Yesterday, on the Feast Day of the Holy Family, I sang in a church choir for the first time since the 90s. Well, if you don’t count Christmas Eve—which was joyfully noisy in the best possible way, but a story for another time.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m all about singing my little lungs out, and church is a low commitment way to do that. And! Now we know that it’s good for the body as well as the soul—because scientists have once again found funding to confirm the obvious.
It was an uncomfortable service for me. The first readings were about honoring and respecting your parents. And the voices of the lectors, who are coached and supported so beautifully, seemed for the first time hateful. Condescending. I am not keen on those particular biblical texts.
Also, I am used to sitting with all the people, not squished in the back corner. I began to wonder if this choir thing was a good idea.
Although, they do need sopranos. “We have a glory of altos,” one woman told me. “Sometimes we get mercenary sopranos. But you’re a true soprano. It’s good to have you.” It is satisfying to be appreciated.
Still. I sat through the readings and homily wondering what in tarnation I’d gotten myself into.
After the service, I introduced my friend Barbara to one of the other sopranos in the choir, Ellen, the kind woman who sits next to me and nudges when I sing in the wrong place or don’t know what’s going on with the hand jives. These women are both grandmothers who relocated to be near the grandchildren. Barbara meets with a little group of women in the same boat, and Ellen is new here and eager to make friends.
While we were chatting, I mentioned that I didn’t think I liked sitting in the way back corner with the choir, and that I missed sitting with Barbara.
And then Ellen said that some people will sing a year and then take a year off to sit with their spouses and families. I felt the urge to clarify that Barbara is a mom-like person for me and not actual family, but I didn’t have the opportunity. Barbara was voicing some skepticism about that plan, wondering why you’d need to be near a spouse.
But then, as if thinking aloud, she mentioned that she had noticed older couples holding hands or touching during the service.
She paused, and then observed, “I guess you’d want to be as close as possible in the time you have left.”
Poignant.
***
On the way home, I stopped to collect a bike trailer I loaned to a friend, and loading it into my trunk, I nicked my knuckle. But I didn’t feel it, had no idea I was injured.
“Nicole, you are bleeding profusely.”
Indeed. Blood everywhere.
He fetched the first aid kit. Then, as he was swabbing up the blood and getting out the Band-Aid, I felt a different poignancy. We single people are touched, cared for, so seldom.
Aside from my time in the hospital, the last time someone had fixed an owie was when I was twelve.
I so keenly remember my stepmother getting out a Band-Aid and then, after inadvertently touching the pad, she threw it away. I was shocked that someone would waste a Band-Aid for me.
When I recently asked her about it, she did not remember that incident. And she was somewhat sore amazed that of all the things she did for us children, this small gesture had made the most enormous impression.
***
Later that day, on my afternoon stroll, I was on the same stretch of road where I’d been talking with my son several years ago, in the spot where he’d told me about meeting a particular someone.
So I called him. Reported about the readings, honoring one’s parents, my discomfort.
He groaned, and then growled, “Respect.”
“Yes,” I said, giggling. “I realized pretty early on that the best way for me to honor and respect my parents was to never have any contact with them whatsoever. Which was likely not what the first century Palestinian writers were getting at.”
To which he replied, in a wee but emphatic voice, “Worry about yo-self!”
And that was just right.
Because isn’t that what makes family—the appropriately-placed worry? Family are the persons with whom we know when to intervene and when to leave be. The ones we trust to worry on our behalf. And the people we trust enough to ask for help when we need it.