A little something different from the usual fare here, below. It meant something to me - maybe you’d like it as well. If not, well, I’m sure Drudge is up to something…
Last night we went down to Baltimore, to the Peabody Institute, part of Johns Hopkins, where a cousin (well, a cousin’s daughter) is majoring in voice, and had her senior recital.
She is an operatic soprano, I believe, and she was amazing. Pieces in four languages (German, French and Italian, along with English), and just a triumphant range. We took the little boy along - thinking we might force-feed him some culture - and he wound up covering his ears during some of the higher high notes. She noticed too - and joked about it with him afterward.
But the most important piece of music came at the end. It was composed by her father, my cousin, who was unable to be there last night. He is in a bed he now never leaves - he has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. You have probably heard it referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
He also was a fabulous musician (runs in the family, though the stream is significantly shallower on my side). As a young man he played in San Francisco Bay-area bands in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He became a Christian after getting married and thereafter played, and wrote, Christian music. The final piece of the recital was one of those songs; it was written in the early 1990s, and there’s actually a tape of him playing the piano and singing it, a duet - along with his oldest daughter, then five. She’s now in her early 20s - it was her recital last night.
So for the last song, she and her three sisters went up on the stage and sang the song. A beautiful melody; I don’t remember all the lyrics, but something like, “to help me walk… and God knows the way.”
And when the song was over, she clicked on a CD player. She’d had the tape transferred to CD, and there she was, five years old, with her daddy, singing the same song, same key.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, mine included.
The hell of it is they’d tried to set up a live video feed, Skype sort of thing, so he could watch it live. But it wasn’t working; he missed it. They did tape it, though, so he should get to see it.
And it made me think about kids and family and God and how unjust life can be. I’m not a religious person, you know that. And it’s hard to articulate the sadness. But there’s also something about it that’s not sad. He was there last night. And I guess I was just devastated at how much his family misses him, and loves him.
Sometimes you get a glimpse into what it really is all about. Last night, simply, was one of those times.
