GRIEVING IN THE TIME OF COVID 19

The grief monster got me again this morning, caught me unaware and gave me the old one-two punch in the gut. “Get out!” I shouted. But I didn’t hear the words I’d said. The noise sounded more like a wolf howl to me, a wolf howl, or a moan of abject pain. Perhaps I should have expected it, the sudden appearance of this sleeping giant. A pessimist might have observed some warnings that a storm might be brewing underground. There had been, for example, a considerable reduction of crying over the past couple of months. But I am not a pessimist. This drying up might have been caused by the passage of time, time spent in the warm Mexican sand, the gradual thawing of chilly relationships, the sprouting of new healthy relationships, the shedding of some failed experiments, the formation of new habits, the revival of my storytelling hobby, new volunteer opportunities, better eating, long daily walks outdoors, daily internet contact with people I love. Even in a time of pandemic, any of these might have boosted my mental health. Or it might simply have been that the focus required to thrive during a COVID 19 pandemic can distract you from just about everything you are used to. So perhaps I can be forgiven for failing to expect the monster. It was just after 7:30 AM when the monster struck. I was sitting on the edge of my bed celebrating the sunshine snaking along the wall from the closet door to the place beside the mirror. I was thinking that my neighbour and I might get a hamburger and fries from a drive-through window today, the first restaurant food we’ve had in five weeks of obeying the call to “Stay Home!” The people on the radio were telling me about a star-studded concert that would be playing on all the TV networks all over the world. Among the other stars, John Legend would be singing. “Let’s go out on this song,” said the radio people. “John Legend: All Of Me.: What’s that they said? Let’s go out? I went out all right. In one brief second I went all the way back to the winter of 2014. It was Saturday morning, every Saturday morning. We were at the west End Seniors Association, David and I, attending dance classes sponsored by the Parkinson Association. We were seated, doing the warm-up exercises. The nurse, Sharleen Heavener was leading us. John Legend was singing All of Me. Beside David I was stretching. I was singing to the gentle rhythm. I was pretending that everything would be all right. John sang: The world is beating you down, I'm around through every mood. You're my downfall, you're my muse My worst distraction, my rhythm and blues I can't stop singing, it's ringing, in my head for you [Pre-Chorus:] My head's under water But I'm breathing fine You're crazy and I'm out of my mind [Chorus:] 'Cause all of me Loves all of you Love your curves and all your edges All your perfect imperfections Give your all to me I'll give my all to you You're my end and my beginning Even when I lose I'm winning David could still walk back then. He could still drive. We could still learn new dance steps together. But his voice had slowed, and his signature had changed so much that people started checking to confirm its authenticity. Somehow he had forgotten how to shift his weight gracefully from one foot to the other. It was plain to both of us that everything would definitely not be all right. Still, we concentrated on burying the future by making everything all right at that moment, the moment before she asked us to stand, the final seconds of sitting down. So what if the task of burying the future required an avalanche of pretending? We were up for it. We were listening to popular songs. It might be the end of the world as we knew it, but we were learning to dance.

