A Particular Kind of Moment
In memory of someone I never knew
On a music stand sat a large, professionally framed, four-panel set of photographs. Each panel showed the boy soprano from our community choir’s recent spring concert. In the first photo, the boy’s head was angled down as he prepared to sing a solo passage from Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. The second photo showed the boy looking straight ahead. The third showed a more confident angle. By the fourth photo the boy’s head was tilted toward the church rafters and his arms hung with palms open.
The photos appeared to be taken with a cell phone camera, positioned at a sharp angle to the stage. In one, the top of the boy’s head was cropped out. In another, the composition was off-center. Audience members’ arms and hair busied the edges of them all; a purse strap draped over the side of a pew; the tip of a violinist’s bow poked oddly into frame. The photos were neatly matted and framed, yet blown up to a proportion that pixelated the images. Who was this for?, I thought. The framing must have cost a fortune, even though these prints seem to have been ordered from a Kinkos. It was huge, maybe 3 feet by 4 feet, something you couldn’t hide away in a back stairwell unless you were a Rockefeller.
In front of the choir, next to this panel of photos, stood an old man of around 80 – a man who reminds me of my now-deceased grandfather. Every week the man arrives at rehearsal with tousled hair as if recently roused from a nap in his La-Z-boy. He perpetually wears the same emerald green sweater and over-pronated orthopedic shoes. Similar to my grandfather, he is shaped like a sack of rice; not lumpy like a sack of potatoes, but smooth with short, stubby limbs.
With no pomp and hardly any circumstance, the old man had just removed a bedsheet from the music stand to reveal the framed photos I found so perplexing. He spoke with a faraway expression on his face: “This is the dear boy who sang with us at the concert. This will be given to St. Anne’s Church for display.” A polite, respectful clap moved through the choir. What also permeated the choir was an unspoken but palpable thought: who would hang this ugly thing?
This was a particular feeling that happens every once in a while. The moment when someone’s heartfelt gesture is both exceptionally sweet, and a bit disconnected from reality. You feel pity but you also feel protective; you would punch someone who might say something mean, even though deeper down you have thought the mean thing also.
As we, the choir, wrestled with this emotion, the old man made his way back to his seat in the front row. As he went to sit, a last thought struck him. He stood and turned to address the group. Staring into the middle distance, head tilted toward heaven, he seemed to speak more to himself than to us:
”This is for my dear daughter. Gone from us for 20 years. She is my angel.”
He then sat down and rehearsal began. For the next few minutes, as we woodshedded a few pages of a Wagner opera chorus, I couldn’t concentrate for considering what had just happened.
I knew nothing of this man’s life or of his daughter, but his purpose was so clear I felt a poignant sadness. Time and age and loss had distilled his effort to what mattered to him most. While I was blinded by aesthetic matters and practical considerations, he was carrying on what I would later learn was a longstanding tradition: a photographic print made after every choir concert — in memory of his dear angel daughter. It made me wonder if this choir was important to his daughter. It made me do the math, realizing that he would have been in his 60s when she died, leaving her, most likely, in her 30s or 40s.
After rehearsal concluded, out of respect I approached the photo set for an up-close view. The images were even blurrier than I had first imagined. Still, when I looked past the quality issues and into the photos themselves, I saw a young boy singing with the innocence of a child who had yet to consider what it means to “perform” for a crowd. His face was full of concentration and youthful timidity. Even through a photo, I felt a desire to encourage him with a supportive smile – willing him to sing the right notes, to hold them steadily for the right amount of time. There was something pure there. I was ready to hang the ugly thing in my own entryway.
After taking in all four photos, I turned to leave the room. With a small smile still on my face, I made eye contact with the old man. His face remained impassive as he shuffled deliberately past me and down the hall. I watched him fortify himself against the handrail as he navigated a set of steep stairs that descended to the street, surely on the way back to his La-Z-boy.
His daughter’s memory stayed with me on the train ride home.
- Andrew
Thank you for being an empathetic witness to a stranger's grief.