Songs of Living

Occasionally, when I am in elementary school, my mother dusts off her vinyl records and lets my sisters and I dance to the Village People or a recorded Blues Brothers concert. She tries to teach us about disco, but most of the time we just spell out the letters of Y.M.C.A.

McKenzie is one of the quietest kids in her kindergarten class.  My mother volunteers to help with the class Halloween party, and the half-dozen or so parents involved decide musical chairs would be a good game for their age group.  As the game proceeds and the first few kids who didn’t get a chair become restless, someone suggests that they dance while the music plays and freeze when it stops between rounds.  As five dancers turn into nine and then ten, their entertainment seems to be more of an attraction than winning the main game with the chairs.  Indeed, all of the students along the sidelines dance, including McKenzie.  While variations of Monster Mash echo from the boom box, most of the class just jumps up and down and in circles.  In the midst of this chaos, my sister rocks to the beat with a hand on her hip and the other pointing alternately to the floor and the ceiling in her best impression of John Travolta on Saturday Night Fever.

My mother takes piano lessons from her aunt when she is young.  She makes sure my sisters and I also take lessons when we are kids, though somehow Sara gets to opt out after completing her level one songbooks.  For several years, our old upright piano resides in the basement, as far from the television as possible.  I complain about practicing most songs, unless one catches my interest right away.  My mother hardly plays, but every so often she sits on the bench, her fingertips remembering which keys were smooth and which were prickly from the missing ivory.  She warms up with Chopsticks after identifying middle C as the cleanest and smoothest key on the board (when I first began lessons, I actually thought this specific note stood out as much from the other keys on every piano).  From there, she remembers exactly one other song from her youth.  Bobcat Boogie is only four lines long and serves as an introduction to syncopated rhythm, but it is my mother’s song.  She plays through it slowly at first, hitting and correcting wrong notes, readjusting the rhythm in places as the melody comes back to her.  She plays these rudimentary versions quietly, but as her confidence returns, so does the volume.  And my sisters and I like it that way.  Her left hand introduces the song with two measures of the baseline, and then the right fingers join with an up-tempo dance on the black keys.  Each hand taps out its own variation of the song until the final four or five measures when they mirror each other and jump to a halt.  The energy from their notes invigorates my mother, and she plays faster and louder with each repeat.  My sisters and I make up dances behind her, and when the music stops we clap and beg her to play again, and then we jump up and down and move our feet faster as the tempo speeds up.  She plays for us until her fingers, out of shape from the lack of practice, can no longer keep up.  For years I try to play this song but can never quite get the rhythm right.  Now that my mother has lost the ability to play, this song is nothing more than clumps of printed notes on a page.

On a sunny day in March, I drive my mother to Omaha.  We have an uneventful lunch at a café chain then meet my father at the Medical Center.  A neurologist diagnoses my mother with dementia.  When we leave, my parents buckle into one car and I stand on the nearby sidewalk, fumbling for something in my purse.  My eyes water behind dark sunglasses.  As the car pulls into the intersection and rolls away, my mother smiles broadly and leans over my stoic father to wave at me.  My father nods in my direction, and we share the same how could this happen? look.  As I watch from the street corner, I can’t stop thinking about that absurd scene.  My father and I know my mother has just been given a death sentence, but my mother is extremely excited because she got to see and spend time with us.  The drive to my dorm takes an hour on the Interstate and I listen to a new CD my cousin gave me—the soundtrack to The Fountain.  Though I haven’t seen the movie, the music feels odd, intense and tortured, and as if it is grieving.  The composition wails through the car speakers, muffling the sound of my own crying.  The tormented melody plays on my computer for the next three straight days while I lock myself in my room, only attending class once as a way to think about something other than reality.  Over the following weeks, this music plays less and less often, and soon I cannot listen to the songs at all without remembering those first, horrible days when we learned there was no cure for my mother.

A few years later, we see the new True Grit movie at the theater, and I give my father the soundtrack.  The melodies are familiar but the overtones are slower, reflective, nostalgic, as if contemplating the idea that even though we yearn for the past, we might find a purpose in the present.  The soundtrack resonates so strongly with my father that he wears out four CDs in two years simply by listening to them so much. 

My mother dances more as the disease progresses. Not ballroom style professional moves, but she taps her feet and head to the beat of television theme songs and catchy advertisement tunes.  If something has a strong base, she will stand up and sway her hips, as if compelled to move to the music.  She does this when I play a specific song on the piano that begins with a few staccato D’s and A’s in Bass clef.  When she hears those opening measures, no matter what she is doing at the time, she begins to bounce.  Once or twice she is so enraptured in the simple tune that she jumps up and down during the refrain.  As a family, we watch and marvel at how completely tied to the song she is.  I play again and again.  My mother continues to dance.  I start the song one more time. My mother sighs and groans a little, but her heels pick up the beat and she bounces around the room, her legs taking orders not from her brain but from the stanzas.