgin Mary, knocking her to the floor and snapping her head off at the neck. The head rolled across the floor in front of our horrified gazes and came to a stop at about the third row. We couldn’t have been more shocked if Marie Antoinette herself had been executed before us with a guillotine.

We were speechless and frozen in place when Sister Francis Mary returned. She was apoplectic. She demanded to know who had been roughhousing. Brave Patsy raised her hand and told Sister Francis Mary about the wind. Sister accepted her explanation. Then she wheeled on us and hissed that we in the class must have been having impure and sinful thoughts, that we were clearly wicked children, and that she was canceling all the stars we had earned. We were devastated. We hadn’t been thinking impure thoughts. We had been thinking about the Polish rosettes.

I don’t remember when there wasn’t music going on in our house: my father whistling while he was figuring out how to fix something; my brother Pete practicing the “Ave Maria” for his performance with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus; my sister, Suzy, sobbing a Hank Williams song with her hands in the dishwater; my little brother, Mike, struggling to play the huge double bass.

Sundays, my father would sit at the piano and play most
anything in the key of C. He sang love songs in Spanish for my mother, and then a few Sinatra songs while he remembered single life before children, and responsibilities, and the awful war. My sister sang the role of Little Buttercup in a school production of
H.M.S. Pinafore
when she was in the eighth grade, so she and my mother would play from the big Gilbert and Sullivan book that sat on the piano. If they were in a frisky mood, they would sing “Strike Up the Band” or “The Oceana Roll.” We would all harmonize with our mother on “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”

When we got tired of listening to our own house, we would tramp across the few hundred yards to the house of our Ronstadt grandparents, where we got a pretty regular diet of classical music. They had what they called a Victrola and would listen to their favorite opera excerpts played on 78 rpm recordings.
La Traviata, La Bohèm
e, and
Madama Butterfly
were the great favorites. On Saturdays they would tune in to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast or sit at the piano trying to unravel a simple Beethoven, Brahms, or Liszt composition from a page of sheet music.

Evenings, if the weather wasn’t too hot or freezing, or the mosquitoes weren’t threatening to carry us away to the Land of Oz, we would haul our guitars outside and sing until it was time to go in, which was when we had run out of songs.

There was no TV, the radio couldn’t wander around with you because it was tethered to the wall, and we didn’t get enough allowance to buy concert tickets. In any case, there weren’t many big acts playing in Tucson, so if we wanted music, we had to make our own. The music I heard in those two houses before I was ten provided me with material to explore for my entire career.

Our parents sang to us from the time we were babies, and one haunting lullaby was often included in our nighttime ritual. It was a traditional song from northern Mexico that my father had learned from his mother, and it went like this:

Our mother had brought her own traditions from Michigan, and her songs were even grimmer. She sang us a song about Johnny Rebeck, whose wife accidentally ground him up in a sausage machine of his own invention. After that, she sang:

Last night my darling baby died

She died committing suicide

Some say she died to spite us

Of spinal meningitis

She was a nasty baby anyway

We would howl with laughter and chorus back at her in three-part harmony:

Oh, don’t go in the cage tonight, Mother darling

For the lions are ferocious and may bite

And when they get their angry fits

They will tear you all to bits

So don’t go in the lion’s cage tonight

My favorite place for music was a
pachanga
. This was a Mexican rancher’s most cherished form of entertainment. It was a picnic that took up an entire afternoon and evening and could last until midnight. Preparations would begin in the late afternoon, to avoid the worst heat of the day. A good site was chosen under a grove of cottonwood trees so there would be cool shade and a nice breeze. Someone would build a mesquite fire and grill steaks or pork ribs or whatever the local ranches provided. There would be huge, paper-thin Sonoran wheat tortillas being made by hand and baked on a
comal
, which is a smooth, flat piece of iron laid over the fire. Fragrant coffee beans were roasted over the fire too, then brewed and served with refried beans, white ranch cheese, homemade tamales, roasted corn, nopalitos,
calabasitas
, and a variety of chiles.

Around sunset, someone would uncork a bottle of tequila or the local
bacanora
, and people would start tuning up the guitars. The stars blinked on, and the songs sailed into the night. Mostly in Spanish, they were yearning, beautiful songs of love and desperation and despair. My father would often sing the lead, and then aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends joined in with whatever words they knew or whatever harmonies they could invent. The music never felt like a performance, it simply ebbed and flowed with the rest of the conversation. We children weren’t sent off to bed but would crawl into someone’s lap and fall asleep to the comforting sound of family voices singing and murmuring in two languages.

My brother Peter’s beautiful boy soprano voice landed him a soloist’s position in the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus, which at the time had a national reputation. They would travel by private
bus giving concerts throughout the country and return covered in aw-shucks glory. On the nights of their homecoming concerts, my father, mother, sister, and I would troop down to the Temple of Music and Art—a beautiful, small theater in downtown Tucson, modeled after the Pasadena Playhouse—and watch them sing. Our whole family would hold its collective breath while my brother emitted the eerie and mysterious high sounds that only prepubescent boy sopranos can make, praying that he wouldn’t be sharp or flat. He was seldom either, but when he strayed, he was more likely to be sharp. I have the identical tendency. We all knew from hearing him practice at home which passages were likely to derail him, and we white-knuckled through them as we listened.

The boys were dressed in cowboy hats, silk neckerchiefs, satin-fringed and pearl-snapped cowboy shirts in desert sunset colors (the colors being allotted to sopranos and altos accordingly), bell-bottomed “frontier pants” with rodeo belt buckles, and cowboy boots. The stage was dressed with an artificial campfire, a starry-night backdrop, some saguaro cactus silhouettes, and a beautiful full moon projected from the back of the hall. Now, this was some serious production value, in my six-year-old opinion! It had a mesmerizing effect on the audience, and everyone listened in hushed and rapturous delight.

Whenever I imagined myself singing for the public, it would be like that: I would stand on a proscenium stage with a real curtain that opened and closed, and sing those beautiful, high, pure notes and give the audience chills. After all, I was a soprano too and could sing just as high as my brother. I wanted to sing like him. I can remember sitting at the piano. My sister was playing and my brother was singing something and I said, “I want to try that.” My sister turned to my brother and said, “Think we got a soprano here.” I was about four. I remember thinking, “I’m
a singer, that’s what I do.” It was like I had become validated somehow, my existence affirmed. I was so pleased to know that that was what I was in life: I was a soprano. The idea of being famous or a star would not have been in my consciousness. I just wanted to sing and be able to make the sounds I had heard that had thrilled me so. And then one day, when I was fourteen, my sister and brother were singing a folk song called “The Columbus Stockade Blues.” I came walking around the corner and threw in the high harmony. I did it in my chest voice and I surprised myself. Before that, I had tried to sing only in a high falsetto tone, and it didn’t have any power.