It was too hot a day for the oldies of the daytime activities. My wife goes there one day a week before change from the nursing home. At the daytime activities walk, have lunch, talk and sing under supervision for a morning and afternoon long.
When I came in in the afternoon, they had just finished lunch. No, there could be no walking for them, I realized after my own walk. Not that the sweat was on my back – old people sweat much less than young people, I noticed – but the warmth was like a heavy blanket over every movement.
I sat down at the long table next to my wife. She greeted me surprised, even though I had informed her about my arrival a day before. I do know that her memory does not hold such data, but the announcement itself can give her a pleasant moment. Living in the moment, demented people and their environment were already working on that when people had to invent it at Mindfulness.
So walking was not possible, but you can always sing, even if you can’t do it well. The supervisors handed out textbooks with many love songs from the last century. Hiphop and rap are for the generation of seniors; That will be a noisy gang in all those homes. In terms of intelligibility, there will be little difference, because rappers are difficult to follow anyway.
Just about all classic Love Songs – Most were in English – were there. From ‘Cheek to Cheek’ from 1934 to ‘Yesterday’ from 1965. One of the old men at the table took the floor. He had once heard Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sing ‘Cheek to Cheek’ during a joint concert. He kept a special memory of it, because he and his wife had visited this concert – his wife who was no longer there.
Whether the memory was completely reliable was not relevant. The fact is that music leaves deep marks in memory. That was also apparent from singing – taking away is a better word – by many. But music can also fade completely, I had noticed with my wife. I recently showed her ‘Kind Woman’, a beautiful ballad from Poco from the seventies, sung by Richie Furay. We had often listened to the song and heard the Furay singing at a concert in Groningen. She still liked it, but she listened to it as if it were new to her.
As a guest I didn’t want to interfere too much with the choice from the text books. Yet with a short break I could not resist pointing to ‘Love Me Tender’, a classic from 1956 by Elvis Presley. I recently found it on Spotify after many years and immediately understood why it had become classic. A strong melody with a text in his simplicity, by Elvis without any pathetic reverb – which he often surrendered to. In short, a perfect love song, based on a song from the American Civil War and with a new text by Ken Darby, an American composer.
In the daytime activities, a supervisor played it nicely for the piano, the visitors with humten excited: “Love me tender, love me dear, tell me are mine, I’ll be yours through all the years, till the end of time.”