The Organ Recital
There is strength in the songs we sing with others.
When I have dinner with my mom’s friends (who are my current parent surrogates as I became an orphan exactly two years ago to the day), my usual entry question of “How are you guys?” is sometimes followed by a tale telling of surgeries and ailments. And I am interested, because I care about how these humans are doing, and because I am glad it’s not me. Yet.
Invariably, Carol will finish on a wry note with, “Well, that’s the organ recital for today” a double entendre which is hilarious because they are intricately beautiful and skilled chorale singers and there is one amongst them that is an actual organist. As in, one who has, in towering cathedrals, played organ recitals.
These cool cats are in their 70’s, I think to myself.
They’ve lived pretty big and adventuresome lives, I reason.
Hanging around people 20 years older does make one feel a bit more springy, I will never admit out loud.
And then.
The other day, we had a happy hour at a distillery for a long gone friend returned home (the tall one in the pic above). She gathered a clutch of our common humanity around her, from 30 year old young moms to 50+ social media stars, accomplished authors, business women, professional soul soothers, kickass restauranteurs, mouthy broads the lot of them.
And amidst chatter about new jumpsuits and where to eat later, I fell into a conversation where the punch line was, “Listen, I love my sexy little CPAP machine. I can’t WAIT to tuck in and sleep like a princess.” As she was talking about how it cured her postpartum breathing issues, how much better she slept and had become nearly superhuman in her waking life, I had never heard such sleep porn!
OF COURSE I had to counter with “Well are you measuring your HRV?” as I thrust my Oura-ringed finger in her face and did that definitely-not-annoying thing of pulling up the app and showing people my nightly sleep score. Across the bar, a friend called out that she wanted to try my ring on before she left, while another started talking about how she just started her Estradiol HRT patch and was considering a GLP1 to battle inflammation.
As I finished my gin and tonic, before I moved on to a craft NA bevvie because I actually didn’t want a resting heart rate of 110bpm at 2am that night, it hit me. Right here in this gorgeously hip, plant-decked, twinkle lit bar, I was at an organ recital.
No, I was IN an organ recital.
I come from good German stock, and for most of my life I didn’t know my doctor’s name. I have never been ridiculously fit, no no no. I’ve been a roundish short girl with tits and ass, who can climb and balance, who loves heights, played soccer, ran when I felt like it, slept little, worked hard, ate mostly well, drank a lot (but never to extended extremes), and had good hair. I pushed out one kid without any aftershock, had one knee surgery from an old college soccer injury, and before I got my first readers at 45, I had 20/20 vision my whole life.
That’s the woman I miss. The one who plowed forth never thinking about sleep scores, the one who always bounced back.
Growing up, when they told us that women disappear in their 50s, I believed the conventional wisdom that it was because society (read: men) stopped looking at them, shifting the gaze of relevancy to younger models. But I understand it better now, and as I’ve tipped to before: what if the vanishing is us? What if we no longer recognize the self we have spent a lifetime building?
Today, at 54, I actually have an appointment with a knee guy to look into: bursitis. I’m sorry but bursitis sounds like something Charles Nelson Reilly would have had on a very special episode of Love Boat. It is not something I would expect for a woman deciding on which platform shoes goes best with #sparklepants at the James Beard Awards.
I wonder if I really did think that getting older just meant battling wrinkles and regretting the baby-oil tanning tendencies of the 1980s, and not so much understanding that your old ass ear bones can microscopically flake off causing such debilitating vertigo that you become stapled to the earth and can’t move.
So this is where I think the organ recital starts to crescendo from the background with undertones of Handel’s Messiah (which my glorious mother sang like a seraphim), because there is strength in the songs we sing with others.
And by god, if one thing was modeled for me, it was strength.
This good German stock handed down to me came with one hitch: a disinclination to weakness. Not in an abusive and crushing way, never as an aversion to weakness in others. Only in the self and only as a survival skill.
And no wonder, the woman who lovingly raised me with wit and charm was a survivor of war, of refugee camps, of crossed ocean immigration, of the American 1950’s, of a college education with English as a second language, of a full hysterectomy because of the Dalkon Shield, of a crappy marriage, of financial fuckery because of that, and of so many other things women have had to survive.
But she walked around the neighborhood almost every night. And she mowed her own lawn, painted her own house, insisted on shoveling her own driveway (mostly), gardened all summer long and played pirates with Jake in her yard for hours. She was hiking Ireland in her 70’s and the January day in her 80’s before I took her to the hospital to figure out what was wrong with her bloodwork, she had been raking her roof of the last snowfall. She’d had a hemoglobin of 4 (normal is 15), and she was out raking her roof. Leukemia was the only thing that ever bested her. And it did it, with her handshake, six months later.
I miss her strength and wisdom and sharp wit and would give anything to sit at her table and wax on about change and the wild ride. But I started Pickle because she and I made a pact about sharing the real deal, that we’d be honest about what was happening, what had happened, and talk openly about things so that others could see and feel seen.
There’s strength in storytelling, and I’m confident the women of my daughter’s age will walk into this time of life with a full head of knowledge and the best sun-screened skin of all humanity.
And so the recital commences, Picklers. And we go forth to amplify the light.
And as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. Nelson Mandela
As a pre-cursor:
The Last Peony
If you are just joining, please know there is a part one to this saga called The Long Goodbye, in case you need to catch up.
love
And now, the Organ recital and it's attendees have not met because of back surgery, lung and mobility issues. The organ plays on, but without the audience that makes the songs more harmonic. Hopefully summer will bring more recitals. And you can share your song.