HALFWAY THROUGH

“Hope is the ‘Yes!’ to life.” –Ronna Jevne I’m halfway through the 22 hours of training you have to take if you want to be registered as a volunteer at Pilgrim’s Hospice. They provide services to people who are dying. So far we’ve covered the organization chart, policies and procedures, confidentiality, communication skills, family dynamics, and psychological issues. “Aren’t you bored?” my friends are asking. “We know how you hate policies and procedures. With your training and experience you could teach communication or family dynamics or psychological issues. Don’t you have better things to do with your time?” “Actually,” I reply with a half grin, “I love it.” They are surprised. I am twice as surprised. “What are you learning?” they want to know. I’d tell them, but the truth is, it’s too early to say. How do you really know what it is that you are learning until you have learned it? I’ve been wandering for a year now in the wasteland of widowhood and retirement. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out which way to go. In retirement I would have spent more time with my husband. In widowhood I would have returned to work. But what are you meant to do when you’ve been married for a long time and now you’re not? What are you to do when you’ve been working for a long time and now you’re not? Pondering the problem, I thought of setting a goal. But I’ve never been much of a goal-setter. As a compromise, I settled for a guiding principle I would try to follow: Just say “Yes!” My friend Jennifer invited me to join her at a singing event. I said “Yes!” We chose seats for no particular reason and later discovered that the singers in the row ahead were from Canmore. They told us that they sang together in a Threshold Choir. “What on earth is a Threshold Choir?” we asked. “We sing at the bedsides of people who are dying,” they replied. “It’s an international organization with a lot of local choirs. We love it. If you are interested, you should look on the Internet for the contact information for the Edmonton choir.” Each Threshold choir has a name. In Edmonton we have the Voices of Compassion Threshold Choir. The representative I contacted was both friendly and guarded. She told me the choir meets weekly to practice as a large group. They send people to the bedside in groups of three. There were questions she wanted me to answer. “Would you be comfortable at the bedside of a dying person?” “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been there a few times.” “Can you sing your own part in a trio without any music in front of you?” “Yes,” I said. “I have done that.” “Are you willing to take the volunteer training program at Pilgrim’s Hospice?” Hmmm! I might have said “Yes!” to that. I don’t exactly remember. If I did, I wasn’t being entirely honest. My real plan was to join the choir, then convince them that I didn’t need the training. The process of joining took longer than I expected. It is a small choir, formed only two years ago. They have learned a few things along the way. They have learned to be cautious about taking in new members. I had made the call in May, but it was already late in October when they invited me to a practice, and I was busier by then. I probably would have said “No,” had I not been so much in the habit of saying “Yes!” Now it’s January. After one whole year of wandering in the wasteland of retirement and widowhood I look back in wonder at how time could drag so much and pass so quickly. I had imagined learning to feel at home here. I don’t feel at home. I want to, because it looks like I’ll be here for a while, maybe even forever, learning how to survive, learning how to thrive. To survive means putting up with things you don’t love, like being alone much of the time, and not having a structure that pulls you out of bed on the days when you don’t feel like getting up. To thrive involves learning to recognize love when you feel it—learning the difference between doing things you don’t love and making sacrifices when you love something. It’s a distinction that’s hard for a grieving person to make. You spend a lot of time in an emotional fog. You become accustomed to feeling miserable while doing things you used to love I do love singing in a Threshold Choir. I love the music, challenging yet simple enough to allow all members to sing at a bedside in three-part harmony without the aid of a book. I love the way I feel after practice—warm and relaxed, the way you might feel after a long warm bath. I loved our Christmas party, when we drank a little wine and gave ourselves fully to the delight of singing rock songs at the top of our lungs until we were hoarse. I love the closeness of it—the way everyone cheers when I arrive at practice later than usual. These people, strangers to me such a short time ago, are cheering because I am there. I love it so much that I never did ask if I could skip the 22 hours of volunteer training at Pilgrim’s Hospice. I was pretty sure they’d say no because it wouldn’t much matter how smart or experienced I am. I would still have to go through the process. In 2020 you can’t just march into an institution and ask if they have any dying patients you can sing to. Somebody has to recognize an appropriate situation and invite you in. There are no hoops to jump if you are invited by a family member. But institutions won’t invite you or recommend you to families unless you have been cleared for entry by a criminal check and met their requirements for volunteer training. So I registered for the training, fully intending to sacrifice 22 hours to the boredom of sitting through presentations of familiar content. The joke’s on me. The content is just what I expected it to be and I am not bored. Here in the unfamiliar wasteland of retirement and widowhood, with more time than I need and emotions I’ve never before experienced, I never know what to expect.

THE MUSIC OF CHRISTMAS (Nursing Home Life, part 14)

