Asking that I not identify her too sharply, a close, younger relative of mine, whom I'll call Philandra, reminisced about the days when she regularly went skating with Aretha and her younger sister Carolyn. The Arcadia Roller Rink on Woodward Avenue, not far from Wayne State University, was a real big thing.

"The thing I remember most," Philandra told me, "is when Aretha was up and ready to party, the party was on. And when she was down, everybody tiptoed around her and left her alone. I remember once she said, 'I got a leather suit that I'm gonna wear skating.' And she fell into the Arcadia really sharp. It was kind of a grayish color. And she was skating, and she fell and the skirt split right up the back. And I remember how embarrassed she was. I told her, 'You can't wear too good a clothes when you're skating. You never know when you're gonna fall.' And she looked so mad about it. Everybody was off that day. She never did get the dressing thing right."

"Well," I said, "Aunt Mae and I didn't think she was properly dressed when she performed at the White House."

"Yes," said Philandra, "I watched it on television. But I think Clinton kind of liked it."

Then Philandra went on with her memory. "Her dad had kind of put her out of the house, and she was in the garage -- which was where he let her live. And, you know, those garages had servants quarters, and she had a piano up there. I enjoyed visiting her. We'd go up there and bang on the piano and sing and whatnot. She could sing, though. We used to sit at that piano and wail. Aretha could sing.

"But after she started singing professionally, she got a little too grand for us," Philandra continued. "One day we were over at her house on LaSalle. I was looking at that pink 1958 Imperial they had. I was sitting on the steps, and Aretha was up on the top step. She told me her daddy was gonna give her the money to go to New York and get her a contract. And she said, 'One day when the name Aretha Franklin is spoken, everybody around the world will know who you talking about.' I just looked at her because it sounded like a fantasy."

Overwhelmed by the stories and biographies -- official and unofficial -- that we construct around our sacred celebrity-aristocrats, fans easily overlook or forget those special qualities and abilities that endeared our idols to us in the first place. Soon, maybe as early as next year, Aretha's own version of her life -- written with veteran soul music biographer David Ritz -- will be published. According to rumor, the book is packed with the kind of shocking disclosures we have come not only to expect, but demand from our heroines and heroes.

Over the decades, all the write-ups, press releases, TV documentaries, gossip, hearsay and scuttlebutt about Aretha Franklin has cemented into brick-solid narrative architecture. Jerry Wexler once called her "Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows." News items appeared about lawsuits her creditors were bringing against her for failing to pay her bills. Some worry about the weight she's carrying. During the fabled Atlantic period, her marriage to Ted White -- a non-musician who got a co-credit on several of the hit songs Aretha composed and recorded for Atlantic -- was complicated. That he treated her badly was an open secret.

Meanwhile, Aretha can still sing. If anything, her voice, over the past four decades, has improved. In an interview with Time, Aretha herself acknowledged this improvement: "I stopped smoking in 1991," she explained. "It helped my voice tremendously. The clarity and everything. The range even increased." Globally revered as the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin puts her heart into everything she sings, whether it be the kind of sacred church offering that inspires and undergirds her stunning delivery, or a winsomely erotic, earth-shaking blues or a Puccini aria. And, in recent shows, Aretha has warmly performed opera and hip hop.

When by laser beam, iron oxide paths or well-needled vinyl I travel back through the late century with Aretha, I hear so much that's been overlooked in the music she's given us that it's almost as much fun to remember her aloud as it is to repeat tracks, rewind or to turn the record over and play the other side. Lest we forget, every side has its other side, too, and the way Aretha Franklin's life connects with the lives of others, including my own, is intriguing to consider. Music of course is a kind of glue to which anything can stick. Consider the afternoon, in 1982, when I sat at my mother's bedside in a Mexican clinic outside Tijuana, where she'd gone to take laetrile treatments for the cancer that was eating its way through her body.

I was singing "Day Dreaming," which is one of my favorite Aretha pieces, and one she herself composed. I had always admired and loved the song's cascading melody and unusual rhythmic and chordal conception. Mother and I began to talk about Aretha and the Franklin family.

Mother looked way off into space and said, "I saw that child up in Detroit the other day before I came down here for treatments. I was in the Red Lobster [which happens to be one of Aretha's favorite restaurants], and Aretha came over to the table and said, 'Mary, you don't come around anymore. I'm still the same me. You don't have to stay away just because I'm supposed to be so famous."

When I again asked my mother the question I'd asked years ago -- why she hadn't married Aretha's father -- Mother said, "All right, you asked, so I'll tell you. You're old enough now. I don't know if you'll understand, but I couldn't marry anybody like that," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he would spend Saturday night with me. Then, at the crack of dawn, he would hop up out of bed, shove his little bottle of whiskey in his coat packet and say, 'Oh, Mary, I have to go preach.' Al, I just couldn't marry anybody like that."

To pinpoint the beginning of Aretha Franklin's actual presence in my life is a lot like trying to nail down the origin of a cry. The musical cry that encircles the world didn't originate in the United States, it was African-American music that gave it back to the world. Perhaps. Perhaps and maybe and probably and if are quiver-points in that cry. And what is that cry all about? If the fixed and measurable sound of the cosmos is indeed the Om of ancients, the Amen of the Christians, the Amin of the Muslims, then its fluttering, human-sung version is the blues. And the blues are simply the flip side of spirituals.

In church, they sing "Jesus." On the street, they sing "Baby." "Baby, Baby, sweet Baby ... "

Sometimes the sacred and the secular sound alike. There is a good reason that "Amazing Grace," the gospel album Aretha made in 1972 for Atlantic with her mentor James Cleveland, has sold and sold and sold to the point where it has achieved double-platinum status. And there is a reason that I have many of her musical treasures on vinyl, tape and compact disc. Aretha Franklin is anything but a sound-alike. She was always one of a kind, a spirit. And with each passing moment, big pieces of that spirit seem to be disappearing from the world.

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