Kenny Rogers

Amidst all the chaos out there in the corona-stricken world on the first day of spring in 2020, one small piece of news caught my attention: Kenny Rogers died. I can’t say that I was ever a fan of the country singer with the “husky voice” and a neatly trimmed beard – the peak of his popularity was in the early 80s, at least where I lived, and I was still a little too young to care about that kind of “mature” handsomeness. (My crushes at the time were typically much younger – the boys from the neighbouring apartment buildings, who played soccer or did gymnastics in the playgrounds outside). But when I heard it on the radio, the first thing I thought was, “he’s been alive all these years!” This might sound strange and arbitrary, but I’ll explain. Those who’ve lost someone close to them will maybe understand this way of interpreting everything with a new and unique-to-you measuring rod: the death of that someone becomes the main landmark, the defining event. Anything else is classified as “what happened before” and “what happened after.” In my case, the death of my mother 14 years ago has assumed the power to reshape history. I look at the photo of me and my friends Federica and Alexandra taken almost 20 years ago, and I don’t see three lovely young women, untroubled in their student days: I see that me who still had a mother. I look at my older cat whom I’ve had for what seems like ages (12 years), and I can’t quite comprehend that my mother never got to find out about him because she died almost two years before I got him. Virtually anything can be redefined in this way.

So when I heard the announcement of Kenny Rogers’ death, I first became aware of a sort of vacuum that exists in my head – some kind of a neutral space which gaped open and bottomless after she died, and sucked into itself everything even remotely related to her or our life as it once was. And then those things just ceased to exist. They were gone, or should have been gone, frozen in time when she still moved through it but which was a past time. This included Kenny Rogers too, whom my mother liked; we even had an audio-tape of one of his albums – it must have been the one with “Islands in the Stream” which he sang with Dolly Parton.

Now when I think of those years in Bosnia – the late 70s and the 80s – I realize we didn’t have a lot of anything at the time. Books, for instance. My parents did own some (the collections of Cronin, or Remarque, or medical encyclopaedias, atlases…) but not a whole lot. Or furniture. Most of it my parents got on credit at various times, so it was often mismatching. But once you bought the big things, like the living room couches or the kitchen table, you knew that was it, for life. And then those audio-tapes. I don’t think we (and by “we” I really mean my parents) ever owned more than about two dozen. Which of my parents bought them, and where, is a mystery to me; my guess is it was my mother since music was her first love which she had to renounce after her parents pushed her away from the piano and into med school (that she promptly dropped and switched to pharmacology, only marginally more tolerant of it). Try as I might, I can’t recall which other tapes we had, except for one other one: some album by Zvonko Bogdan. Its “album cover” – a piece of sturdier paper with printed song titles that fitted into the transparent plastic box holding the tape – had a touched up photo of two horses pulling a cart with a man on it, rumbling down a road on some Vojvodina salaš. I don’t know if I’m really remembering this album cover, or if it’s just my imaginative derivation from the lyrics in plenty of his songs, involving horses and carriages. And when did we listen to those tapes? I have no clear memories of that. Maybe when we had guests over? Typically my father’s friends from work, with their families. But I do know Kenny Rogers from somewhere, and it’s certainly from that tape. Most music that I do remember from those family times in Bosnia came from the kitchen radio: a very plain black rectangle with a small antenna, which stood on the kitchen counter, between the sink and the stove, getting occasionally splashed by the water gushing from the tap, or by the things cooking on the stove elements. That radio was such a dependable friend. It was, again, mostly my mother who listened to it because she was in the kitchen much more than anyone else; on the weekends, there was a late morning music programme where the radio station played a bunch of songs (domestic pop), and the listeners voted for the best one. One time when we listened to it together, and both liked the same song (it was called “Marija;” I don’t remember any more who sang it), my mother called in to cast her vote and added that her daughter too voted for the same song – they had no trust issues at the radio at the time; they believed there were indeed two votes. “Marija” won that weekend, to our delight.