“Mostly Christmas makes me feel” –Linnea Good Earlier on the blog I made a short list of songs I love to wallow by. But now that Christmas is coming, there are so many more songs. And what better time can there be for wallowing in sadness, nostalgia, joy and completely inexplicable reactions? It’s a musical bonanza, two of my best Christmas weeping songs presented consecutively on a single album, Winter Song by Sarah McLachlan. How magically transforming it is to lubricate the tear ducts with Sarah’s version of Joni Mitchell’s River, in preparation for the heart-breaking torrent of McLachlan’s own Winter Song! I could be tapping my toes to Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. In fact, I do tap my toes when it comes on the radio, but when I want to play Christmas music, I Hear myself asking Siri to play Winter Song. It’s not nostalgia that draws me in, it’s the connection to feelings of sadness and loss, the self-indulgent tug toward a moment of melancholy against a backdrop of comfort and joy. . If, like me, you are a closet whiner,sad songs are the perfect outlet for expression. Fortunately, Christmas offers a wide selection of choices with something to meet every emotional need. For example, there’s Silent Night, the song that still holds the record as my biggest crying song. The whole thing started some time in my thirties. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But every Christmas, I’d be at a concert or a church service and we’d start singing Silent Night. Before we got to sleeping in heavenly peace the beauty of the thing would overwhelm me. The rest of the singers would have to finish singing without me. I’d be sniffling, wiping tears, my throat stretched tighter than a drum. No more singing from me. No particular sadness in it. Here was nostalgia at its most pervasive. Each year that song would start, and I’d remember how I cried last year. The memory would set my glands to drizzling. The first cure for the problem came to me quite accidentally the year I volunteered to play the piano at the late church service on Christmas Eve. The stage was set for the worst of my crying. Near the end of the service the congregation would begin to sing Silent Night. They would pick up the tall candles they had been given when they entered the church. The lights would go down and the first candle would be lit. Then each person would light their candle from the candle of the person next to them. The beauty of the thing would overwhelm me. Normally I’d be a wet rag by the time all the candles were lit and the third verse was sung. But this time I was the musician and everyone was counting on me. The burden of responsibility calmed my nerves. It was a Christmas miracle! All the beauty and no tears from me. I played in heavenly peace. It worked, and I had high hopes for singing that song in the future. But it only worked when I played the piano for other singers. If I didn’t play, I still cried. Then came the second cure. It was the year when another pianist volunteered to play the late service. Members of my family were visiting that night. I packed my purse with Kleenex and invited them to join David and me. Each of us picked up a candle as we entered the church. Then, near the end of the service, Carla played the first notes of Silent Night. As the peaceful music began, my father, summoning the louder voice of a man who has forgotten his hearing aid, turned his candle toward my sister. “Where is your candle?” he boomed. “I don’t know,” she whispered. All was still calm at that point. “Where’s your candle?” he boomed more loudly, thinking perhaps she had not heard him. “I don’t know,’ she shouted back. We’d made it to Holy infant so tender and mild. Then began a scurrying search of the floor for the missing candle. By now we were at the second Silent night, Holy night. Quick as a flash, while shepherds quaked at the sight, I handed my candle to my father to give to my sister. “This is an extra one,” I shouted, hoping only to have to say it once, particularly because it was a lie. I wanted—no, needed—him to be quiet. At that point, all thoughts of crying had left me. I felt like a teen-ager, the way you do when you want to pretend that these people are weird strangers who just happened to cross your path. But my father is a conscientious man. That evening he was bent on making sure that everyone was included. “Where’s your candle?” he asked, glancing at my now empty hand. We had made it to the third Silent Night. At this point, my thoughts turned from utter embarrassment to sympathy for my poor David, the long-suffering man who had, in all innocence, married into this family. His only possible escape could come with a messy expensive divorce, and I just didn’t think he was up to it. I started breathing deeply, lest I should develop a penchant for fainting. I shook my head vehemently at David, who was offering to hand me his candle. “You keep it,” I whispered as loudly as I could. I didn’t trust myself to hold a fire in my trembling hand. Things settled down a bit then. My father stopped worrying about my candle. All was calm, until we got to the end of the song. We blew out our candles and then sat down. There was a snap! There was a soft cry of surprise. There was no point trying to pretend the noise wasn’t caused by my family. It was my sister, jumping up to retrieve the two halves of an unburned candle upon which she had just sat. Apparently it had been on her chair all along. Mercifully the service promised to end. The piano struck the first chords of Joy To The World. Beside me stood David, whom I now noticed, was taking deep breaths in a vain attempt to suppress fits of laughter. Of course the laughing attack spread to me, and then to others nearby, the way a wildfire might spread if you weren’t careful with a candle. Since then I have become philosophical and more than a little curious about the strange relationship between emotions and songs. Christmases come and Christmases go. Each holiday season brings its songs and its feelings. This year I’m choosing Sarah McLachlan for the melancholy effect. That said, I expect to hear Joy To The World, which will likely cause me to break out in a broad smile. And when I’m asked to sing Silent Night, I’ll do my best not to laugh. But I might not succeed in that.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC CLASSES FOR BABIES

Kitty: I’ve been wondering where you go on Saturday mornings. Carys: To music class. Kitty: You don’t say! Music class eh? Are you learning to play the piano, the trumpet, the obo perhaps? Carys: Of course not. I may seem grown up to you, but I’m only six months old. I probably won’t be able to play the obo until I can sit up without support. Kitty: Then what do you do there? Carys: Make noise, mostly. Kitty: Like purring and meowing, you mean? Carys: Sometimes, but only in the animal songs. Kitty: What are your favourite things to do at music class? Carys: Oh, I like to suck on the sticks, and they have rubber drums. Now a rubber drum is a thing you can really sink your teeth into. And I like to get up on my hands and knees and watch the toddlers toddle. Today one of the toddlers toddled right over to Teacher’s guitar and loosened the strings. That must have been fun. Then, and this is really fun, I make big spit puddles on the floor and race to see if I can crawl through them before Mommy notices. Kitty: Oh. Are grown-ups allowed to go to music class. Carys: Sure. Every Saturday Mommy and I pick Granny up on the way and we all go together. Granny hugs me and lets everybody else know that I’m the cutest kid there. Then she dances with me and bounces me up and down until I spit up my breakfast. She says she gets her Saturday morning exercise getting up and down off the floor with me in her arms. Mommy says going to music classes is a good way to spend time with Granny, and Granny says listening to music lights up at least six different areas of your brain if you view it on MRI, which we never do. So I really wonder if it’s actually six, or maybe five or seven. And does it light up more areas when you suck on the sticks? Kitty: Ahhh! So much science in the world, and so little is known.

