Daniel Duvall Mayers: Moon River Memories

Father and Daughter duet

When I was nine years old I remember my father coming to visit us one day, quite unexpectedly.  I knew my father for only one complete year of my life, and this was one of the four times within that year’s span that I can recall seeing him. I remember him walking up, tentatively, to the open front door of our small apartment and embracing the curly-headed little blonde girl, who stood boldly in the doorway and called him “Daddy.”

Not long after he had arrived, he sat down at the small, mahogany veneer piano, on which my sister practiced religiously, and he began to play a soft, melancholy tune that hangs in my memory still. Moon River.  As his fingers traveled in a trance over the familiar black and white keys to his childhood, I realized that this man, my father, drank tears as other men drink their coffee of a morning.

There was a sweet sadness in his playing that I have not heard since.  My mother told me later--rather mockingly I thought--that my father had the ability to play almost anything he had heard once, provided he could transpose it into the key of ‘C’.  It was as if he must bring all musical expression, I supposed, to that central place on the keyboard where sharps and flats are tonically subdued—such was the pain that made up his life.

When I turned twenty-three, nine years after my father’s early and rather senseless death, I watched the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time.  It is one of my favorite films to this day.  The image of Audrey Hepburn singing the words to Moon River accompanied by the soft strains of an acoustic guitar, made me see my father’s peaceful face and graceful hands once again.  As I watched Hepburn’s character “Holly Golightly” gaze longingly beyond the window of her tiny flat, set in a building flanked on either side by the high brick walls of New York City, I identified her sadness with mine.  She too had run away from home a long time ago and had no real place in the world to call her own.

I thought of my father as he must have been before he died, lying in his bed, looking out the window—with only a burning cigarette in his hand for company—his spirit flanked on either side by the sterile walls of an eastern state sanitarium.

 He was a long way from home, even when he returned for a visit.  And the dramatic emptiness that made up his life is the space that I’ve been left to fill.  I still cry when I see the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And I realize that Life is a long song that swells and ebbs on waves of yearning and discord, and though it rarely reaches resolution, its music must always be heard.
--Noelle Clearwater (all rights reserved by the author).

Moon River

Moon river, wider than a mile

I'm crossing you in style some day

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Two drifters, off to see the world

There's such a lot of world to see

We're after the same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend

My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me

(moon river, wider than a mile

(I'm crossin' you in style some day

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Two drifters, off to see the world

There's such a lot of world to see

We're after that same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend

My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me

--Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini 1961