Sitting at the end of the dinner table Martin asked if I wanted to sing with him. I'd been telling him of my adventures while learning the sound booth of a local church where their band was being formed. This particular night only a few had turned up.
Therefore, I found myself singing ... I was the only person left standing at that point who was not doing anything. What use is a band with no one singing?
The thing was that I found out I enjoyed being at the front behind a microphone. That microphones do not phase me. Well, that was a technical hurdle out of the way in this journey of life. And the fact that the sound coordinator came dubb the voice out, change the voice ad so forth. I asked if he could also change the voice to make me sound like an angel... The poor man's face was the horror-filled at the challenge. The theatricals were hilarious. So much for a career behind the microphone.
Martin Meyzies, a friend of my immediate family, quietly sat there and listened. Suzie Q the guitars in the sitting room ... get it for me. There was something strange in the way he said it which I'll explain later.
The result was after I'd sat down back at my computer Martin started to sing. The song was beautiful. A love song I'd heard many times before. Then came another half of one. and he stopped. Martin had a beautiful voice.
Asking why he had stopped "It's not what it was!" was the answer. He told me he used to sing and left it at that.
Six months later he was dead. About two months later talking to a friend who was in Sale she said what was his name. "Susan, he used to sing with Slim Dusty." Brenda, the friend, had 'grown up at Slim Dusty's knees'.
Yes, I could see Martin around the track and bush campfires. "No Susan... professionally." Now that floored me. Even so, it also explained why partway through the second song Martin stopped.
At today's date it's close to a year that he and I last sat at the end of the kitchen table enjoying each other company. Him singing one and a half songs.
The canny things is that travelling up to Batemans Bay just as we were going through the hills near Bucken looking out the side windows at the moonlit, Gum trees in sleeping bags' tape was turned on.
The memory of the first, and only, "one and a half" songs I ever heard him sing, came hauntingly back though my mind.
life is strange at times. If you avoid something yourself, be open to that something finding away in just so you will face it. deal with it. Move forward with the journey that is now your life.
Funny, in many ways those keys to moving forward were handed to me. Literally from beyond the grave as we travelled along the highways that Martin had in part helped to build the foundations of.