REMEMBERING PETER LOUGHEED

Peter Lougheed died last week. Though many people remember him for many things, in recent years it has not been possible for me to hear his name without recalling the summer I helped to make him Premier. It was the summer of 1971 and I was 17 years old. Voters in our riding, Sedgewick-Coronation, had voted Social Credit for as long as they could remember, and they weren’t about to change their votes for some upstart lawyer from Calgary. Our local town was called Lougheed, named after Peter’s grandfather, and my folks thought it was time for a change. My dad looked around the village of Lougheed for a candidate to run for the Progressive Conservatives. Finding one, he and a few others put the wheels in motion. Mom was designated as full time volunteer at the election office. I was designated as cook and bottle washer. We were farmers. Summer was the time when there were men to cook for. Early that summer peter Lougheed announced that he would be kicking off his campaign in Lougheed. My family was over the moon. “Write a song,” commanded my parents. “We’ll have a parade.” So I wrote a song, to the tune of Has Anybody Seen My Gal. My song said, Herb Losness For The Lougheed Team. “Call up Gail,” commanded my parents. Gail was my best friend in high school. She was going to be a nurse. I was going to be a social worker. Her home town was Hardisty. Peter Lougheed’s grandmother was a Hardisty before she married a Lougheed. Gail and I were about as geeky as two teen-agers could be. Geeky was what they wanted. Both of us loved old-fashioned music. Our moms were handy with the sewing machines. Soon we were outfitted in Conservative colours, orange hot pants and blue tights. I got out the old accordion. Gail and I climbed onto parade floats singing Herb Losness For The Lougheed Team. For fillers, we sang a Johnny Cash song about the disintegration of a musical group with conflicting political leanings. Late August found us standing in a crowd of thousands on the parking lot of the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. Other constituencies had sent singers for their own songs. I pumped up the accordion and we shouted ours over the din. Then we all went inside, far too many of us for the fire regulations, to cheer wildly at anything and everything Peter Lougheed said. It was election fever at the pitch. Election day arrived. The people of Sedgewick-Coronation voted Social Credit. The rest of Alberta voted for Peter and the Conservatives have reigned ever since. Later that year, I turned 18 and earned the right to vote. So far, that is my only experience working actively on a political campaign. For Gail and me—both of us volunteer church pianists in later life, it’s a memory that never fails to bring a good laugh. And though you might wonder about the ethics of enlisting help from campaigners too young to vote, I don’t think I felt abused. Just amused, and involved.

SINGING IN THE TRAIN

This morning I heard a song sung by Jane Doe with backup vocals and piano by sarah McLachlan and her band. Jane Doe and I were sharing a seat on the LRT. “I will rmember you,” sang Jane. “Will you remember me?” I expect that Jane was hearing Sarah in her earbuds. I was hearing only Jane, Jane singing a solo on the train. I was careful not to turn in her direction, lest she realize that I had heard, lest she might suffer, for the whole day and maybe the entire week, the embarrassment of knowing she had been heard. . Meanwhile, my cerebral cortex went to work, pulling up the sounds I imagined that Jane was hearing. “Don’t let your life pass you by,” Jane sang softly, smiling as she sang. The train rolled on. By the time I left my seat, I wasn’t hearing Jane anymore. But I still heard Sarah. An early morning concert for me and Jane, all for the price of a train ticket. For Jane, whose real name I do not know, I hummed as I walked the path to Hope House, “I will remember you.” It was a good day for singing to yourself. It’s the first day of class. Most of the students and some of the professors are paying more attention to the challenge of figuring out where they need to be than they are to the noises made by the people who pass them on the sidewalk. So I comfort myself with the belief that nobody heard me singing. “Weep not for the memories.” Anyway, it wasn’t really a solo. Sarah was backing me up.

HOPE HEARD FROM A BIRD

Drawn by the song of a bird so sweet
That I could not help but envy his mate
I stepped out the door in the sun to greet the promise of a late March day.
Where geese were honking, crows were cawing, magpies magging, swparrows tweeting.
Robins nesting and ten thousand waxwings had come to our block
To feast for a pleasant hour.
So even though the forecast says, “SNOW!”
And I cannot pretend that I have not heard,
I’ll remember the birds saying,
“Spring’s the word.”

HEN MUSIC

“Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.” (original source unknown)

These days I find that I am the reluctant coordinator of a music program. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in, given that I like music to be good, and my own musical abilities are inconsistent at best. “Some day,” I promise myself in the spirit of hope, “we will find a music leader and I will return to the roll that suits me better, a helpful participant, a loudish singer, a generous giver of advice, much of which should probably be ignored.”
These days I hear myself clucking like the Little Red Hen who sought to bake a loaf of bread. At each step in the process she asked for help from her neighbours. I am the little Red Hen of the email generation. “Who will help me learn the music? Who will help me play the music? Who will help me sing the music?”
Sometimes, when the answers come in, I think I am the Little Red Hen, whose neighbours were far too busy for the gathering and preparation. “I would like to help you, but I’m going to Saskatoon.” “I’d like to help you, but I am hosting a party.” “Then I will do it myself,” I cackle.
And that’s where the whole Red Hen thing breaks down. In the end I am never really doing it myself. There are always people there to help, albeit fewer than we would wish. And there are days when I go off to California, or Calgary and I am not there to help. Through it all the email continues. Every week, in response, there is at least one note from Barb, a busy-but-infinitely helpful person. And every email from Barb concludes itself with this quote: “Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.” And even though every person who gets Barb’s email also gets this message, it somehow manages to speak directly to me.
Would the Little Red Hen have been happier in the age of email?

