Phoned Mother Mary Methodist tonight. She’s 92 and in frailcare. She reports that she’s still playing the piano in the dining room before each mealtime; and that she has given up walking.
She was walking a few steps, fully assisted, each day after her hip op, but now the steel pin has escaped the bone and would need another op to remove so she (wisely, IMO) has decided to simply stick to her wheelchair.
She says of her piano playing, “Sometimes not very well, but I’m the best they’ve got!” She gets wheeled up to the piano, and ‘as long as someone can put my feet on the pedals,’ she’s away! If she plays too long (over her five or ten minute limit) there may be a bit of harrumphing that the food has arrived. Then she’ll wheel over to the nearby table and have her meal on wheels.
She keeps remembering new songs to play she says. Her latest is one Annie (her mother) used to play while she and ___ (Trudi? Sylvia?) danced to it in the Harrismith town hall – some polka. “Step Step Step HOP” she says.
That would have been in the 1940’s I guess.
~~~oo0oo~~~
She reminded me again of how I complained a book she was reading “had none pictures in it.”
~~~oo0oo~~~
‘Step Step Step HOP’ sounds like some of the eight-beer dances we would do on the Gailian lawn in the 1970’s. Though I don’t think the number of Steps and the number of Hops were as strictly stuck to. It was more laissez faire, I think, more impromptu.
Bewilderbeast Droppings 