Somebody and Nobody

For the last few years I’ve been trying to figure out this song. It’s from my childhood. I think I heard it either at a skating rink or from my sister’s radio by the pool, but I’ve only ever recalled a word and part of the chorus, which involves a particular little shift to a minor key¹ . It’s been a go-to hum that my subconscious pulls out of a mental stack of records and puts on the turntable at random times. I recalled that it had an indefinite pronoun, either“somebody” or “nobody,” and Shazam was no help because it only accepts actual music and not my own uncultivated voice. I once sang the song to my DnD group. Elbow deep in pizza and dice and game tokens, I said, “Guys, does anyone know this song? ‘Somebody hmm hmmmmm.”

Weirdly enough, no one had a clue.

“That has to have been a popular song,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I heard it at the skating rink.” A friend next to me scoffed. “Yeah, well not everyone at this table was homeschooled and spent wiiiiild nights at the skating rink. Haha. What a loser. Is it my half-orc, Antwermian Lazertears’, turn?”

I carried around the snippet of the song for years, figuring I’d hear it some day, until there came the inevitable technology. There’s now an app that can translate your humming (if you’re not too tone deaf.) And so crouching in a dark corner, lest anyone should see me using AI, I sang into my phone: “Summmmbody…hmm hmm…Nooooobody…hmm hmm.”

A little whirly thing commenced to whirl. It whirled for quite a bit, perhaps recovering from the noise I had just made at it. And then confetti. 

“Unconditional Love” by Debby Boone.

Debby Boone, along with the likes of Sandi Patti, Amy Grant, and Twila Paris, were of that particular 80s-era Christian music movement. Also Carman. Maranatha Singers. Don Moen. I don’t think my sister ever played them by the pool, though. Maybe at the skating rink? At the local rink’s weekly “Christian Night”? That was an actual thing.

I played the song and found that distinct tune. The little minor key step down at the third line of the chorus. And there were the lyrics. 

Somebody cares

Somebody hears you

Somebody knows your naaaaaaaaame

That was indeed a song from my childhood. But the old love wasn’t rekindled. I thought the song had more…punch to it. I wasn’t transported back to the neon lights of a roller rink or the crystalline pool. Such is life, I suppose. Things romanticized in childhood don’t always end up being as magical in adulthood.

One day recently I was feeling a little crummy. No particular reason except I had been listening to too many podcasts, too many opinions about how the world would end. I left my phone behind and went on a walk. The city of Jackson recently paved over some abandoned train tracks in my neighborhood, and now you can walk them all the way to the farmer’s market downtown. In college, when many young people think they can’t die, my friends and I used to walk the original tracks and recklessly climb the old trestle bridge and one time nearly got ourselves kidnapped, so I found this area to be nostalgic. A little beaten path veered off the paved trail and into the woods, and I followed it. Those were the woods where my friends and I had a hobbit picnic. Also where we found the hobo camp with the empty tuna cans and old clothes stuffed in a log.

Emerging into the open field of the local park, I found that I had intruded on a Modern Dance 101 class. A young woman clapped to keep time as immortal college students dressed in black huddled together, slowly reaching to the sun and probably looking defiantly right into its white-hot heat. Nearby children were digging in a sand box. A dog walker was slowly, patiently accompanying an ancient Vizsla. Also there was a man with a bicycle. 

According to his plates, he was from a nearby city that has plenty of great bike trails, but I guess he was feeling brave and decided to bike Jackson’s obstacle course made up of potholes and sinkholes and the spontaneous geysers of broken water lines. He had the hatchback open to load his bike, and as I passed he bid me a chipper hello. Music was playing on his stereo.

I wasn't looking

But somehow you found me

I tried to hide from your loooooooove liiiiiiiiiiight

I was trying to cross to the other side of the road when the song caught my ear and suddenly I was like a squirrel when it changes its mind and doubles back across the road (squirrels also have a remarkable capacity for thinking themselves un-killable. Yet another similarity they share with college students.² )

It was the song. The actual song. But I didn’t have my phone, and so I couldn’t run up to the man’s car and Shazam it. It seemed as if I would have to talk with my mouth to a person with ears. 

I ended up doing a weird figure eight across the road, briefly tangling up with the dog walker and the very old Vizsla, and then ambling back around to the man as he was unfastening his helmet.

“Excuse me, this is random,” I said. He turned around and flashed a pleasant smile of brilliant white teeth against his dark skin and dark sunglasses. Wow, the charisma of this guy. Running for president, it seems.

“What’s that song? And who’s the artist?”

He walked closer and turned his ear towards the music. And smiled again.

“That’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’ by Carly Simon.”

“Ah!” I said as I knocked my hand against my forehead. “Of course!” As if I had known all along and it just slipped my mind.

He seemed glad that someone else heard and appreciated his music taste. He shot a single finger gun at me—one kachow— and in my heart, there and then, I voted for him.

What a blessing it is to go on walks. To talk to strangers. To do modern dance in a field. To not be kidnapped. To play music in the car, music that is just loud enough that nearby people can hear it and solve a long mystery. We’re all in our little pleasure boats that now and then bump into each other. We wave from our decks and say, “Hey!” [or “Ahoy there!] You’re listening to something you like! I also happen to like that something. Isn’t that great?”

The song is in my “play it till I hate it” playlist, which means I’ll be sick of it any day now. I’m still not sure if I heard the song on my sister’s radio by the pool or at the skating rink on “Secular Night.”

1. I just used the only technical music term in my repertoire. I hope you liked it.

2. The love of modern dance being the other.