PREPARING FOR CHRISTMAS

And as I played the familiar carols
Getting them ready for special occasions,
Feeling the ancient rhythms,
Absorbing the timeless beauty

I wondered at so very much complaining
about Christmas music played too soon in stores
And so very little
About the rush to early shopping.

MORE SUPPORT THAN WE KNOW

“Nice duet you sang,” said my friend, advancing boldly in my direction at the close of the church service. He wore the grin of a Cheshire cat, and turned to beckon his granny who was following closely behind. I turned his way, surprised as he had intended, waiting in momentary silence for the joke to be unveiled.
“Duet?” said a bystander, giving voice to the confusion she saw in my eyes. “I didn’t hear a duet. I thought it was a solo.”
“No,’’ said my friend. “It was a duet. Granny was singing along.”
Not surprising that I hadn’t heard Granny, that only a few people heard Granny singing. I, after all, had been granted sole custody of the microphone. I said as much to Granny, who replied with the gracious acknowledgement that she didn’t mind singing without the mike.
I picture her now, her behaviour less filtered than it used to be, the lone joiner singing spiritedly along to an old favourite, a song she learned in childhood and practiced decade upon decade, Sunday after Sunday in churches wherever she might be. I picture her now, her natural self. She would sing with the congregation. She would sing with the radio. She would sing doing housework. She would sing in the shower.
Music, it seems, lodges deep in the heart, thrusting forth toward the smallest invitation, blooming in the warm light long after other life blossoms have faded. I wonder then about the treasures that might be trapped in the filters that govern us. In those moments when I believed myself to be carrying the full weight of attention, when I felt the vulnerability of singing alone, were there others singing also, singing silently? Was there, after all, unheard by any of us, actually a small choir supporting me, a full chorus?

BEATLEMANIA

I was a bit surprised when, on Boxing Day, my recently acquired son-in-law said, “I guess the Beatles must be your favourite band of all time.” Like I say, I was surprised, and I was about to ask him why he would say such a thing, until I remembered that I had, only the day before, smiled broadly upon opening a box containing the complete collection of Beatle music remastered for stereo. There are hundreds of Beatles songs in that box. I haven’t even heard them all yet and it’s already mid January. No wonder Derek thought he might have discovered my favourite band, even though I denied it. Looking back I think it would be fair to say that Beatle music provided a sound track to my coming of age. I was 7 or 8 when it all got going. When Love Me Do came out as a single, my two older sisters argued over it. One of them was a modern teen-ager, the other a lover of country music. Later on came She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah, and Shake It Up Baby, Twist And Shout. Enough said about that.
There was Beatle music on the jukebox when I drank a milk shake of the metal mixer container at the Lougheed Cafe. There was Beatle music on the speakers at the local skating rink. The Beatles play the Ed Sullivan Show on a Sunday evening while Mom curled my hair and wondered in bafflement what those crazy girls were screaming about.
When, just before my 12th birthday, I went to boarding school in Vancouver, a city with not even one country music station, our dorm literally vibrated with Beatle sounds. Girls swooned over beatle movies. Beatle records orbited their centres day after day after day. We sang You Won’t See Me in four-part harmony in the stairwells. We sang Yesterday in the shower. And one year, during summer vacation, I sang beatle harmonies with a friend named Kim on a stage at the Calgary Stampede.
Strangely though, it wasn’t until I was well on into adulthood that it occurred to me that the Beatles were truly talented. Some songs still played on the radio, beautiful melodies, intriguing lyrics, Fool On The Hill, She Doesn’t Need You, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane. These songs were not the sound track of my youth. I had paid them little attention, probably because of their lack of romance.
So here I am, less than a decade away from 64, reading Many Years From Now, an authorized biography of Paul McCartney by Barry Miles. Here’s how they got so many songs. Lennon and McCartney wrote in motel rooms, facing each other on twin beds. Paul is left-handed, John was right-handed. They could easily see each other’s finger positions on guitar. One of them would start with a line, the other would provide a second line. In an hour or two they’d have a song. If they needed an album, or the sound track for a movie, they’d write a song a day until they had it. In between they’d write extra songs. Songs and songs and songs and songs. They wrote them fast and they wrote a lot of them. As they aged, they wrote better songs.
It’s a lot of work to write a song. I think of how much effort has gone into my writing of perhaps four songs in a lifetime, and my heart bursts with admiration for boy/men in their teens and early twenties who could do it in such abundance and generate a few masterpieces in the bargain. And I wonder, if albeit belatedly, I might be exhibiting a moderate case of Beatlemania.

BEAUTIFUL SONG

Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming
Arranged in 1609, written some time before that
Sung this week as in years past
In languages of many peoples
By lucky choristers like me
Moving parts in choirs large and small

Who says beautiful things can’t last forever?

Lo How A Rose

ROBIN IN STEREO

I like robins
Because they are complicated.

Robins have bad judgment.
I like the way they arrive too early to miss the Alberta snow.

Robins do impossible things.
I like the way they start singing around 3:30 (who among us can get out of bed after a good sleep and start singing at 3:30?)

