Music Hath Charms

My daughter, Cecily, sent me this Mother’s Day card in 2012. It has been on my refrigerator ever since.

I come from a singing family. Singing in the car. Harmony around the piano, singing at weddings and funerals. Singing at nursing homes, singing for babies. Singing soothes, teaches, laughs, cries, smooths over all the rough edges.

I got my first guitar when I was 12. A Harmony Classic. My older sister taught me the songs she was playing - The Kingston Trio, Odetta, Nina Simone. I remember very clearly ‘When Sunny Gets Blue’ and ‘Scotch and Soda’ - bluesy arrangements of boozy songs. We would sing ‘Been in the Pen So Long’ in Odetta’s low voice. My mother thought we were going to the dogs.

And then you throw in a bit of theater. We are a group of vaudevillians.

My father would always say, Don’t be a Dead Ace, which meant, get up and sing that song or play your recital piece for living room gathering that my parents might be hosting that weekend, everyone dressed in their Sunday best, glass pitchers of Manhattans with long glass cocktail stirrers, nibbling on cheese and crackers and dishes of olives smiling with red pimentos.

Funny, because in the end, most of us were not the total extrovert we projected. Although, nothing like a crowd to bring it out! Don’t be a dead ace, and all that.

One of our go-to’s was The Muskrat Ramble in three part harmony, with a vocal trombone break accompaniment on the third verse. Anne sang high, Sheila, Geddy and I filled in the harmonies below. We had learned it for a church talent show. I must have been 5. Anne, the oldest sister, 15.

The Muskrat Ramble re-appeared many times. We resurrected it almost 50 years later for a talent show at my oldest sister Anne’s condo association in Florida. We brought down the house.

Fast forward a decade or so. Last year, my sister Sheila and I flew to visit Anne in a hospital in Dallas. She had disappeared into the mists of Alzheimer’s. Her eyes were vacant and full of panic. She looked at us like we were strangers. No words could bridge the gap. As we stood in a sad circle, I began…“Shufflin’ shufflin’ shufflin’ down, shufflin’ shufflin, headin’ for town…’ Music skips the brain, cuts through the fog and goes straight to the emotional middle. Anne began to sing, with all the words, all the razzmatazz. When we sang the last, ‘ba-da-ba-dah-dah’, Anne knew who we were.

Singing erases the timeline. It’s visceral. It’s in our bones. I describe a visit at sister Geddy’s home. Geddy couldn’t put much into words in those days of Lewy Body Dementia, but she could sing all harmonies she’d always sung.

     Today, Geddy is vacant, hair falling into a bowl cut, eyes sunken, speaking in sentences crowded with old combinations of words collected into thoughts that make no sense, but sound so convincing I feel a failure for not understanding. She begins to imagine people outside the window. She notices a squirrel in the branches – a real vision this time. I find music on my iPhone – Gregorian chants and hymns sung by an angelic women’s choir. We sit on the couch together, listening, harmonizing. This is the sound of our youth, I say. She nods. Panis Angelicus; Holy God, We Praise Thy Name, Tantum Ergo. I massage her back while we sit there, looking for more squirrels. Trance, transport. I massage her arms, legs, while we sit there on her towel-protected couch. She is lost in the massage, in the music. We sit quietly.  Her face is flushed. 

“I’m crying,” she says. Her eyes are weeping but her body is somewhere else-not surprising, from a family that didn’t know how to cry, or show any emotion except humor. It is as though the weeping is the eruption of a cyclone of tragedies, insecurities and unspoken emotions. “Do you ever cry?” she asks me. “Yes, I say, life can be sad. It’s OK to be sad, Ged. Your situation is sad and difficult.” We sit in silence. “You are my friend,” she says, not really knowing who I am. Short, shallow breaths. “This happens sometimes,” she says, concentrating on her racing heart and panting breaths. We need a change. “Let’s try John Phillips Sousa,” I say. “We can march! like Alan Alda!” I take her hands, promenade style, and off we go, still sitting on the couch, singing!

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