Another Silent Hallelujah, Part 1

Mary

Couldn't even hum along

   What is it about Handel's Messiah that renders me speechless?  A year and a half ago I was rehearsing for the church's Hallelujah Chorus when I came down with a case of  laryngitis that lasted for 6 weeks.  This fall, when the North Clackamas Community Chorus prepared to present a sing-your-own Messiah,  I got laryngitis again.  I sat silent in the audience, watching my friends Lois and Mary Jean working through  the alto part, and thrilling to the father and son standing behind me who sang every note.  I was not able to speak, much less sing.
     When our friend Mary had a holiday supper and sing-along, I could barely converse, much less join in the carols.  When Janet and Robert came over with Christmas cookies and the latest pre-natal grandchild report,  I couldn't ask all the obstetrical questions I wanted to.

Robert

     Judy by then had had a 4-week respite from conversation with me.  "Don't talk! Don't whisper!" she'd say, "You could damage your vocal chords." I have to be careful, in any case, when I talk to Judy. It takes her a few minutes now to regain her breath after walking from the car to her easy chair or walking from the bedroom to the kitchen. I wait to speak to her until she has enough breath to reply.
      Judy has new medicine to help suppress the cough that takes her breath away and makes her oxygen- saturation levels plummet. When I tell people that she has an (awful) new normal, she reminds me, "Always add that I hate it."

Merry Brucemas

      Lois and Chuck appeared with brunch on Christmas day.  They brought along their banjo and accordion and the words to Lois's Brucemas Carols, lyrics of traditional carols changed in honor of Lois's  first cat. ("We wish you a merry Brucemas" etc.)  Could I sing along?  Oh, no. But by Christmas  I could talk.

Chuck and Lois cook

     Lois, who is Jewish, pointed out that her people don't usually sing the Messiah.  "Neither do yours," she said. "It's a Protestant thing."  She's right. I used to think that only those who belonged to churches with handbell choirs and adult Sunday schools could master those notes.  Those people who, like the character in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping," conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.” A far cry from Gregorian chant.
      When I wanted to sing the Messiah choruses from my easy enough road, I could not. But I was happy in this season, silently preparing for our granddaughters' visit.