Thursday, August 31, 2006

In The Works

For quite some time, my life has been one experiment after another as I deal with "middle adulthood". For the past 2 months I've been driving Miss Daisy's, and while I've met over a thousand seniors during this period I still don't feel that I know enough about them to comment. It's hard work. Not digging-ditches hard. Threading a needle hard, and when I've learned more I'll say more. Last night I took a break from getting involved as more than a bystander and I knew this had to happen because I don't give good bystand. An 80-something woman was playing a piano and quite well so I moved closer to better appreciate the music. She had but two other listeners, another elderly lass and her 40-something son, so she smiled at my approach and asked me to join in as the three of them sang to her rendition of Impossible Dream.The full force of my lungs can knock a birdcage from it's perch so I responded with a toned down Don Quixote and since I'm nothing if not a ham it was a verse or two before I realized the piano had gone silent and the only singer was myself.

They are so very starved for entertainment that it doesn't take much to convert them from participants into an audience. My voice is what it is but it is loud and within several minutes the listeners had grown by several more until by the end of Lancelot's Theme it had reached a score. This was late, terribly late for them in so very many ways but 9'ish of the PM is slumber time for most of the residents and I was glad for that. They moved to physically restrain me after I'd given it the best shot I had at that hour, and I'd have hated to displease a throng because the want and need of so relatively few was a palpable thing. Any more and the guilt would have frozen me to the spot until my vocal cords went fray, but I extricated myself as gently as possible and bid them good evening. I've seen drug addicts as their eyes lit upon a fix, starving men as the smell of food reached them, and this was as intense.

More than interesting.

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