Robins have nerve.
I like the way they start a nest right beside the veranda table we sit at every day and then dare us to move.

Robins know how to compromise.
I like the way they decide to keep their nest in place when they notice that we’re still going to sit there every day.

Robins cheer me up.
Even when I don’t want to be cheered up, I like that.

Robins surprise me.
And it could just be that my very favourite thing about robins
Happened yesterday, when I was listening
To a recording of a counselling session
Made here at Hope House the day before.

Outside my window a robin sang.
On the recording that same robin sang.
Background music
Robin in stereo.
What finer music has there ever been?

KEYBOARD, WASHBOARD AND THE AMAZING ANGELA LLOYD

Blame it all on inspiration, or wild imagination, or good leadership, or hero worship, or even delusions of grandeur. But 8 days after the fact—having invested about $25.00 on a washboard, a leather strap, 2 old-fashioned clothes pegs, 3 metal spoons, 2 plastic spoons and a kazoo—I think I can probably say definitively that I may not have needed any of it, except possibly the kazoo. In fact—unlike many other people--I actually had a washboard in the laundry room, and a hundred pegs in the peg bucket (albeit they are the new-fangled kind with springs instead of slits and dapper round heads), and a few dozen metal spoons in the spoon drawer, and 3 plastic spoons in another drawer, and my old washboard never once considered having a fancy leather strap, and when I play the comb some people say it sounds to them like a kazoo. Still I did invest about $25.00 in all these things, which now lie in a pile on my dresser, waiting, like jewellery, to be shown off.
Maybe I wouldn’t have bought any of it if it hadn’t been for the fact that last summer I spent $400.00 on a used keyboard which drove me to hysteria and occupied way too much of my free time until, just a month ago, I heard David say, “I think that keyboard was a really good investment.” If I could make a good investment with $400.00, what might I be able to do with $25.00?
And I likely would not have bought any of it, or even ever considered it had I not sat spellbound in the audience at the Timpanogos Festival in Orem, Utah while
Angela Lloyd
hypnotized me with her gentle stories and then delighted me with her washboard antics. So I traded my plans to hear more stories for an hour’s worth of washboard workshop with Angela, and you really can’t go to a washboard workshop without a washboard, can you? And really, if it hadn’t been for the store having such a run on washboard accessories, I would also have bought at least one wooden block, and possibly a bell, and undoubtedly a little tooting horn. Likely I would have spent more than $30.00 adding in all that. So you see, I really got quite a bargain, as it turns out. What I didn’t get, was the skill, the forty million hours of instruction, the 28 years of practice or the ultimate talent that would transform me from the musician I am not, to the musician Angela is. Only in my dreams am I permitted to make all those bits and pieces burst into beautiful music the way Angela does. She said it was easy. Next time I’ll take promises like that with a tablespoon of salt!
When you get right down to it, the reality is more perplexing than the appearance when it comes to playing the washboard with the wooden pegs, and there’s got to be some sort of technique of magic that converts a mixing spoon to a percussive wonder.
So far, about 6 days in—I didn’t get home until very late on Sunday—I’ve mastered the kazoo, using the amazing band-aid trick Angela taught me, and the fancy strap has been temporarily affixed to the washboard with a couple of sewing pins.
Now I must say, all things considered, that every day, as I turn away from the dresser and toward the keyboard--that keyboard is looking more and more like a really good investment!

DROP IN THE BUCKET

Another thing off my bucket list! No, not the Taj Mahal, not the Eiffel Tower. Haven’t climbed Everest. But I did get to the Edmonton Folk Festival. First time ever.
The festival has been on for thirty years now, sells out every year. In some obtuse way I have always intended to go. But then somebody would tell me about getting there two hours early to lay down a tarp on a prized piece of spectator real estate, and a scorching hot weekend would persuade me that burning to a crisp was not better than listening to recordings, or I’d be cuddling up by the fire while a drenching rain poured down. All in all, when it came to reasoning, folk festing was always a little out of reach.
It was the younger generation that changed things. I am not sure how many years it might take me to get over the wonder of having our kids want to do things with us, and even be willing to pay their own way. This year the Folk Fest people pulled it together for us by putting on an extra night with Sarah McLaughlin. Ruth wanted to go, and Mark and Tracey went last year and knew how to get us some handy dandy backpacking lawn chairs with drink holders on the side. All things considered, what could we do? Tracey got the tickets. Her friend shopped for the lawnchairs.
We didn’t take a tarp. We simply shouldered our lawn chairs, tucked toques and mitts in the pockets, and smiled at the neighbours who laughed as we passed. They must have been envious, surely! Who wouldn’t smile at a backpacking family in neighbourhood transit?
The stage was already in full flourish by the time we got there. There were no spots near the stage. To get those you have to skip early evening physio.
So we climbed the hill—nearly as high as Everest. Up, up up! And there we settled, side by side, when Tracy Chapman began.
Sarah’s sweet caressing tones floated right up to the top of the universe as darkness fell. A thousand candles on the hill made you forget that there were stars behind the clouds. And as I lay back, with Mark’s blanket slung across three of us to ward off the evening chill, I thought maybe we’d try to come next year, if we can find the time.
It’s hard to work on a bucket list when there are so many things that simply have to be done again.

