Their Song, Once a Decade

My parents' song was an obscure one — a B-side waltz from the year they met, never on any station's rotation. In fifty-one years of marriage I heard it on the radio maybe twice, and both times my parents went silent and held hands like teenagers, embarrassed at being caught by the universe.

My father died first, in a hospital ward with a communal radio down the corridor playing easy-listening filler. My mother was holding his hand. In the minute he left — and I am precise about this because the nurse was noting the time — the corridor radio finished an advert and, with no introduction, played the waltz. My mother didn't cry until then. The nurse, who knew nothing of its meaning, later admitted the station wasn't one that played 'anything that old.'

We told that story for nine years as our family's one brush with the beyond. My mother would pat the air and say, 'He always was a show-off with a budget.'

She died last spring. And I swear before anything you like: none of us arranged what happened, and the funeral director confirmed the cars have no music systems patched to any station — just a driver's radio, front cab, local news channel, volume habitual and low.

As the lead car turned through the cemetery gates, the news channel — mid-way through a traffic report, the driver told us afterwards, visibly rattled — dropped out. Static, two seconds. Then the waltz, from the beginning, at full volume the driver swears he never touched. It played the whole slow curve up the drive and ended, cleanly, as the car stopped. The traffic report resumed mid-sentence.

Local station. We called them, gently, later. No such record exists in their playout log for that hour. Nothing was scheduled, nothing was played, the log says talk and adverts throughout.

A show-off with a budget, and apparently, wherever he is, a mixing desk.