Affairs of the heart and other places

Amber Lynn Rosario Mendiola was born with a congenital heart defect. She has had heart surgeries since birth until last summer. A freshman high school student at MHS, Amber is a teenager who lives daily at the edge of her finitude. But her heart vibrates valentine vocals this season.

Getting airtime from two local radio stations, on the hour every hour last week, Amber is singing her heart out with sentiments that range from the pain of friendships falling apart to the peppy heartbeat of teenage love and youthful exuberance.

Amber applied and was granted by the Guam-based Make a Wish Foundation the chance to record her songs. A studio-recorded, commercially cut CD hopes to hit the stands this year’s “I-Heart-you-Day” celebration.

Bookends to the demo-CD I had the opportunity to listen to are two off-island tunes. “Issa Lei” is a traditional Fijian wedding chant that has been married to the popular ballad of the “Yellow Bird.” Rhythms of ocean waves and the wind-swaying undulation of banana groves hosting canaries, with faint echoes of West African drums syncopated to a Latin beat, lends richness and texture to this melodious offering. Amber extends her heart out in this tune to the memory of her great grandfather, and in honor of her grandfather.

Equally moving is the Pohnopeian “I Ouramanda Pwohng,” originally written in memory of a fallen island son/soldier in Vietnam, which Amber appropriated.

She sings it in memory of her great grandmother who died of breast cancer.

Remarkable about both Fijian and Pohnopeian pieces is the fact that Amber speaks neither of the songs’ languages yet has enough of a good ear to utter the words like a native speaker.

The rest of the music and lyrics in between the bookends are all Amber originals. A boy-girl duet with Guam’s Vince Peredo celebrates the innocence of young love. A vow of undying bliss reflects the youthful experience of an all-encompassing feeling of affection. There is the effect of friendships falling on the wayside, leaving indelible memories and not a few regrets behind.

Swinging high and swinging low with one’s island baby is dedicated to lovers everywhere. A poignant search for one’s Soulmate, a universal preoccupation of every age in every clime at all times, finds affirmation in just the common incidence of holding hands and walking side-by-side, the choice to unite. Such occurrence, Amber amplifies, is a story that is meant to be told. An R & B ditty declaring a girl’s response to a young man’s confident and inviting stares with “No! No! No!” would warm the cockles of Auntie Chalang Atcha Baby’s heart at Public Health, our island’s No. 1 advocate for responsible sexual behavior particularly among the young at heart.

Very telling of this young woman’s heart is a basic affirmation of life’s sufficiency and the choice of living life by counting one’s blessings. Couched in the language of Christian piety, “Thank you, God” speaks of divine forgiveness and unconditional acceptance, love’s saving grace from loneliness and faith’s grants of happiness, family and friends. For such, one’s rejoinder cannot be anything but gratitude.

In what might very well turn out to be signature cut in this CD-renditions, celebrating the limits and possibilities of the body, “Set me free” yearns for wings that can fly, a heart that will soar, and freedom beyond the limits of the flesh.

It is not so much that Amber crooned her heart out that we tell this story. Nor do we think that Amber is auditioning for the Julliard School of Music, though a good showing of her CD in the local market would not displease us. The point is, Amber is showing the rest of us, young and old, what we can do with our given situation. It is as if she is singing that our external situation is never our contradiction. It is our refusal to live to the hilt the givenness of our situation that cripples the body, shrivels the heart, and stifles the spirit. Hers might be a physically weak one, but Amber’s heart has proven to be stout in every other respect.

I am reminded of Julia Robert’s character Shelby in the movie, Steel Magnolia. Confronted with the choice of having a baby with her husband at the risk of endangering her own health, she declared: “”I would rather have three minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special. Amber’s CD is definitely something special!

This past week in Christendom, Ash Wednesday ushered the Lenten season. The religious mantra is the Jewish blessing in the familiar King James’ English: The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Street level translation: Life is given; life is taken away. Be happy with the gift of life.

Ours is a faith that when confronted with the termination of our finitude, one can truly express the sentiment of that oft-quoted poster/bumper sticker quote: Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.

Ours is not a time that encourages wearing our hearts up our sleeves. Amber wears her’s with a verve, and the Make-a-Wish-Foundation is to be commended for fulfilling the Proverbs’ wisdom: “Desire realized is a sweetness to the soul.”

For cutting the album, we ask Amber to put this drawing on her wall: We heart you. We encourage Amber, who is fully supported by her vocalist Mama Erlin Rosario Romolor, and advised by Micronesian Legal Counsel Jane Mack, not to wait too long for a second album. As would be hollered in the hallways of MHS, “Go, Girl!”

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.