WHAT COLOUR IS MICHAEL JACKSON?

Last week I learned something I had not previously known. I learned that Michael Jackson was black. The news surprised me more than a little. Having never once wondered about his skin colour, I found myself thinking over and over again about the huge changes that took place in the last half of the twentieth century.
I can’t say I was ever an avid Jackson fan, and a blind person is definitely not the most likely person to observe skin tone, but still I am surprised because my state of not-knowing has been going on for a very long time. I didn’t know it back in the days when his sweet voice sang the song about Ben. I didn’t know it when Thriller made it big. I hadn’t discovered it at the turn of the century. In fact, I might never have found it out had his death not surprised the media so much that they stopped all conversation about anything else for several days, thus rendering themselves desperate to say something—anything about Michael Jackson. It was during that never-ending, mind-numbing deluge of over-information that the word got out.
If there’s a medium that ought to be colour-blind, you’d think it would be radio. In this day and age it would not be unusual for an up-and-coming singer to be black without my knowing it, but that was certainly not the case when I was young. Skin colour was everything back in the days of early rock and roll, back in the days when Elvivs was making it big. In those days there was black radio and white radio. A white singer could take a song from black radio, a song never heard by whites, and turn that song into a hit.
Without being aware of it, I listened to white radio. It wasn’t a conscious choice. White radio was all we had here in Canada. When I was a teen-ager my transistor radio pumped out an endless drone of news about the riots that plagued cities and universities across the United States. I listened at first in wonder, then turned off the radio to save the batteries for the music. Unruly crowds of bottle-throwing building-burning mobs were of no interest to me. There was, I supposed, a certain level of inequity. But I did not fully understand that black people were not allowed to vote, or assume positions of leadership, or take certain jobs in hotels, or use washrooms that I would use. Even if I had understood, I would likely have said that all this trouble wasn’t likely to fix anything.
I liked to think that I was a civilized teen-ager, civilized and practical. If I had had dreams about how things could be, a vision of a better future, I might have wished that, by the time the early seventies rolled around, a famous singer could be black without my knowing it. I might have wished that it could take 38 years for me to hear the news. Then again, if I had fully understood how things really were, how much things would have to change in a very short time, I probably would have thought these wishes could never come true.
So I really am delighted to learn that Michael Jackson was black—even more delighted that I didn’t know it. There was no reason why I should have known it. Things had changed so much, yet so subtly that Michael Jackson was presented on my radio—my white radio. It’s a story I will try to remember when I want to hope things can change.

MUSICAL DOG

A dog named Pirate scratches gently but firmly on my leg whenever I play the piano. This behaviour perplexes me because Pirate is normally a calm and accepting dog. What’s more, other dogs named Benji and Spuds have cuddled on the floor near my pedal foot, or chosen to listen to the music from the warm spot at the piano end of the couch.

But Pirate scratches at my leg, the way he might scratch if he needed to go to the bathroom when I was talking on the phone. I try to ignore it, knowing from experience that he will opt to stay inside if I interrupt the song to open the door. Yes, I try to ignore him. Sometimes I make it all the way to the end of the song. But generally I stop and give him a pat on the head. That’s what he wants, a pat on the head. And could it be that this is my first dog with musical taste? It is, after all, impossible to pat and play at the same time.

EXPLORING PAST LIVES

I have always been one to scoff at the idea of the supernatural. The notion of past lives has been, for me, a literary device and nothing more. So it surprises me to say that, if, by some unimaginable chance I did have a past life, that life was almost certainly lived in Tennessee. I have been there twice in this life. I recognized this inexplicable affinity on the first visit, but was certain I would get over it as soon as I got home.
Everything in Tennessee seemed so familiar to me. I told myself it was just because I grew up with country music. I could sing you songs about Knoxville, about Gatlinburg, about Nashville. I could take you on a wild musical ride outrunning revenuers with a tank of moonshine in the back. Give me just a few opening chords and I could smell the air of Dolly Parton’s Tennessee Mountain Home. I told myself it was the long-remembered country music imagery that made me think I’d been there, made everything so coherent, so familiar.

I told myself it was the storytelling that made me feel I knew the people there. It was my love of the southern drawl, my admiration for those with such a superior grasp on my hobby. I assured myself that I most certainly could never have lived a past life in a state where they didn’t know we were having an election in Canada, a place where the notion of public transit has gone the way of the dodo.

But then a total stranger mentioned that East Tennessee University is offering a degree in storytelling with a minor in bluegrass music. And though I neither resigned my job at home, nor called the kids in Alberta with instructions to sell the house, both those ideas made a certain amount of sense. So here I am in Edmonton, a safe distance from ETSU, my Airmiles rewards reduced to nothing, generating great guffaws at the suggestion of a degree in storytelling with a minor in bluegrass, wondering when I might next visit Tennessee.

