Unanswered

It's exactly six months since I last had a conversation with Alex. We talked music (To Build a Home), chatted as we walked out to his car and both said, "I love you." He didn't come home.

I've been writing about lost sounds this week, listening to some firsts and lasts. I've heard the only voice we can hear that was born in the 18th century (Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, chief of staff of the Prussian army for 30 years), the first voice anyone deliberately recorded (in Paris in the 1850s) and the first voice to come back to life (Thomas Edison's, reciting 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' in 1877).

I've heard the last speaker of Tasmanian, Fanny Cochrane Smith, sounding foggy on a wax cylinder that wasn't up to the job of keeping her language going. The last of London's street lavender sellers, whose way with a rhyme falls away towards the end: “Buy it once, you’ll buy it twice/It makes your clothes smell sweet and nice/It will scent your pocket handkerchiefs/Sixteen branches for one penny”. The last castrato and last veterans and lost birds.

Today a friend sent a song called Kauaʻi ʻōʻō that I hadn't heard before, although I have heard the song of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, a native of the Hawaiian Islands, which likely went extinct in 1987. The ornithologist Jim Jacobi recorded the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a male, singing his half of a duet. The duet went unanswered.

I love listening to recordings of Alex's voice, although I wish we had more. Please record your loved ones more. Harvest voice memos and voicemails and videos. But know it's no substitute for having a conversation. Calling them up. Dueting.

We're lucky Alex still echoes, but recordings don't respond. The duet goes unanswered.

Kauaʻi ʻōʻō by Blanco White