Blog 330 – 07.02.2016
( Excerpt from Emily – The Little Girl Who Sang Her Song To Anyone Who Came Along)

Episode 2

One of the many songs Emily sent to me on mixed CD’s for Father’s Day over the years described her quite well as a little girl who sang her song to anyone who came along.

Emily loved the east coast and moved there from Texas just as soon as she could. I visited her in her beloved Washington D.C. area several times and on the last of those visits we drove to Old Alexandria for lunch. After eating we took a walk around the old town and I could tell it was one of her special places as she lovingly pointed out things to me. Down by the Potomac was the train station it was there she told me that she liked to stand with her guitar and sing. She said passers by would sometimes throw change into her open guitar case. She was a singer and a musician – a song writer and a star. She never receive big bucks for her art but she got to sing her song to any and all who came along and some stopped and listened and were blessed. I was one of those lucky ones.

From the first time we stood her up on a chair to sing in church she knew how to make you feel what she was feeling with her sweet voice. The fifties movie about torch singer Jane Frohman was titled With A Song In My Heart after her signature song, Emily had a song in her heart and she was brave enough to share it.

At first the image of my often alone (We are none of us ever truly alone but surrounded by a host of unseen witnesses cheering us on) little girl singing to strangers (another misconception, I think, strangers are only family and friends we have yet to meet) saddened my heart. But now I have come to see Emily’s brief life here in a new light. Like the quote from which the title of the book To Kill A Mocking Bird is derived. Atticus Finch, the daddy in the story is telling his children about getting his first gun at thirteen and how his daddy said he knew his boy would be tempted at some point to shoot at birds. His dad went on to tell him that crows or jays would be okay to shoot as they were a nuisance but that in his opinion it was a sin to kill a mocking bird for all they do is sing their hearts out for us.

Our Emily was a Mockingbird and the sole reason she was here was to sing her heart out for us. So now when I picture her in the train station in Old Alexandria, playing her guitar and singing for change I know she would have sung just as loudly and sweetly for free and often did for that my friend is what Mockingbirds were born for and live to do. They sing for us and lift our hearts and spirits to higher realms from which they come and to which they and we will one day return. I fully expect to hear my Emily sing again, live and in concert before a large awe struck crowd as she never did here. Well, at least a crowd you could see.

Your Fellow Traveler, and Emily’s Dad,
David White