Morning Thanks--A Mother's Day Visit

The crowd on Sunday was a little thin. I'm not sure why. Most residents of the Home don't leave often, but it was a special day, Mother's Day, and lots of residents are mothers. Who knows?--they might have been gone.

As always, a local church provided the chapel service. That's the pastor up there behind the podium. I've heard him before at the Home. He does a very fine job. It wasn't a big production, just the preacher and the pianist, a rather ordinary Sunday chapel. I'm not sure he even mentioned Mother's Day.

But it was, so I couldn't help thinking of my mother, who's been gone now for several years. She would love chapels in the Home because they're very simple, and we never sing hymns nobody knows. If I had a quarter for every "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" we've sung in the last two years, I'd be well heeled.

The pianist didn't look like my mother. Mom was bigger, and I don't think my mom would have worn that gaudy pink--it's just not her style. But I couldn't help think about my mom on Sunday afternoon because that elderly lady started with a prelude she'd taken along, an old favorite of hers, I suppose. That yellow sheet music on the piano--that's what she played, one of those rather spectacular old hymn variations featuring endless arpeggios leaping all over the keyboard, a frilly masterpiece of the genre my mother loved so much that, as a boy, I heard them everyday of my life.

I didn't see a ghost on Sunday afternoon. Mom didn't mysteriously return. There isn't much drama here, but I thought of her when this elderly pianist started in on one of those pieces that makes sure to hit every key. I didn't see Mom, but I heard her, and that kind of visit, for her, would have been just fine.

In her decline, we were a day's travel apart, so I didn't see her all that often. But one of the visits I remember was the time she told me that the piano was going because her hands just didn't have it in them anymore. She couldn't control her fingers in the way she needed to, so that was it. No more piano.

She wasn't complaining that I remember, and she didn't cry or fall apart when she told me; but I remember that day because I had to struggle to think of my mother not being able to live at the piano.

And that's what I thought of when the church's pianist, the lady in the pink, started in on that glittering prelude--I remembered the time Mom told me she could no longer play the piano.

And that's what made me think of that elderly pianist as if she were my mother, who would be, had she lived, pretty much the same vintage. There Mom was, up front, her heavenly dexterity renewed, playing exactly the kind of flashy piece she would have loved had someone asked her to do the prelude at the Home on Sunday afternoon.

It was nice to be so visited on Mother's Day. 

This morning's thanks is for Sunday chapel and the elderly pink lady at the piano. I didn't get her name, but then, I suppose, I could say I already knew it.