When Old People Make Music
This morning it was our turn to participate in the service at Mennonite Manor. While I stood up front and sang along with others from our churches, I mused on how some of the feeble elderly participate in and love music after many of their other capabilities have been stolen from them.
When it was time for people in the audience to choose songs for the group to sing, one elderly gentleman in a wheelchair chose "Just a Closer Walk With Thee." His wife, after her husband had repeated the number for her and she found it, held a songbook with the words. He never looked at it. He threw back his head and sang with a strong, clear resonant voice, even inserting some of the echoing words in the versions that are not dumbed down for old people. He closed his eyes part of the time, and moved his head slightly with the emotion of the moment. Watching him, my heart listened closely to the words of the song, and I was blessed to "hear" them through that man's experience, even though he was a stranger to me, and I did not know his past. His evident yearning became my prayer as well.
I thought of another resident of the Manor who we first met when she was 96 years old. As a wife and mother many years earlier, Lida welcomed into their home her son's college friend who was a student from Japan. The student had returned to Japan after college, apparently did well financially, and never forgot his "family" in America. He visited them every year. The son who had befriended him was tragically killed in a car/pedestrian accident shortly before we learned to know Lida, but Hideyo kept coming back to visit Lida at the nursing home. Mutual friends introduced us, and we invited both of them to our house for Sunday dinner.
Somewhere along the line we learned that Lida played piano beautifully and often played in the chapel at the nursing home. She had taught piano students for many years. When we saw how much she had enjoyed the drive we took on the Sunday afternoon she was at our house, we invited her to accompany us to a piano and voice recital event at which our son Shane sang.
She was ever-so-grateful, but ruefully remarked about the piano teacher "I was a lot harder on my students than she was. I made them memorize their pieces." Lida moved later to Indiana where another of her sons lived and we've lost track of her. But the memory of that gracious, intelligent, musically accomplished lady puts a smile on my face every time I think of her.
Another friend, Yvonne, tells about her mother, who lost her speech and the use of her one arm as the result of a stroke. But with her good hand, she could still pick out a tune on the keyboard and sing along with her playing. She often repeated the hymns she had heard most recently in church.
It must be that the the ability to make music is buried so deep in our personhood that it survives ravages fatal to many other more peripheral skills.
When Winnie-the-Pooh was stuck in the door to rabbit's home (from eating too much of rabbit's food) and had to stay there until he shrank down enough to be able to push on through, he requested that those who read to him to help pass the time would read "sustaining" kinds of stories.
I do not play a musical instrument, and I do not distinguish myself by my singing ability. But I like to think of the music "stories" I'm filing away now as having a reading-to-Winnie-the-Pooh kind of quality. In the future, when I feel a great need for "sustaining" kinds of experiences, I believe that sung stories will come to my aid. Yvonne's mother, Lida, and the unnamed man at Mennonite Manor all show me that it has happened for others.
When it was time for people in the audience to choose songs for the group to sing, one elderly gentleman in a wheelchair chose "Just a Closer Walk With Thee." His wife, after her husband had repeated the number for her and she found it, held a songbook with the words. He never looked at it. He threw back his head and sang with a strong, clear resonant voice, even inserting some of the echoing words in the versions that are not dumbed down for old people. He closed his eyes part of the time, and moved his head slightly with the emotion of the moment. Watching him, my heart listened closely to the words of the song, and I was blessed to "hear" them through that man's experience, even though he was a stranger to me, and I did not know his past. His evident yearning became my prayer as well.
I thought of another resident of the Manor who we first met when she was 96 years old. As a wife and mother many years earlier, Lida welcomed into their home her son's college friend who was a student from Japan. The student had returned to Japan after college, apparently did well financially, and never forgot his "family" in America. He visited them every year. The son who had befriended him was tragically killed in a car/pedestrian accident shortly before we learned to know Lida, but Hideyo kept coming back to visit Lida at the nursing home. Mutual friends introduced us, and we invited both of them to our house for Sunday dinner.
Somewhere along the line we learned that Lida played piano beautifully and often played in the chapel at the nursing home. She had taught piano students for many years. When we saw how much she had enjoyed the drive we took on the Sunday afternoon she was at our house, we invited her to accompany us to a piano and voice recital event at which our son Shane sang.
She was ever-so-grateful, but ruefully remarked about the piano teacher "I was a lot harder on my students than she was. I made them memorize their pieces." Lida moved later to Indiana where another of her sons lived and we've lost track of her. But the memory of that gracious, intelligent, musically accomplished lady puts a smile on my face every time I think of her.
Another friend, Yvonne, tells about her mother, who lost her speech and the use of her one arm as the result of a stroke. But with her good hand, she could still pick out a tune on the keyboard and sing along with her playing. She often repeated the hymns she had heard most recently in church.
It must be that the the ability to make music is buried so deep in our personhood that it survives ravages fatal to many other more peripheral skills.
When Winnie-the-Pooh was stuck in the door to rabbit's home (from eating too much of rabbit's food) and had to stay there until he shrank down enough to be able to push on through, he requested that those who read to him to help pass the time would read "sustaining" kinds of stories.
I do not play a musical instrument, and I do not distinguish myself by my singing ability. But I like to think of the music "stories" I'm filing away now as having a reading-to-Winnie-the-Pooh kind of quality. In the future, when I feel a great need for "sustaining" kinds of experiences, I believe that sung stories will come to my aid. Yvonne's mother, Lida, and the unnamed man at Mennonite Manor all show me that it has happened for others.
posted by Mrs. I at
5:12 PM
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