Three blocks from my house is an old people's home filled with old folks with nowhere to go but slowly to their graves. Many are aware and cheerful in their plight, others are silently resigned to their fate. The home lies on my bicycle route I take for exercise on Sundays. I like to stop and visit with the seniors as they while away the time in the lobby. Mary is an eighty-seven year old ex music teacher. She knows a few arias by heart and sings them in a wobbly soft voice. She repeats stories of her long gone husband who taught violin. The stories are quite detailed but are repeated word for word ten minutes later. Lou used to play piano in a bar. He bangs away at the beat up grand piano donated by a long dead resident. He knows only two or three songs as he keeps time with a stamping foot. The sprinkling of listeners avidly sponge up the sound for little comes their way in the form of entertainment. A lady wheels her chair up to me and asks me to play the piano for her. Some part of this request is to get the old man away from his pounding on the keys for a moment. I ask Lou if he would mind if I took a turn. He gladly gives up the bench and I start to play the old songs. The audience nods their heads in time and memory as I lead from one standard to another. I play some songs I wrote myself, more for my own entertainment than for theirs. They all clap when I'm finished and they drift off to their rooms. These few minutes of conversation and song mean a lot to these lost souls. It supplies a focus of interest that serves the whole week of gossip at lunch and makes their passage through their daily purgatory a little more bearable. |
