Here Comes the Sun

We are a family that sings.

It has always been this way. When we first started dating, your mother and I would sing along to the radio when on car rides. And both of us grew up in households radiating with music, because your grandparents love music.

Even the city where we live, Detroit, has a musical history. Motown Music - which your mother and I adore - was one of the most beloved sub-genres of music in the 20th century, and originated just a few miles from our house.

Your older brother sings to you when you are crying, already, just like your mother and I do.

I love to sing to you. And as it happens, you and your brother love the Beatles. Each of you, from the time you were both a few weeks old, took a liking to a specific Beatles song. In those early newborn days, I would try singing anything to rock you both to sleep and the Beatles are what you both responded to.

The Beatles song that comforts you, Here Comes the Sun, is a lovely tune. And it suits you.

One of the best ways to describe your emerging personality is that it is sunny. Your mother would often say, even at a month or two old, that "Myles is just happy to be here." Your smile and disposition, my son, is warm and calming.

By many accounts, your birth came at a dark time in contemporary human history. Just a few weeks after you were born, the novel coronavirus began spreading rapidly across the world, causing the worst pandemic any living person has ever seen.

The economic fallout of worldwide quarantine was also the most significant economic disruption any living person has probably ever lived through. And just a few weeks ago, the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked global protests of police violence and racism, which again, are unprecedented.

You arrived in our arms just in time for a truly exceptional time in history.

On the surface, then, the song that soothes you seems ironically timed. The coming of the springtime sun seems out of tune with the arrival of a global pandemic, depression, and episode of civil unrest. Indeed, when I first realized that Here Comes the Sun helped settle you for sleep, when I sang it to you I thought of it as a prayer. I wanted the long, cold, lonely winter to subside. I hoped for the sun to come, and soon.

But recently I've wondered if the timing of Here Comes the Sun rising to prominence in our lives was not a prayer, but rather a sign that a prayer was being answered.

You're too young to realize this, and I'm only starting to see this too. But there has been something interesting happening during this pandemic. In communities all across the world, including our own, I am seeing courage, compassion, leadership, and kindness to a degree I've never seen it before. People of all ages are making sacrifices. People in my age group, who are sarcastically characterized as being self-absorbed and indulgent, are leading with integrity and making sacrifices, too.

Through all the darkness and malaise of this pandemic I see rays of light. I see the beginnings of a change in mindset. What I pray for and hope for is that this pandemic shines a light on our culture and reminds us that we are capable of making sacrifices to solve difficult, existential problems. That we are capable of rising above adversity and petty differences.

And most of all, I see hope that in the next decades my contemporaries and I will choose to meet difficult, global challenges with courage and confidence instead of running from them.

For us, Myles, you were a prayer answered. And amidst all this struggle, your arrival here reminds me that the sun is, and always was, coming.