#glenn miller – @anenlighteningellipsis on Tumblr

Glenn Miller // Moonlight Serenade

When I was a kid my Nana used to play this song all the time, first flitting around her home keeping track of too many grandchildren and too many pots on the stove, then sitting quietly in her chair reading or working on a crossword with one of those blue pens with an eraser in the cap.

It’s the only song I remember hearing at her funeral. There were others, even others by Glenn Miller, but this is the only one I can remember. I was twelve. I remember sitting in a chair sandwiched between two of my cousins, humming along with this song while looking at the poster board we’d crammed full of photos, and seeing a photo of my Nana and Pop standing together under a tree sometime in the 1940s. That was the first time it hit me that this was probably the music she fell in love to. Immediately I pictured that young couple in the photo holding each other close and swaying to the music. I pictured them dancing to this song and making promises about the life they’d share when he came back from the war. All he had to do was come back.

And he did.

I know she played other music, but this song was heavy in the rotation and I can’t help but feel it was theirs. Now every time I hear it, I picture them dancing.

He passed away twenty years before she did. Twenty years. Eight or so years before I was born. Once, I remember hearing a recording on a little old 45 - a message he’d sent to her. I only heard it once and it was the only time I ever heard his voice. She had a few of those old records, and letters they’d written back and forth. She destroyed them all. She said those messages and letters were only meant for the two of them and she didn’t want anyone else to have them after she was gone.

Twenty years she lived without him.

But his name was the last thing she said out loud before she died.

katecolleen

Found it. 1941.

anenlighteningellipsis

Oh my god... Okay... I’m crying. You can’t just add this heart wrenching, poignant personal anecdote to ‘my’ post and expect me NOT to get emotional and rb :’))

This is so beautiful, thank you so much for sharing, darling <<33

#LOVELOVELOVE #i love when people do this with anything i post but whooo boy thisgot me #:') this is fine i'm fine ever yth ing's fine #the importance of #music #repeat #commentary #1940s #glenn miller #moonlight serenade #l'amour

anenlighteningellipsis reblogged

erdesque-deactivated20180814

plvsmid

Moonlight Serenade playing from another room

Glenn Miller

nebulaast

The year is 1942, and there is a war.

Not here, and not yet, but it’s the thought that weighs heavily on your minds. It threatens to disrupt the peaceful reprieve you have both managed to seek out from the party. Away from that crowded, smoky dance floor, and out into the gardens, where the evening is cool and fragrant. Everything is muted out here, softer, both sound and sight.

Alone together. One offers a hand, the other takes it, and you begin to dance.

For now, the idea of war is an ocean away. For now, you have the golden streams of light that spill out from the French windows, letting your shadows on the wet cobblestone stretch longer as you sway to a muffled tune.

Neither of you speak. The atmosphere is rich and dense with the delicate swell of instrumentals, the cloying scent of hyacinths, with the weight of words left unsaid. It’s a last dance. It’s a goodbye. But above all, it is a theft. Possibilities, moments in time, the growth of something more, all taken away by forces much larger than either of you.

Your eyes drift closed, and everything fades to the back of your mind except for the person in front of you. Your awareness has narrowed down to a few sensations, cataloguing them in your mind and stashing them away for safe keeping. Hands clasped together, a soft cheek leaning on a wool-clad shoulder, a hushed sigh close to an ear. Hair being brushed back, the sweep of eyelashes over cheekbone, the reassuring warmth of another person.

Chest to chest, heart to heart. You wish that this dance would never end, continue like the constant, never changing cadence of the music. You wish that you could capture this moment in amber, moving neither forwards or backwards, only a gentle sway to a distant song.

But the year is 1942, and there is a war, and soon the music fades to silence.

#just carve my heart out with a silver spoon #favourite songs #moonlight serenade #glenn miller #1940s #muse #big band #music from another room #to see if there’s a pub