I have always been a sucker for “Guess what?”. The first time I remember hearing it was in second grade when my teacher began the day by exclaiming “Guess what, class!” My hand shot up. Miss Consodine pointed at me and said “What is it, Elliot?” The rest of the class looked at me curiously.
“We’re going to be quizzed on telling time?” I guessed. We’d been told weeks ago that we needed to learn to accurately read a clock. I’d driven my family crazy by glancing at a clock at least hourly and yelling “It’s five of three!” or “It’s six thirty!” until I was sent to my room and told to stay there until the big hand was on the twelve and the little one on the seven.
“What do you mean, Elliot?” Miss C. asked, confused but ever so patient.
“That’s my guess!” The room went silent. How come my teacher asked us to “guess what” if she didn’t mean it? Worse, how come my twenty-five classmates all knew not to guess? Why did everybody else intuit what a rhetorical question was except Over-Eager Me?
In any case, I fell in love with guessing early on, and so riddles were my absolute favorite game. I bet I was the only kid reading Batman Comics who rooted for Riddler, the criminal mastermind, over the dull, bad-guesser Batman. I soon got bored with simple riddles like “What has many keys but can’t open a lock” (a piano) so I rejoiced when I finally solved a great rhyming one like “What always runs but never walks/ Always murmurs, never talks/ Has a bed but never sleeps/ Has a mouth but never eats” — a river!
With such a background, was I ever primed when in ninth-grade English class we had a unit on traditional folk songs and studied a very famous old ballad called The Riddle Song. In the first stanza, the singer has been given four impossible requests by his lover, but he succeeds in achieving them.
I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone.
I gave my love a baby with no cryin’,
I told my love a story that had no end.
The singer explains in the next stanza that he gave her a cherry blossom, since it had no stone; he gave her an egg with a chick within that had no bones; he gave her a sleeping baby that wasn’t crying; and he told her “I love you, and my love will never end.”
The reason I remember this particular lesson sixty-three years later is that our young teacher, Mr. Weeks, then told us that we all already knew the haunting tune of this 200- year- old ballad because it became the tune of a recent hit song that was playing all the time on our transistor radios.
We then noticed the record player he had brought to class. As he was about to put the needle down on the Top Ten hit song, he read The Riddle Song’s first stanza aloud to us so we could hear the rhythm and compare it to the famous song he was about to play for us.
I ask you, Reader, to now read that stanza aloud for the rhythm of it and then click below. I am betting you have not forgotten this once ancient tune, transformed into a late 1950s ballad, in which a famous American pop singer croons that his love has no end:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feTbWrnETP0
Mr. Weeks also used the opportunity to teach us how the two similes in the song — “I need you, oh, my Darling, like roses need rain” and “melt my heart like April snow” — demonstrate that true love can only be accurately described in the most emotionally excessive terms, as in loving someone until the Twelfth of Never. It was on this day that I became a romantic, and will be one for the rest of my life.
If you think this essay is mainly about riddles, you are wrong. It’s about the power of music. A few months ago I saw that Johnny Mathis had turned 90, which made me think of one of my favorite pop songs of all time, which made me think that I wanted you to start off this week feeling as smitten and love-struck as I do every time I hear this gorgeous love ballad.
And guess what? I’d love for you to let me know if you did.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here