"Everything I needed to know I learned from songs on the radio" Part 2

1963: I am standing on the kitchen steps. My mom is hanging laundry on the clothesline. Through the screen door I hear it again: the song! I want to sing this song. More than anything, I want to sing this song. Its sinuous melody touches something sharp and sweet within me. But I do not know what the words are and I cannot capture the tune with my four year old voice. My mom tells me that the man is singing in Japanese. I don't know what that means, but there is something in his voice that I hear in my dad's voice sometimes when he sings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhZl7-8j7S0

At times in years since I have felt a feather-touch of some uncapturable sweetness, a sharp beauty that swoops close for a moment and is gone, an otherness, an ache of inarticulate joy...rare and fleeting...