Sisters in Song

Yesterday I opened Facebook to find awful news. Pilar’s 79-year-old mother had been killed in a crash caused by a drunk driver. Pilar has been a dear friend of my wife and I ever since she started dating a high school buddy of mine back in the late 1980’s. They later married, and though it became more difficult to stay in contact as we were raising our own families, we still count them as some of our closest friends. Over the last week I have been enjoying seeing photos of Pilar and her sisters beaming with happiness as they pose for pictures with their radiant and youthful looking mother. She was visiting her daughters, who all live here in North Carolina, from their home country of Colombia. My heart sank for my friends. The happy visit that I had been following through Facebook had turned tragic.

I had just finished college and moved into a small rental house with a friend. We decided to have a keg party. My roommate and I had invited pretty much everyone we knew. It was turning into one of those parties where you expect the police to show up and shut it down due to complaints from neighbors. Amazingly, that did not happen. My future wife and I had just recently started dating each other and she was at the party as well. We were well into the revelry when people began asking, “Where is Kenny?” He had always been a reliable participant in all of our group’s parties. There were no cell phones. We could not just call and say, “What is holding you up, dude?” We soon found out what the holdup must have been.

Kenny pulled into the driveway in his enormous seventy-something automobile. As he stepped out of the car with his usual giant smile on his face, the other doors on the car also opened. Kenny had brought friends. Girls. Kenny, tall and handsome, had brought a group of dark haired, exotic, gorgeous girls to the party. It did not take long for word of this to spread through the party. Every male in the house practically stampeded out the door and surrounded these stunning sisters who were from Bogota, Colombia. I don’t know how long any of them had been in the States at that point, but they were clearly still learning English. They were all smiles and their limited ability to speak fluently in the language of the other partiers did not stop them from boosting the already lively mood of the event.

It turned out that Kenny had met Pilar at the Mexican restaurant she was waiting tables at while she worked on perfecting her English.  As our group of friends made our way through our early twenties there were many more parties and get-togethers. Kenny and Pilar along with Pilar’s sister Rocio were reliable friends that you could count on to always be there for every opportunity to celebrate the New Year, someone’s birthday, or just a casual night hanging out at a local bar. Sometimes one or two of the other sisters would join us.

My friend Kenny was a talented musician and artist.  I wanted to learn to play guitar. I knew that starting at age twenty-something would be difficult. Like learning a new language becomes harder once you have passed a certain age. Since Kenny was a musician, I always wanted to show him when I learned something new on the guitar. If it was at a party, he would join me in another room and I would attempt to play whatever song I was working on. I liked showing him because he was always supportive. “Dude, you are rocking it”, he might say. Many times Pilar and Rocio would come with us to listen. They would clap and say nice things about what I’m pretty sure was some dreadful sounding stuff. During all those times, none of them mentioned that Pilar and Rocio were talented musicians themselves. And I never asked.

At one New Year’s Eve party, and our most well attended one, I told Kenny that I had learned a new song. We went back to the other room, only this time quite a few more people came along. I twanged out my version of Military Madness and by the end several more people had come into the room. I must have been getting better. Someone actually asked me to play something else. I had nothing. It was like I could learn one song at a time, but without song sheets and time to re-practice I could not play anything else. Kenny said that maybe Pilar and Rocio would do a song. Pilar reluctantly agreed and I gave her my guitar. She said that she was not very good, I had no idea that she even played at all.

And then she started this unique strumming with the back side of her fingers and using her thumb along the bass strings. She started singing in Spanish. I had never heard anything in this style before. Colombian folk music. Almost as soon as Pilar started singing, Rocio joined in. The song was sung in a combination of harmonies and rounds. Shortly after they started, the entire group at our New Year’s Eve party were crowding into the small room. It was beautiful, happy music. It was the music of a family. Immediately clear that this was something that they had done for years. They knew their parts. They explained later that they had sung these songs their whole life as a family. On this night, they were having to handle their own parts but also the parts their other sisters would normally cover. I was amazed.

People that came to that party would talk about it for years. I had friends that I had even forgotten were at that celebration come up to me years later and say how they remembered those beautiful girls singing their hearts out in Spanish and how amazing it was. Over time, I would ask them to sing at every get-together. They made playing and singing seem effortless. Occasionally I was fortunate enough to hear at least one more of the sisters join in with the same effortlessness and talent.

These sisters, who had shown up at my party all those years ago, are much more than beautiful girls as I had seen them that night. They are talented musicians. They are brilliant artists. They are whip-smart engineers. And they are all consistently kind people. But mostly they are sisters. Sisters close to each other in a way that I think is unique to the culture that they were raised in. A culture clearly fostered by their mother that they lost this week. I know that this sisterly closeness and love is strong and that will keep them going as they move through this tragic circumstance. They will lift each other in song.