THE STORY OF AUTUMN LEAVES

By Rita Grimaldi

    

I am sitting at our October storytelling gathering in the library auditorium. Angie is playing Autumn Leaves on her harp. All of a sudden I remember that this song was one of my mother’s favorite songs. Now I listen to it differently. I listen to it remembering my mother. Now Angie is singing the words - first in English and then in French.

This morning I think of the song again. In my mind, I’m hearing Angie’s voice singing. I remember being eleven years old and it being spring. I am taking the Bathurst bus up and down the hills to St. Clair Avenue. I am going to the record store on St. Clair to buy my mother a birthday present. A recording of the song Autumn Leaves sung in French by Maurice Chevalier.

It is a long way to go on my own. I get off the bus and walk to the record store.

Inside there are rows and rows of record display counters. The LPs are in cardboard covers and the singles are in brown paper sleeves. There are small booths on the right hand wall with turntables in them so that people can listen to the records before buying them. One day I played a record in one of these booths but I don’t remember if it was that day.

I buy a single of Autumn Leaves. I take it home and give it to my mother on her birthday. It is the month of May. She accepts it in her self-contained way. She always had the feeling of not asking for anything - of just accepting what was given and looking after herself. Always giving out but not expecting anything in return.

As I listen to Angie play the harp and sing the words, I remember that it was October when my mother died. The autumn leaves were falling.

I wonder to myself if, somewhere in her heart, my mother knew that she would die in the autumn only a few years later. 

And I wonder if, when she sang the song in her mind and came to the words ‘I’ll miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall’, she was able to see forward past her death and know that even then she would miss my father and his love for her. When the autumn leaves began to fall.