It was an evening trip to the grocery store. The crowd had thinned. As I neared the deli and bakery area I heard singing. Vocalizing. Not a tune or words I recognized, but clearly with secure vocal quality and pitch. I rounded the end cap, negotiated another aisle and then, my curiosity got the better of me. I felt I had stepped onto the movie set where the Greatest Showman follows the voice into the laundry and discovers Keala Settle. I positioned myself to peer back into the bakery area from whence emanated much clanging and sounds of cleaning and reorganizing of pans – accompanied by singing. Solid. Secure. Unself-conscious. An average, ordinary middle-aged woman, dressed in traditional bakery white, hair confined to a hairnet – and she was singing.
My usual habit is to walk to the supermarket when I run out of something – or maybe a day or two after. Instead, we made this grocery run in my roommate’s truck in order to stock up on flour for the pizza crust and sourdough, tomato sauce and other canned goods, and heavy items. On the way home I commented, “Did you hear the woman vocalizing in the bakery?”
“Yes!” exclaimed my anthropologist roommate, “wasn’t it a delightful throwback to when women sang about their work?”
When women sang about their work! When did we lose that? Fortunately for our soul-health, we retain a good deal of musical ambience in this music town!