We have a few concerts at work every month. Usually the people who play music for us are known quantities. Every once in a while I’ll hire somebody new because we need a musician for a certain event, or because they came highly recommended, or used to play for us a long time ago and want to come back. Occasionally I’ll hire someone because they want to play for free, and it’s worth the risk.
I don’t always stay to hear the concerts after I introduce them. I like to when I can, but sometimes I’ve got to drive, sometimes I’ve got to work on next month’s calendar, that sort of thing.
If residents like the performer, that’s great. They’ll say so, warmly, the next time they see me in the hallway:
“Danny, that one was great! We’ve got to have them back.”
“That was a good one, Danny.”
David said “Zo-wee” once, just like Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot.
If anything, I get too much credit if they like the performer.
On the other hand, if they didn’t like the singer, everybody acts real furtive and embarrassed about it, like he was a close personal friend of mine, an old Army buddy who saved my life once, and if I hear a word of criticism about him I’ll blow my lid. It’s like pulling teeth, trying to get people to admit they didn’t like a concert:
“Danny, did you hear that musician the other day?…Where did you find him?…All right…”
“I didn’t hear him. What did you think?”
“Oh, well…”
“No, I want to know. I couldn’t stay, and I want to know if people liked his style.”
“Oh, I don’t know…”
“Listen, he’s nothing to me. Did you think he was any good or not? I tell you, I don’t care if he lives or dies. I need to know if you like him.”
When I’m driving, I default to the jazz or classical station. Lately the classical station’s been running nonstop ads about Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet at the San Francisco Symphony where the tagline is “Some love stories whisper. Romeo and Juliet burns.” This drives me crazy every time I hear it, and it makes me so mad I have to turn off the radio. It’s a stupid thing to get mad about, but why in the world would you put whispering and burning in opposition to one another? Whisper and shout, fine. Smolder and burn, also fine. Why mix your imagery like that?
Tamaris likes to listen to Dave Brubeck. I saw that from her entry in the resident directory a while back, so now when I drive her, I make sure Dave Brubeck is playing. Once or twice I threw Bill Evans into the mix. She’s got the stateliest walk of anybody I ever saw. She’s extraordinarily small, classically proportioned — you would never think to take her smallness lightly, I mean — with the gravest, most serious voice. Come to think of it, her smallness gives the impression of the most extraordinarily concentrated personal power. It’s terrific when she laughs. Like a lawn mower covered in velvet.
Before she moved out, Norah liked to sing along to the Mamas and the Papas with the windows rolled down. I miss her all the time.
Back to KDFC. Last week they played Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” as part of the Classical California Countdown. I forgot how much of a kick that song gives me. Not just me, either. I started playing it five, six times a day when I was driving, and almost everybody commented on it.
Miku started conducting along with it spontaneously in the car. Forceful, joyful jabbing. Whenever I take her to the audiologist she will politely, deprecatingly discourage conversation: “I can’t hear a thing.” Whenever I pick her up from the audiologist, whatever they’ve done to either her ears or her hearing aids, she is delighted to talk, delighted to hear again.
“This song really fills you with oomph,” she said, jabbing the air.
I jabbed the air a little bit myself.
I love the feeling of pretending to conduct an orchestra. It’s such a baffling kind of movement. I can obviously never tell what any given movement of a conductor is meant to communicate, but it always feels like you ought to be able to figure it out through sheer force of feeling, the way you feel like you ought to be able to speak French or something as a little kid if you just cock your head in the right direction and speak with confidence.
The funny thing about working in senior living is, you might really pride yourself on your knowledge of the past, but someone there who lived through it is always going to outdo you with “They Just Chopped Down the Old Apple Tree” or “About a Quarter to Nine.” I think of myself as pretty knowledgable about the Great American Songbook in ordinary circumstances, but I’m getting smoked all the time here.
I worked overtime almost every day for a couple of weeks while my assistant was on vacation. It was tiring, but sort of wonderful to stay late and wander the hallways after dark, making deliveries. One night I was on the third floor distributing calendars and singing “For Me and My Gal.” The hallways at work have terrific acoustics.
It was late enough that I felt I could sing in the hallways, but not so late that I worried about waking anybody who might have been sleeping. Winnie had her door open. She was waiting for a med tech. She stopped me and asked me to sing it again. It’s one of her favorite songs. So I stood just outside of her door while she stood just inside it, and she brought up an oscillating hand just beside her ear and she sang very careful, very excellent harmony with me.
I like Winnie a lot. She’s kind and a little wistful and she’s from the same part of the Midwest as my father’s people. She always gives you the sense that she wants to come along with you, whenever you’re walking somewhere, of wanting a conversation to go on a little longer, of wishing to be brought somewhere, and whenever I walk away from her I always feel a little unhappy, like I’m forgetting something important.
It was beautiful, singing that song together, and looking at one another while we sang.
Now my father was a charmingly musical man. Probably he still is. Sometimes he used to sit down at vacant pianos in big department stores and play a couple of show tunes. He played the piano at home, too, and when all three of us kids would visit our parents’ house as adults at the same time, Dad would often cap off an evening together by playing us all off to our bedrooms, singing a little louder to carry through the hallways, himself being the last to go to bed.
“For Me and My Gal” was often the last song my father and I would sing at the piano together before we’d all break up. My brother was a very gifted musician but not much of a singer, and didn’t much care for the Great American songbook. My mother could only just carry a tune, and my sister wasn’t much better.
I couldn’t play, but I could sing well and harmonize pretty reliably, most of the time, and felt often, seated next to my father on the bench, that I had inherited from him the most and the best of his personality, that I was more like him than any of his other children, and that we both knew it and were pleased to know it; that I most perfectly refined and represented his taste, even if I could not replicate his religious outlook in quite the same way, that I was the most elemental part of himself shot forth from a bow, and I never felt this more strongly than when we sang together.
My parents played a lot of Dan Fogelberg when we kids were growing up. My sister and I would sometimes listen to “Leader of the Band” as adults in a sort of gratifyingly, self-indulgently miserable anticipation of our father’s (far-off, certain, impossible) death.
Once, my sister and I listened to that song on a road trip together. After we both concluded the usual talk about how dreadful and unbearable his death would someday be, I said, unprompted, with no reason to say it, “But just give me a reason to turn on him, and I will.”
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lovely.
This one really hit home for a number of reasons. Thanks for articulating so clearly how you can love and even maybe miss parts of your relationships with the family you're estranged from.