Hope is an echo

When I come across a word seldom used in daily conversation three times in a 24 hour period, I pay attention. I wonder. I equate it to those serendipitous times when you are humming a song and turn on the radio only to have that song playing. Such was my experience this week with the word echo.

My first encounter was when I tuned into WMFT on the way home from work. The announcer read a blurb written by conductor Gerald Schwarz from a CD titled Echoes, Classic Works Transformed. He had hired current composers to write a short piece based on something written by a master like Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. So, the premise is that updating a theme or being inspired by a well-known phrase becomes an echo. The track that was played was wonderful. I made a mental note to investigate the CD.

That night I was doing a crossword puzzle and 37 Down was 'reheard cry.' Ah, I thought as I saw it was 4 letters starting with e, another echo. Then, the following morning, part of my meditative reading included, "Hope is an echo, it ties itself yonder, yonder. The spring grass showing itself where least expected." It's a line from a Carl Sandburg poem.

As I started putting this together I remembered a song we used to sing in Brownies. "Little Sir Echo, how do you do? Hello! (Hello!). Little Sir Echo will answer you. Hello! (Hello!)." I thought of walking through the tunnel from the parking lot to the entrance of Brookfield Zoo, a place where children run ahead of their parents and yell back so they can hear the noise resound. I thought of bird cries in a fjord in New Zealand, of reading about sounds bouncing off the moon. I thought of the vacant look in my father's eyes as he became an echo of the vital man he once was.

Today is the 28th anniversary of my father's death. Each memory I have of him is now an echo, as, I suppose in a different kind of way, am I and his grandchildren and their children, who are now reflecting his life lessons coast to coast. On this All Hallows’ Eve, I'm sure there are people who are echoes in your life as well. Whether you lost them last week so the pain may overshadow the echo, or last decade, we who remain get to choose the echoes we pay attention to. We can let some echoes fade away and we can keep alive those that make us smile, warm our hearts and make us certain that our hope for spring green grass will indeed appear where least expected but perhaps most needed.

Marilyn