Pryor - Look at You Now

M y mom hadnt uttered a single word in the two hours wed been driving. Clearly, nothing in the world feels as quiet as the silence of a mother. There were no other cars on the Indiana interstate that day. Snow was pouring out of the sky and the road was slick. I thought about offering to drive but when I looked over, I dared not speak.

It was early January 1979. Baby, I Love Your Way was playing on the car radio. I had just turned seventeen and was a very young senior in high school. Young, not because I was smart and skipped a grade, but probably because my parents wanted to get me off to kindergarten as soon as possible. There were a lot of kids in our house: I was born number five out of seven children in nine years. My brothers were the oldest and then came the five girls. Our mom called us her army and sometimes her crowd, and maybe most fitting, her herd. Being a part of an army, crowd, herd, had great value as a little kid. Theres a sort of mob identity thing that goes on in big families, a free pass that you can take advantage of. Other parents, older siblings, neighbors, teachers, coaches, people, give a nod when youre one of so many. A nod that says, Oh yeah, youre okay, youre one of them. Its like having a little something extra inside that reminds you you belong somewhere in the world, and it never goes away. Id grown up my whole life knowing I was loved. Knowing I would always have a place I belonged.

I didnt think much about the way we grew up; it was just my life, and up to that point almost all of it had been spent in our hometown of Winnetka, Illinois, a small community thirty minutes north of Chicago, perched like a Norman Rockwell painting on the edge of Lake Michigan. We lived in a gigantic house with three stories, eleven bedrooms, four fireplaces, and a killer basement. In the winters we made snow forts in our backyard, and our tree-lined driveway covered with snow looked like a fairy-tale wonderland. But the best thing about that great house was how perfectly it fit our army of family: seven kids and two parents.

My dad grew up the son of a naval captain and went to boarding school in Connecticut before heading off to college. He worked for IBM after graduation, and then came the Pryor Corporation, a business he started on his own in our garage before I was born. Our mom, well, she was the president of us. She did everything that had anything to do with the seven of us and our home. She drove, fed, nursed, looked after, scolded, praised, and kept the ship running, every day. Our mom spent her entire life within the protected walls of the North Shore. Her parents still lived just a mile or two away from us. After Catholic high school, she went down the street to college at Northwestern University, where she majored in theater and starred in most of their musical theater productions. She met and fell in love with my dad at Northwestern and married him soon after graduation. They settled in the area, and quickly we kids arrived, one after another.

Northwestern University was a beautiful sight. Every time we drove past the ivy-covered brick buildings, set back on the edge of Lake Michigan, our mom pointed out the sorority where shed lived and the fraternity where my dad had lived. Id watch the college kids walking with their backpacks, holding hands and being young, and found it near impossible to imagine that could ever have been our mom and dadthat they could have ever been young, ever been anything other than our parents.

We finally pulled off the interstate to get gas. It was late morning, the sky was dark, and the snow still hadnt let up. My mom uttered her first words in hours.

Are you hungry?

No, thank you, Mom.

She stepped out of the car and closed the door hard. I leaned over to change the radio station. Frank Sinatra came on singing, Ive got a crush on you. This was the music my mom loved and had been singing my whole life. My grandfather, her dad, was our mothers most cherished confidant. We called him Papa and he was the quietest, kindest man Id ever know. He and my aunt and my mom sang and played music in our living room after family dinners sometimes. Id hide behind the drapes, when we were all supposed to be sleeping, and watch my grandfather play the tiple; it sang straight through my heart the first time I heard it. It had ten strings and looked like a baby guitar. As Papa played, my mother would sit on the couch, her big brown eyes wide and alive. Shed tap her high heel on the living room carpet, stand up, arms stretched in the air like she was talking to God, and belt with a voice that thundered through the house. Her beautiful face lit up the room, but it was her verve that was so impossible to ignore.

On one of those nights when I was about six years old, I found the courage to come out of the drapes and ask my grandfather if he would teach me to play that tiple. He answered with a bent little smile, No, this is a useless instrument. It wont exist by the time you grow up. You need to learn to play the guitar.

Okay, wheres a guitar?

We dont have one, and youre too young, Liz. Ill teach you when youre eight or nine.

What? That was a hundred years away. I committed the rest of that year to campaigning for a guitar, declaring on a daily basis that I could not live without it. I put notes all over the house; in drawers, in the fridge, in the bathrooms, in their cars. All of them read, Please, please, please get Liz a guitar, any guitar will do! And then the following Christmas, under the tree, like magic, there sat a guitar bigger than me with a note that read, Here you go, Love, Papa.

The guitar became like an appendage. It gave me the greatest access to myself I would ever discover. It was like finding a key to the place inside that could help me understand what mattered most in life. The music helped me through and around the things that lived inside me. Once I began, I didnt stop. I wrote, played, and sang for everyone and anyone who would listen. And ultimately, I got a seat with the grown-ups in our living room. Singing along just like my mom did.