Let me tell you how time flies – how things change really fast. You see; it seems like only yesterday I was singing with friends in a Sweet Adelines quartette. It’s been eight years. Four years ago I was playing in a band. Four years ago my mother was still driving and walking and she and dad came to an outdoor band concert. That same fall, they drove three and a half hours to share Thanksgiving dinner at my post in the Needles district of Canyonlands. That was after knee surgery for my Mom and she was recuperating nicely. I didn’t even go back for Christmas that year. Instead, I drove from Natural Bridges National Monument to Durango to spend a few days with my daughter. By the time another year rolled around, I was meeting my parents in Monticello Utah to deliver a mobility scooter to my mother. Three years ago Mom was still driving. And she could still drive well. Dad would back the car out of the garage, pull it up by the ramp and Mom would navigate down the ramp with walker or scooter and step into the car. Dad would then load the scooter on the rack to the rear of the car and they were off. 17 months ago Dad had hip replacement surgery and we realized at that time Mom could no longer drive or live alone. We had to nearly lift her into the car. She sometimes got stuck in the bathroom. She died 15 months later after having been dependent for a year and bedfast for two weeks. Just last year I was living and working in Page AZ. Just last year we had no suspicion of Coronavirus. Just one year ago my son purchased my childhood home from my parents and embarked on a remodeling project-completely upgrading the existing 55-year-old house and finishing the basement and garage. Just last Thanksgiving, I drove to Durango to share Thanksgiving with my daughter in a threadbare and minimally furnished apartment. Three months later I became the roommate in that apartment and was almost immediately solitary due to Coronavirus. During these past four months my mom passed. My daughter returned to our apartment after two months of care-taking for my Mom. I am singing in a vocal group again – albeit virtually – and our apartment is more than adequately furnished.
What massive changes time has wrought. Changes, not just in my life, but globally. We will host Mom’s memorial service in early August but we will host it virtually – likely with greater attendance on Facebook Live and Youtube Live than can be achieved in a socially distanced church building. But through it all-whether online or in person-music-lots and lots of music. Times have changed massively. Our enjoyment and dependence on music for entertainment and comfort has not changed – only the method of delivery.
Monthly Archives: July 2020
Music knows no age or genre
I was working on recording a Father’s Day offering for my dad so I pounded away at the keyboard all morning trying to get the nuances of the old-fashioned gospel hymn just right. It must be relentlessly taxing on my roommate in such situations, I thought. After all, she is much younger than I, and an educated and trained musician in her own right.
Somewhat wryly I smiled, “Old church music! If they only knew; sounds like ragtime straight out of a barroom, doesn’t it?”
“It’s perfect,” she said, surprising me with her reply. I had forgotten she is an anthropologist. “It was upbeat, stylish, action-packed, bouncy, full of energy – just what every generation wants from their music.”
True music is ageless and knows no genre. It is us – the linear generations- that place restrictions and prejudices; we who say, “that’s folk, that’s classical, that’s religious, I don’t do old stuff.” Ridiculous! Music always and forever will be an outcropping of the soul. It may be a mathematical formula or a stream of consciousness; an opera or a rap; but first and foremost it is spiritual – an outward expression of what is within.
Meanwhile, I continue to chip away at a larger project: Mom’s memorial service. We want to do it right. It was she from whom we got the music. It needs to be upbeat, stylish, full of energy. And of course, it will be very mid-century Christian. I debated aloud about assigning my younger son a part. All my children are musicians but the youngest is the one who parleys in the hardened vocabulary and angst of his generation on punk stages and in dusky bars four nights a week. Would he stoop to old-fashioned gospel? Sadly, I was projecting the embarrassment and rebellion of my own young adult years on him.
“Phil is not like that,” she said. He is not a snob. He loves Music. “Music is music with him.” Music is an outward expression of what is within. There is an ocean of love in that young man – whether pain or joy.
How fortunate we are – every one of us in this family – to have music as the go to pressure valve – the way to express what is really inside – to say what can’t be put in words.
What do you need to say through music today? What do you need to hear?