High Hopes Earned And Realized

I was still the Miami Herald’s pop music critic when Frank Sinatra made one of his last South Florida concert stops in March 1992. It was not a great show.

Oh, there were glimpses of brilliance, yes. But overall, Sinatra seemed doddering and confused, the great Voice but a reedy shadow of itself. It seemed painfully apparent that age and infirmity had caught up - and passed him.

Which left me this dilemma: How do you slam Frank Sinatra? How do you knock an icon?

There followed perhaps the most diplomatic review I ever wrote: one that dutifully enumerated the concert’s glaring faults but also took pains to pay homage to Sinatra’s overall greatness. Not that his fans were fooled or pleased; they met the review with howls of predictable outrage.

Then, weeks later, there came a handwritten note from Sinatra. He thanked me for the review.

At first, I figured he didn’t get it, didn’t realize that he’d been slammed. Nicely slammed, but slammed just the same. Later, I came to believe he’d understood exactly what I had said. And why. Which lent an unbearable poignancy to his letter of gratitude. Here was the old lion, well past his powers and conceding it. The proud old lion, thankful for a small consideration.

Sinatra left the stage for good only a few years after. Late Thursday night, of course, he died.

Some day soon, all the old lions will be gone. They’re already leaving us, you know. A heart attack here, a cancer there, and they slip into the light.

They were the generation that saw the end of the known world and lived to joke about it. The one that weathered a Depression and fought a world war, that kept itself anchored to the ground when everything was up in the air and no one could say for sure how any of it would come out. The one that swaggered out of the inferno with a glint in its eye and a self-assurance in its grin. They smoked too much and drank too much, and they moved through the world with an easy confidence that said they knew their place in the scheme of things and that place was right on top.

Sinatra serenaded that generation for 60 years, shepherded it from bobby sox to support hose, first car to wheelchair, black hair to gray. What they felt, he ennobled. What they valued, he defended. And what they dreamt, he plucked from the ether and distilled for them in the hard clarity and sublime yearning of his matchless voice.

Now it ends. For him. For them.

The old lions take their leave. And wouldn’t you know, it seems as if it’s just now that we begin to understand who they were and what they were all about. A friend and I were talking the other day about the credit we never gave our elders. They were smarter than we could concede. Tougher than we ever had to be. Confident in ways we can only dream about.

Better parents than we ever admitted.

Did we ever thank them for what they did? Did we?

Have to make it quick now, if we do it at all, because they’re almost gone. One day soon all we’ll have left is books and movies, snapshots in which nobody knows who all the people are and old stories worn smooth in the retelling. All we’ll have is songs about one more for the road and strangers in the night, songs they sang that we’ve only just learned how to hear.

You can’t go back, nor would you really want to. You can’t change yesterday.

But just the same, yesterday matters.

We owe debts we can never pay to those who lived those years, owe them for the way they went through hell and came out the other side. They made mistakes, sure, but on balance, we didn’t turn out so bad. Not so bad at all.

So we ought to acknowledge that what we are is because of what they were, in the days when Francis Albert sang songs that gave weight to dreams. And lions still were young.