Carried Away

This afternoon I played piano at a new ward in the Jewish Home, one that housed Russian-speaking residents. I went through my usual eclectic repertoire, leaned a little heavier on Tchaikovsky and several times during the hour, an enthusiastic Russian man shouted out “You make us so happy!” 

 

On the way out of the Home, a resident in a wheelchair was sitting at another piano in the lobby trying to pick out pieces she used to play. It was hit and miss, but sometimes she found all the notes to Fur Elise and a bit of Mozart’s Rondo a la Turk. I tried to join in on the bass, either accompanying her or doubling the melody and we had a few moments of satisfying connection. Ah, the power of music.

 

Two hours earlier, I hosted the first meeting of the 34^th year of the Men’s Group and began by playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. XIV on the piano. In all those years, I’ve played piano for them like this exactly once. Minutes before I was ready to play, my wife was on her way out the door when she got a call from her cousin telling her that her Aunt Lil was dying. Lil was the last of the three sisters that included Karen’s Mom and at 96 years old, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. And yet it was. Karen had been making plans to see Lil in February, while Lil’s ticking clock was making other plans. While I was playing, I imagined her listening far away in Florida and that brought an extra dimension to the beauty of this piece. 

 

Two hours before that, I was teaching two first-grade classes at The San Francisco School, the last of my three-day reunion with a place that still resonates with such power and beauty in the way that it gives children exactly what they need to be the happy kids they deserve to be. Every one of the fourteen classes I taught was a jewel, but my last first class brought it all yet one step higher. I decided to end the class with a little seated Singing Time with the kids preparing to learn or remember the wonderful repertoire of songs associated with the upcoming Martin Luther King celebration. We began with “Free at Last” and watching their sincere faces singing with so much gusto and passion was an icing on an already delicious cake. But it got better.

 

At the end, one girl raised her hand and looked at me and said, “For a moment while we were singing, I didn’t know where I was.” She seemed to have had a little spiritual epiphany, not exactly an out-of-body experience, but maybe more an in-the-body experience of all her nerves, muscles and breath dancing together to help her forget for one moment that she was a separate little identity in a place called a school. In fact, at 6-years-old, the same kind of experience I see the elders sometimes have at 96-years old. Music is for every one at every age in every place. 

 

Lil passed away an hour after that phone call. I can only hope that she also had the sense of forgetting that leads to the most profound kind of remembering, the kind that takes us out of places with names and brings us wholly, completely, home. 

 

It was a good day.