This is an article featured in the Forward FOCUS Summer 2021 publication by FiftyForward
Telling Our Stories
By Sarah Martin McConnell
“Sarah, you have to come get mother” said Priscilla my sister when we finally connected after hours of dead phone my lines.
Hurricane Katrina had just pummeled the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There was no power, no water, and four families were holed up in
the mother 96-degree heat of the steamy aftermath, all crammed into my Mother’s three-bedroom, two-bath house in Moss Point, which, blessedly, had suffered no significant damage. But the entire coast from Mobile to New Orleans resembled a bombed-out war zone.
Mom, had been recently diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s, and was becoming more undone by the minute. The chaos was too much for her. “Who are all these men sleeping on the dining room floor?” she asked over and over, as her agitation mounted.
“I can’t just drive into the disaster area,” I told Pris. So we made a plan that we’d meet half way. “I’ll take the last Montgomery exit off I-65 coming south,” I told her. “That’ll be the first exit for you heading north. Turn right and pull into the first gas station you come to. I’ll turn left at the last Montgomery exit heading south, and we’ll meet there. If we both leave at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning we should get there about the same time.”
“Okay,” she said: Then the phone went dead.
Driving into Montgomery that next morning, I was hopeful. I exited the freeway at the appointed exit, turned left, and sure enough, there was a gas station right there. That was lucky. I hadn’t really known that there would even be a station at that exit.
With towers down and dead batteries, we had had no no cell phone connection since last night. So after 45 minutes of waiting, I really began to worry. I thought this might have been the most hairbrained plan I had ever concocted. So when Priscilla’s car rolled in ten minutes later, I sent a hallelujah heavenward. Following a gleeful reunion Mom and I were soon on the road to Nashville along with Andy-Dandy (her faithful cat) who was very sweet and like my mother Marge, very traumatized.
To provide distraction and fun on the way back to Tennessee, I started singing and Mom joined me. Singing together is a Martin family tradition, especially on road trips. First we sang to the radio. Then we sang favorite camp songs and those Mom taught me growing up, like There’s a Hole in the
Bottom of the Sea and The Prisoner’s Song (my grandfather’s favorite). We sang every song from every musical I could think of, followed by songs from the 1930s and 40s we had sung together in close harmony when I was a child while she washed and I dried the supper dishes. I exhausted my whole folk song repertoire, which is vast. We sang “It’s a Long Road to Freedom” made popular by The Singing Nuns. I remember a line from that song, “When you walk in love with the wind on your wing and cover the earth with the songs you sing, the miles fly by.” It was especially appropriate that day. Singing together the miles did fly by as we laughed and sang music as bright as the light of that summer afternoon. Our hearts were lifted and we made it home, tired but happy.
We all have stories that give our lives shape and meaning. Family stories. Love stories. Stories of struggle and heartbreak. Triumph and tragedy.
We never know where our stories will lead us. This is just one of my stories about the transformative power of sharing live music. Just one of the stories that led me, ultimately, to Music for Seniors. Telling my own story often leads to wondrous new stories with so many stories still to tell.
I wrote a song titled Stories. One of the lines goes like this “ … the falls from grace, the crimes and the glories. We all come face to face telling our stories.”
Catch our latest podcast, Squeeze the Day, featuring an in-depth conversation with Sarah Martin McConnell about how she launched her nonprofit Music for Seniors out of this transformative love of music. She discusses the programs early beginning at FiftyForward into the nonprofit success it is today.
Listen to it here: https://fiftyforward.org/podcast/ or on your preferred podcast platform.
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