Posterity

             Singers used to know how to sing. Musicians used to know how to play. They knew they were getting a paycheck, like all of us workers, but they felt their songs. They weren’t doing it for a paycheck, like we all are. The music industry is and was not ever a lucrative field (unless you hit it “big”) which only proves the point more that they were doing it because they loved it.

All those musicians who gave out to their old age live on through their songs, but what do the factory workers live on through? Their children? Hardly. They think they will raise upstanding kin who will carry on their legacy because that is what is important to them. When their children’s children die, they live on no longer, their stories forgotten through so much time, whereas those musicians—Betty Weiss, Robert Johnson, Ray Charles—they live on much longer than they expected.

The rest of us hope to have legacies, but we won’t. We will have diary entries devoted to amateur poems we wrote, so subjective our grandchildren won’t even know what the subject matter was, but they will make up their own and we will love them for it.

After we are gone—this large group we are in community with—what will remain of us? A headstone that reads, “Faithful husband and father”? I hope there is more than that. Even if it all boils down to only one instance when a niece or nephew is reading through my journals, and through one single entry, they have a Tesla sort of headache-wreaking epiphany about what they want their life to be as they listen to the out-of-date Ray Charles singing, “Come Rain or Come Shine”. That will be enough for me to smile in my grave, instead of rolling over.