May 8th was
choir appreciation Sunday at our church.
Our pastor was out of town at her son’s college graduation and choir
members were asked in her absence to deliver responses to one of three
questions: Why Church? Why Music? Why Worship?
When I saw that simple question: Why Music? in connection with church, I
immediately remembered a talk I once had with my Dad on that very subject. Here’s that talk, along with some background
on my Dad and our family.
My Dad turned 42 the year I was born. And though math is not
my strong suit when I was ten he was 52 and he was 62 when I was twenty. So as a kid I thought of him as old. I never knew him with hair. He was a farmer. He milked cows, sowed oats, made hay, shucked
corn and did all the things farmers did back then and that was how I knew
him. He hardly ever went to town. He lit Camel unfiltered cigarettes with a Zippo
lighter and snored. He laughed easily
and was very kind. As I got older I came
to realize he was soft hearted.
It took a while for me to imagine my Dad having a life other
than the one I saw him living. I’m not
sure kids, at least kids when I was growing up, grasp that life can change or
that your parents had choices and that things happened to them, both good and
bad. I don’t know when I started to put
the narrative of my Dad’s life together but when I did I was astounded at what
I found.
We had an upright piano in the living room that no one could
play. If you opened the lid on the bench
there was sheet music no one could read.
I take that back. My brother
played the trombone and my sister played the coronet in fleeting stints with
the school band. So they might have been
capable of reading that music but they didn’t.
Mom and Dad gave the piano away, to cousins I think. Iowa cousins?
I’m not sure anyone knows now.
In the attic there was a bass drum, a wood block, a cymbal
and a snare drum. They had always been
there way off in a corner. At some point
at the dinner table, which from the time I was nine was made up of only Mom and
Dad and I, I asked whose drums those were.
“They were mine,” my Dad said, in the past tense.
“When did you play them?”
“When I was in high school.
I was in a combo.”
“What songs did you play?”
“None you would know.”
And that was that. My
Dad played the drums?
My Dad went back to church at some point, maybe when I was
in Junior High. We would sit in the same
pew every Sunday, Dad on the left and Mom on the right. When we stood and sang hymns I sometimes held
the hymnal together with Mom and sometimes with Dad. My Dad’s voice was smooth and strong, and he
sang on key. When the notes got too high
he would drop an octave. Sometimes he
saw it coming and started an octave lower at the beginning of a phrase but
sometimes it was just one note to the next.
I learned to do the same thing. I
thought that was improvisation.
My grandfather, my Dad’s dad and also a farmer, died in an
auto accident when my father was eighteen.
His mother tried to hang on to their tenant farm but it became too
difficult so she moved her family of four to Oak Park and they all got jobs in
the city. My Dad worked downtown. I couldn’t picture my Dad, who always wore
big overalls on the farm, in downtown Chicago.
It seemed unreal. He told me once
that the office building where he worked was near Symphony Hall and that sometimes
after work he would go there to see if they had leftover single tickets. When he could buy one cheap he would go in by
himself.
“I never knew music that beautiful existed,” he said. “I would sit in that big hall with all those
people, more people than live in Danvers, and the music from the instruments
would fill up the place and sort of wrap itself around me. The sound was amazing. And I didn’t know a soul there.” When you’re a farm kid from a small town it’s
hard to get used to being anonymous. My
Dad and his first wife, also a farm girl, left Chicago and came back to her Dad’s farm to raise
their family.
My Dad sang on the tractor.
I could hear him singing sometimes when I took him lunch in the
field. He made up new lyrics to old
songs. He didn’t whistle, at least when
I knew him. He hated doctors and that
extended to dentists. Dental care and my
Dad were not acquainted. When his teeth
went bad I think he lost the ability to whistle. Or maybe he never had it. There are some
things we never know about one another.
When my Mom sang in church she belted out the hymns. She was off key, scratchy, sometimes not even
close to the melody. She didn’t seem to
care. When I looked up at her as we sang
in church she smiled back broadly. I don’t
know if she realized how bad she sang but if she did she didn’t care.
When my Dad was thirty six his first wife, Irene, died in
childbirth. He brought a new baby boy
back to the farm to join two brothers and a sister but his wife never came home
again. And the next morning, and every
morning and evening after that for thirty two years, he had to milk the cows,
who looked at him dumbly that next morning, unaware his life had caved in. Dad, his motherless children, the cows sheep
and chickens all lived together on his father in law’s farm, where my Mom and I
would also later live.
When I was old enough to imagine and appreciate that
experience, probably after I became a father, I asked my Dad how he got through
that part of his life.
“I’m not sure how I did it.
But a lot of people helped me.”
“Were you going to church then?” Dad had a big gap in church attendance. That’s another story.
“Yeah.”
“Did going to church help after Irene died?”
“Yes it did.” He was
quiet for a moment.
“I would go to church and the women there would help me with
the kids. It seemed like the only time I
could sit still and be with other people comfortably. I was in a fog for quite a while.” He kept
thinking.
“It wasn’t the sermons.
I could barely concentrate on anything, let alone words in a
sermon. My mind would wander back to
Irene and my troubles. It was the
music. It was that good organ music they
play before church starts when everyone is quiet. It calmed me down. And the hymns. Oh God the hymns felt so good.” He became animated as he talked.
“It felt so wonderful to sing after I had been so sad. It helped just to hear my voice blend in with
the other people in church. I couldn’t
talk to them about what happened to me but I knew they cared for me and singing
with them, all of us on the same beat with the same words, I think sometimes it
was the best I felt all week.”
He paused.
“Yeah church helped me a lot. But it wasn’t the talking. When I needed it most it was the music. It lifted me up.”
Beautiful,Dave. Youre an amazing writer. What a touching narrative. Thank you!
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