Sally Huggins Toner

If I begin by telling you that this year’s song for the New Year is “Three Little Birds,” and that earworm, “Every little thing’s…gonna be alright” immediately pops into your head, you might say,

Take your Pollyanna ass self and get the f#$k away from me…and we’ll no longer be friends. 

Totally valid. Yes, I have been paying attention. The world is literally on fire. I’m getting a graduate degree in journalism, and, most mornings, I can’t bear to turn on the news. Misery abounds, and here I sit in my comfortable study in my comfortable townhouse, rested, well-fed. How dare I say not to worry? But, if you’ve read this far, I’m asking you to hear me out. 

Hear me out–the introduction to a line of reasoning. I’ve been focusing on that this year, helping my students to walk their audience through an argument to support a logical claim. For the 30+ years I’ve been teaching writing, I’ve always struggled with this lesson, and, the older I get and the less anything seems to make any sense in the world around me, it hasn’t gotten any easier. Still, I’ll try to walk you through  my choice of songs and earn that, as they say in AP speak, sophistication point.

What draws me to “Three Little Birds” this year is not necessarily “my message to you…” as Marley sings. It’s the title. Different stories exist about how he came up with it, but I’ll choose the literal meaning. I’ll Imagine the singing bits of nature on my doorstep. And I’ll make them cardinals.

Cardinals are the state bird of Virginia. They abound in Reston and on our deck and right outside of our kitchen window, thanks to my husband’s attention to our feeders. They are my mother’s favorite bird, maybe her favorite animal altogether. So I grew up with them represented in art, knick knacks, crocheted on pillows, throws, all over our house.

In my adult life, I learned that they also symbolize communication from the departed–messages from our ancestors. So I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years looking for them on my morning walks, summoning various people I’ve lost, looking for answers to questions I wish I’d asked while I could. We rarely ask the right ones when we have the chance, do we? I’ve been thinking a great deal this holiday season about my mother’s parents. Anyone who knows me won’t find that surprising. The end of the year, Christmas, then New Year’s Eve–these were the times growing up I always spent with them, even after they moved four states away when I was seven.

Before then, it was every weekend. A friend posted on Facebook the other day a reel where a young dad talks about grandparents getting, “soft,” because they watch the latest toddler shows on Disney+ instead of making their grandkids sit through the marathons of Matlock they’d be watching anyway. I put this memory in a comment:

My lineup—The Carol Burnett Show, All in the Family, The Jeffersons all on my Popa’s lap eating Kraft Singles and drinking Coca Cola. I can still hear his giggle. (Aimee has his giggle) Then the opening to The Rockford Files (answering machine I think) when I snuck into his and Meemaw’s bed later in the night. Unlike my parents, they’d let me stay. Safest place I’ve ever been.

I’ve been considering that ever since–the safety I felt, the safety I know we all want to feel. That memory holds other things–my grandmother’s silk pillows, her arms wrapped around me, Popa’s snore–how I’d find the cigarette hole in their sheet. I didn’t understand then that it came from another time they’d been super dangerous and smoked in bed. I’d stick my finger in it, wind the cloth around my hand. Listen to the sound of James Garner’s voice as we three drifted off. Today, looking out of my window on this gray January afternoon, I can’t have any of those things in real time anymore.

But I can seek out the cardinals. 

When I’m anxious, when I’m sad, I can remember I’m loved greatly, capable of great love for others, thanks to my grandparents and so many others. My mom says, whenever I talk about how safe Meemaw and Popa made me feel, it guts her, since she knows Meemaw rarely felt safe herself growing up. Still, there must have been someone who did for her what she did for me. Close as I can tell from family lore, probably her mother. My great grandmother’s name was Sara, something I didn’t know until Mark and I had chosen a name we’d never considered for our second child for reasons we couldn’t explain.

Three little birds?

I wish you all peace in the New Year. Knowledge that you are loved greatly and capable of great love for others. I wish for you conversations with your younger selves in those moments when you feel anxious and sad. I wish for your ancestors to wrap their arms around you, which might not give the answers you need, but you’ll be able to drift off, warm, feeling clearer in the morning.

And finally, I’ll leave you with a picture of my friend Grinch rehydrating. He had a night last night and just told me to take my Pollyanna ass self and f#$k off.