UNDERSTANDING PERSON-TO-KEYBOARD DYNAMICS THROUGH THE LENS OF RELATINSHIP THEORY: A SINGLE SUBJECT CASE STUDY

An electronic keyboard can give you the power and the inspiration to do things you never, ever could do before. Placed in the hands of a musical dreamer, it is a dangerous thing.
You can lay down a piano track, solid and steady, a fitting foundation for that which will be built—track 1. You can smooth the surface with soft strings—track 2. You can embellish the bridge with a flute accent—track 3. You can fancy up the transition between the bridge and the final verse with a few bells—track 4. You can give the last verse a grand finale with a dash of piano and strings—track 5. You can bring in a trumpet—track 6, and then take out the trumpet because it really does not belong there.
That sense of building something spectacular from the ground up can be intoxicating. Over and over you can listen to your creation, awed by its beauty, proud as your mother used to be when she stood back to admire the elaborate wedding cakes she had created. Nobody ever really understood how Mom could put so much time, artisstry and effort into something she knew would presently be eaten. Keyboard music , to be sure, is not like wedding cake. It can be captured. The following day it will be there for you—OR so you think.
But the next day, puelled by a fire of pleasant anticipation, you can press the ON switch to discover that the previous day’s creation has vanished without a trace. or maybe only part of your creation has vanished, likely the foundational piano accompaniment on track 1. Perhaps you will never know how it happened. Maybe there was some warning on the screen that a blind musician cannot read, or maybe there is a clue buried somewhere in the multilingual instruction manual, Or maybe there are gremlins in the house. And you know you will never hear that song again, which makes its memory all the sweeter as the days pass by.
Common sense tells you to put that keyboard up for sale. It has disappointed you, diverted your attention from important things, wounded you deeply. You bought it secdon-hand and some other sucker will buy it from you. You lived without it before and you can live without it again. Don’t be sad. Get angry! It has no right to treat you this way!
I have known the pain of losing the beautiful music. Common sense bids me to get over my keyboard And yet, to my surprise, I persist. It would be one thing if I had never heard that music, but it is quite another to have heard it and lost it. You can’t just walk away pretending it never happened. Surely the options are not entirely exhausted. If the whole song has disappeared, then I can start from scratch. If only the foundation is gone, perhaps a new foundation can be wedged in somehow.
Today, as I prepare for my daily routine of summoning common sense while listening to others talk about the hurts and longings of past and current relationships, it occurs to me that I have been fooled into thinking I had bought a keyboard. I bought more than a keyboard. I bought a relationship with a keyboard, a relationship founded on hope, trust and the expectation of a future fruitful joy.
So maybe that explains why I just can’t wait to start the whole song-building process all over again, a little wiser, though not much wiser. Any counsellor worth her salt surely knows that Relationships which begin with hope, trust and the expectation of a future fruitful joy tend to be governed more by emotion and longing than by common sense. You see it over and over again. The people who have those thrilling-yet-disappointing relationships are willing to try a lot of things and not too ready to give up.

MY KEYBOARD

I wanted an electronic keyboard, so I trolled the Internet for prospects. To my surprise I found one, just the one I wanted. And yes, I will admit that I was a little bit defensive when David said, “Really, it’s just a toy for you.” And yes, I’ll confess to temporarily forgetting a few guilty memories when he sighed and said, “Looks like we won’t have to plan anything for your two weeks summer vacation.” And yes, I did silently blame him for making these comments while aiding and abetting, which is to say that he drove me in the pouring rain all the way to the outskirts of the city to buy it, and said it didn’t matter to him how much money it cost. All he wanted was my happiness. Marriage, after all, is a complicated institution.
Okay, so maybe I can see why he called it a toy rather than an essential item. I really didn’t need a keyboard, given that I have a piano, and a guitar, and an accordion, and two little flutes from foreign countries and three drums and a rainstick and a tiny harmonica bearing a metal plate that says Grand Old Opry, Nashville Tennessee. It’s not as if there wouldn’t be any music in the house if I didn’t buy an electronic keyboard. And okay, so maybe I did get some new electronic device several times at Christmas, and maybe I was a little reclusive for a week or two every time this happened. But it couldn’t have been all that bad. Otherwise, why would he have been so accommodating about getting this new (second-hand) keyboard?
Still, marriage is a complicated institution, a dance of give and take. So I have been talking about using the keyboard at church after I get really good at operating it, which makes it seem like something a little more useful than a toy, and I try not to get so carried away with its 600 tones and five-song six-track memory that I forget to make supper. I’ve done pretty well at this too. In two weeks I’ve only forgotten supper a couple of times, and stayed up until 2:00 one time. And I’ve tried not to bother him when he’s on the toilet with questions about what the screen says and I‘ve tried not to ask him to read the instruction manual to me during the few minutes of free time that he generally devotes to the newspaper.
But it’s hard to do these things because I am having a lot of fun with that keyboard, even though my back is hurting so much these days that it’s hard to have fun at anything, , which is probably why he mistakenly thought it was a toy.