There are few certainties about life. We're born. We grow. We age. We die.
If we manage to stumble into the right combination of time, parents, location, and opportunity, we learn. If we're able to survive enough of our mistakes, we eventually garner some degree of wisdom. If we're lucky, we discover something that we're able to do that we're reasonably good at doing. Maybe we get paid for doing it. Maybe we don't.
And if we're luckier than most, we discover the capacity to give love and receive it.
I don't know much more that that. But I do know that hard times will come. If you'd like to hear one way I found to cope with them a bit, I'd be honored to have your company below the Ornamental Orange Ortifact.
Let me start by telling you a story.
Once upon a time there was a man who wanted to be something previously unheard of: an American musician. Auspiciously enough for so bold a desire, he was born on the 4th of July. His formal training was in engineering. Essentially self-taught as a musician, he received little if any payment for his work. In fact, for his best-known song he received the grand sum of $100.
His imagination was vast. He wrote about the South with nostalgic intensity, yet spent his entire life (save a brief honeymoon visit to New Orleans) in the North. In an vain attempt to make it big, he moved to New York City. A year later, his wife and daughter left him. Three years after that, his health shattered by alcoholism and living in abject poverty at 30 Bowery Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Stephen Collins Foster died. He was 37.
I tell this story because when my wife was diagnosed with cancer six months after our wedding, about all I could do to cope with it was to walk every night after the sun had set and the "normal" people were heading to sleep. That's when I had the streets of Ann Arbor all to myself. That's when I did my crying.
And because I'm a conductor and composer by trade and by training, I needed something in my brain to keep me walking, some tune that would keep on forcing me to put one foot in front of the other as I traveled alone with my fears through the back streets of the university town I'd lived in for 30 years while tears coursed down my face.
I literally walked and cried until I had no more tears left to cry. As I walked, it was these words--Stephen Foster's words--that repeated through my mind:
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh hard times come again no more.
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
I believe with all my heart that music releases power into the universe. Music is sound, and sound is vibration in the audible spectrum. Our bodies and psyches, too, are in constant vibration of their own accord; surely vibrations released with the intention of healing and comfort can connect in some way with those who are broken, or afraid, or facing their own unanswered questions?
On Monday my wife had yet another CT scan. And for the very first time--after major surgery, six months of chemo, and numerous other challenges--we finally heard the words we've longed to hear: "no evidence of disease."
But still I sing those words ... hard times, come again no more.
An arrangement of Foster's tune is given in the clip below. It happens to be mine.