Sunrise, Sunset: A Lyric Essay

Swiftly fly the years

A small wooden box sits on a red dresser. Lift the lid. Beneath a glass panel, its inner workings are revealed. Wind the key, and a tiny fan begins to whir, causing clocklike gears and a knobbed metal drum to turn. The teeth of a tiny steel comb are lifted and released by the drum’s protruding pins. Each tooth, when plucked, vibrates at a unique frequency, creating a melody.

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days

My parents gave me this music box for Hanukkah in 1973, the last year they were together. I’d just turned seven. Did they know, when they gave it to me, that they would separate within six months? Had my mom already fallen for Erich, the man who would become my stepfather? And if she had, did my dad know?

I believe my mom capable of holding such a secret close until she was ready to reveal it. But I don’t think my dad, had he known of her betrayal, would have been able to pretend we were a regular family having a normal Hanukkah. My dad was like me, transparent as the glass panel on the music box. Nothing could stay hidden. The man I later married was more like my mom, capable of opacity.

So my dad must not have known.

It was my favorite gift I’d ever received. Perhaps it still is.

Is this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?
I don’t remember growing older
When did they?

I was born an old Jewish woman. Even as a seven-year-old, I was sentimental about the passage of time. I spent many hours watching those miniature tines rising and falling as the notes of Sunrise, Sunset rose and fell. By this time in my life, I’d already seen Fiddler on the Roof several times. I teared up each time I listened to the melody, imagining what my parents would feel like at my wedding, shaking their heads and wondering where the time had gone.

That year we lived on Parnassus Drive, high in the Berkeley Hills. The home belonged to an academic family on sabbatical abroad. My parents too were on sabbatical from their teaching posts at the University of Kansas. My dad taught that year at UC Davis, commuting a few times a week, while my mom did post-doctoral work in statistics at UC Berkeley with a world-renowned statistician named Erich Lehmann.

My brother Len and I, four years apart, were bused to different schools. At Hillside Elementary, I had the following memorable experiences:

• I was moved from first grade into second grade (the age cutoff was different in California).

• Big, mean girls on the playground pulled my hair harder than I knew hair could be pulled without coming out of your head.

• I learned a little ditty that went: a mother-fuckin’ titty-suckin’ two-ball bitch. My parents, horrified, tried to stop me from singing it. They succeeded only in stopping me from singing it in front of them. The following year, I brought it back to Broken Arrow Elementary School in Lawrence, Kansas and taught it to the whole third grade.

• I met my best friend, Veronica Batiz, whom I adored fiercely and entirely.

• I fell in love with my second grade teacher, Mr. Curry, who had thick dark hair, dreamy hazel eyes, and a Tom Selleck mustache.

While I was falling in love with Mr. Curry, my mom and the great statistician Erich Lehmann were also falling in love.

My dad adored Veronica almost as much as I did. She and I climbed all over him, hanging from his arms, taking his glasses, and messing up his hair. We nicknamed him Funny-Looking One and Fat-Looking One. He had bulked up a bit at that time, thanks to steroids he was taking for his asthma. He never seemed to mind these nicknames. On the contrary, he delighted in them.

My mom wasn’t around much that year.

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears

If you wind the music box as tightly as possible, it plays really fast at first. Too fast. Eventually it slows to a normal pace, then a dreary, languid one before grinding to a halt, always in the middle of a phrase.

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the—

Some time in the spring of 1974, my parents sat Len and me down at the dining room table in the house on Parnassus Drive, with Berkeley, the bay, and a couple of bridges glistening below. They told us they were getting a divorce. I cried for a few minutes. Then I went to my room and played with the toys that belonged to the family whose house we were renting. Those kids had a lot of cool toys. My favorite was a stuffed platypus.

They look so natural together
Just like two newlyweds should be

My mom and Erich did not have a big wedding. A justice of the peace, a couple of colleagues as witnesses. They had ripped apart two families to create their union. A party would have been gauche.

I acquired a new stepsister named Fia (short for Sophia) who was two years younger than me, plus a grownup stepbrother and stepsister whom I saw from time to time. I’d always wanted a little sister. Though Fia lived with her own mom in Berkeley, whenever I came to visit my mom and Erich she came over to spend the night.

