Ode to MJ

Picture it…1972, the Jackson 5 come to Jamaica and my sister, their greatest fan, goes to their concert. I am too young to go but I ride in the backseat of my father’s Ford Cortina to the national stadium to drop her off and witness the euphoria in the parking lot for my four year old self. My big sister, my idol, brings home a signed poster of the Jackson five that adorns the wall of our shared room until she leaves for college in the United States and I, thinking I’m big, take down the poster to make the room mine, after years of waiting. The poster is lost but my journey with Michael begins.

Summer of 1983, I’m not sure whose party on Norbrook Drive in Kingston, Jamaica. I don’t remember whether I was invited or if I was along with an invited friend who carried me in but all my gate crasher friends were there. I can still remember the electric blue halter top dress I was wearing and the smell in the air of chicken being barbequed wafting up into the sky in blue plumes that clear, beautiful, summer night.

We were all dancing en group when a change in the pace of the music had signaled that single folks like me needed to depart the dance floor, while those with boyfriends snuggled in close. So I sat on the driveway of some person’s yard trying to save my hair from being too much of a sweaty frizz, when the DJ put on “Human Nature” and the boy I had a crush on asked me to dance. I still remember being led by the hand through the crowd to the dance floor and my heart beating so loud it almost drowned out Michael’s singing while my sistrens gave me the thumbs up signal as we moved closer. That was teenage bliss.

Fast forward a couple of years; my sister, her baby and I are leaving the hospital after a long sad visit with a loved one. The drive home was draining and sad, no one is speaking, our hearts were grey and the flow of our tears had just stemmed, momentarily. Michael Jackson’s “Leave Me Alone” comes on the radio and out of nowhere this little one year old in her car seat starts to sing “Neave me ano ow ow ow; Neave me ano ow ow ow; Just stop dogging me around.” We burst into laughter as our adult eyes made four in the front seat, amazed. She could not even talk that well, much less to remember the chorus of a song plus, when did she learn to sing? Just like that the mirth was back in our lives. Good memories from my twenties.

Next, that baby turns nineteen and suddenly, excruciatingly, her spirit is called home. Her funeral is being planned and I am to eulogize her. One my sistrens calls me from yard and says ‘what can I do?’ I say send Chissy to sing “Gone Too Soon,” she says “done.” Her daughter comes to Florida with a professional arrangement of “Gone Too Soon” on CD, belts out an unforgettable rendition of that Michael Jackson classic, stuns the gathering at the emotion and beauty in the voice of a then thirteen year old. We send that singing baby home in fine style. I say goodbye to my thirties.

Then Michael Jackson dies on my sister's birthday, she is the one who calls me to let me know.

So, today during MJ’s memorial I insist my girls watch, telling them that this is history in the making. They are not impressed! But then Brooke Shields comes on and wait a minute, that’s Hannah Montana’s Mom! They are enthralled and somehow a five year old and an eight year can relate, his multi-generational appeal has touched the youngest amongst us. Remarkable!

Goodbye MJ, I did not realize I was such a forty-one year old fan until you were gone. But as I am now just beginning to comprehend, your songs were there at every metamorphic interval in my life. I heard on TV that your career spanned thirty eight years, I know, I was there. God Speed. Selah.