WE WALK UP THE DUSTY WOODEN STAIRS to Tom’s study. On the walls are Tom’s college diploma, a West Virginia University tapestry and a drawing of a plane given to Sheila from her father, who worked in the headquarters of NASA. The room is small and contains two bookshelves full of books on cooking, losing weight, finding happiness, mathematics, computers for dummies, and the folk song books by Tom’s father. Tom shows me the old faded records and he pauses on the one with his father’s picture.

 

 Tom sits at his white Mac and clicks on different icons until he finds the YouTube video of his father singing an old Irish folk song. A screen with text appears and his father’s voice crackles out of the computer speakers introducing a song. Then he begins to sing, “A few more months…a few more years…”

 

 The room is silent except for the jangling of the collar on Sheila’s dog. I watch and listen, feeling uneasy, as if intruding on something private. The air in the room feels thick and heavy as the strong tenor voice belts out through the small speakers, memorizing all three of us, maybe even the little dog staring at the computer screen intently.

 

 As the song comes to an end, Tom stalls a moment then turns his chair towards me. His pupils are so large they seem to fill his entire eyes, making them appear shiny and black behind his glasses. “Those are the real folk songs,” he says. “You can’t re-write folk songs much like you can’t re-make an antique.”