But the black kitchen radio did not have a cassette player. So, at some point my parents must have decided to “upgrade,” and as a result, a small but sleek Panasonic radio and cassette-player with rounded edges and wide circular inbuilt speakers (so that it reminded me of some giant bee-like insect), found its way into our home. It got its honorary position in the living room, where the only TV in the house had its place too (and the black kitchen radio remained the uncontested master of the kitchen regions). Clearly, Kenny Rogers and Zvonko Bogdan were singing from that Panasonic box in our house; and I do remember one distinct occasion when the cassette-player was used. It was when our second-floor neighbours – just below us – came for an impromptu visit. This must have been at the very beginning of the 90s: those were the last years I was still living at home, and the troubles in the country were just about to flare up. My parents never really hung out with any neighbours in our 10-floor apartment building, including the second-floor neighbours (who had two sons, a little older than me), and I don’t know how this visit came about. But that afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Nježić from the second floor happened to both be in our living room; it looked like they had dropped by on some brief formal business, but then got into a lively chat with my parents and sat down. Next thing you know, there was some food and drinks, and then Mr. Nježić quickly zipped down to their place, picked up some tapes, and came back in a jiffy with the supply of his music. I remember the loud booming of patriotic songs (or rather, nationalistic ones) coming through the closed living-room door with a frosted glass panel, and then I must have gone out because I don’t recall how this ended. I do know that the following day, Mr. Nježić came to apologize for any inappropriateness, and no one ever talked about it again.

There was one more music-playing device in the house at that time, and it played very different music from Kenny Rogers, Zvonko Bogdan, or patriotic songs: the record-player, or as we called it, the gramophone. It was a simple, small affair, which someone (probably our parents) got for my brother and me, and it had its permanent place in the room we shared at the back of the apartment. We never used it much, and had only a handful of records, almost exclusively children’s music (I remember at least one Dragan Laković album). But our miniature collection had one definite oddity, which didn’t belong there: an album by Kiss. The story behind it goes back to one of my birthdays – perhaps my 12^th or 13^th – and a small party where only my parents’ closest friends and their kids were invited. Bane was the elder son of my parents’ closest family friends, a couple of years older than me. If his father hadn’t been given a bigger apartment (back in those days when one’s workplace was securing apartments for the employees) at the other end of town where they moved while we were still in elementary school, we probably would have had a teenage romance at some point. We were complete opposites (me, an obedient A-grader, and he a mischievous rebel: the stuff movies are made of!). After they moved, instead of seeing each other every week, we saw each other every few months, and got estranged and a little weird. I don’t remember much of that birthday party, but I do remember the moment when I opened Bane’s gift, which was unmistakably an LP, and found myself bewildered and at a loss to see an album by a rock band I barely knew. And what I remember even better is Bane turning to another kid and saying he got me that LP just so he could listen to it before deciding to buy it for himself. Did we listen to it that night? I don’t know. But I’m sure I never listened to it afterwards, not because I was terribly hurt (I wasn’t) but because I really didn’t care about Kiss, so it became just one more of those things that trail around, unused, collecting dust, and ending up who knows where and how.

What I do remember quite well from the Kenny Rogers times of my childhood – in a way that doesn’t feel like remembering but more like moving weightlessly in the elements of my life – is my mother.  My mother with her hair short at the time, my mother in her in-house work-dresses, my mother bringing us warm milk (sometimes laced with coffee) to our bedroom in the morning, my mother pegging the clothes out to dry on the balcony… All the dresses had a similar cut: they had buttons in the front, two big pockets on each side, and angular collars; some had a belt made of the same fabric, inserted through the loops on each side of the waist. There were a couple of light-fabric summer blue or floral dresses which seemed so comfortable that, later, I took one for myself. But my favourite one was made of some terry material with a joyous multicolored pattern of long lines which always made me think of Brazil. That dress meant summer, and sun, and hot days in the apartment (but we could always cool it down easily with a good draft between the front and the back); it meant light-heartedness, and music, and pulled green shades in the rooms facing west; it meant sweet daydreaming about the summer that always felt interminable even when you knew if wasn’t; it meant perfect order in the face of everything, maintained by the very colours of the terry dress. By my mother, and father, about the age then that I am now, and by their presence, and struggles, and guidance, and music. By Kenny Rogers himself.

I don’t know what happened to the terry dress afterwards, but its matching belt was used for years to tighten and keep in place the ironing board when folded, or else the board would splay open at the most unexpected moment. It was still performing this function in my father’s new, smaller apartment as recently as a couple of years ago, even after so much had changed since the terry dress days. But I realized I hadn’t seen it during the last few visits, so the other day I asked my father if he still had it. He remembered it, and my mother’s terry dress, right away, but said he lost trace of the belt; couldn’t remember what happened to it or when it disappeared. We both paused a little, pondering over this; it was as if we were thinking back to all those years held together by such trivial things, and acknowledging a certain end. It was as if an umbilical cord had been unobtrusively cut, and we had all started drifting, without yet being fully aware of it, away and towards some bottomless void where eventually all manner of things go. Like islands in the stream, perhaps.