On top of the music box is a picture of a little boy and a crow. The boy looks about two years old, with chubby cherub cheeks. He wears lederhosen and a peaked cap. In one hand he holds a bugle. The crow is perched on a wooden fence. Boy and crow appear to be in conversation. The crow’s eyes are downcast and its beak open, as though relating a sad tale. The boy listens, wide-eyed.

In the summer of 1974, my dad, my brother Len and I drove back to Kansas in Red Pete, our VW van. In the car, we played letter games like GHOST and the alphabet game and sang  The Shaffer Family to the tune of The Addams Family at the top of our lungs. We visited the Great Salt Lake and went camping in Utah and Colorado. Although I now know now my dad was utterly decimated by my mom’s desertion, I’ve always remembered that road trip as a happy time for our little trio.

Back in Lawrence, I was the first kid in my class to have divorced parents. In the bathroom at Broken Arrow Elementary School, a girl said, “Your mom left because of you.”

“She did not!” I yelled. But I cried in the stall after she was gone.

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the—

Ten years after my parents separated, the same year I graduated high school, my dad met a woman named Betty on a train from New York to Boston. By the end of the train ride, they were kissing. A few months later, she moved from her apartment in Newport Beach, California to our house in Lawrence, Kansas, tag-teaming me as my dad’s housemate when I went away to college.

I was relieved that my dad did not have to live alone.

When did she get to be a beauty?
When did he grow to be so tall?
Wasn’t it yesterday that they were small?

I got married under a canopy, just like Tzeitl in Fiddler on the Roof.

My brother Len played and sang You’re My Home, by Billy Joel. My stepsister Fia was a bridesmaid. Three friends sang Soon, Love, Soon, by Vienna Teng, who would later become a friend and creative collaborator of mine. Another friend rode a unicycle and juggled torches. He also juggled my nephew. David—the bridegroom—stomped on a glass, which was actually a lightbulb in a cloth bag. The crowd shouted Mazel tov! and hoisted us on chairs. I sang Natural Woman for David before they cut the cake.

My parents walked me down the aisle, one on each side, while their respective spouses looked on.

Unlike Tzeitl and Motel, we already had a child. Our older son had turned one three days before the wedding. His babysitter walked him down the aisle, and we made vows to him.

My wedding dress was so beautiful. Ivory lace. Tiny pearl beads. It fell straight, like a sheath, no big floofy skirt. I’d like to dye it with an ombré gradient that goes from aqua to deep teal. Why should something so lovely be worn only once?

What words of wisdom can I give them?
How can I help to ease their way?

Our second son was eleven when David and I sat him down on the brown velvet couch in our family room in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and told him we were separating.

“Okay,” he said. “Can I go now?”

A few minutes later he was in his room, playing video games.

Our older boy was sixteen at the time. He’s on the autism spectrum and likes to ask a lot of questions. We promised him that whatever happened between us, we would always be there for him, just as we’d promised we would. He pointed out that we had made vows to each other too, and now we were breaking them. He wanted to know the percentage chance that we would get back together.

He found our answers unsatisfactory, so for quite some time he repeated the questions every day.

Sunrise, sunset

Now our younger son is fifteen. He remains, for now, a young man of few words. David and I are still married, still separated, still living (separately) in Michigan.

Our older son is twenty and back in California. He still asks me periodically what the chances are that his dad and I will get back together. I tell him the chances are slim, but it doesn’t matter, because even though we’re not a couple, we’re still a family.

My Vati is gone. I miss him so.

My stepmother Betty sold the house I grew up in and lives in a small apartment in Lawrence, Kansas. At ninety years old, she is one of the happiest people I know.

My mom has short term memory loss. It doesn’t seem to bother her. She still describes her years with Erich as “heaven.”

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the—

Fifty years later, my little music box still plays its aching, wistful tune. The colors have faded and taken on a sepia tinge, but the little round-cheeked boy continues to listen to the crow with eager curiosity. To this day, no matter how tightly or loosely I wind the key, the music always stops in the middle of a phrase.

My boys in Lake Michigan in 2020.

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Sunrise, Sunset is from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein.