Yesterday, after some delay, a truck load of bags was taken to the G &W.
I began to focus on emptying out one room at a time. This might seem the obvious way to work but maybe it is the Lyme or maybe it is something else, but my focus/attention span does better if I work in one area and then go to another and rotate around. That way I don’t seem to get as overwhelmed with the smaller tedious tasks of sorting and disposing.
Hubby was able to help me some and that was a tremendous benefit. There are some things he knows better the history behind them than I do…He told me that he would make himself available today too and so we are hopeful to get a lot done.
I spent a bit of time packing up what was left of the piano books and collecting up the music stands. I fondly set aside my father-in-law’s music stand. He had macular degeneration in one eye and claimed he couldn’t see his music. Needless to say, this was a tremendous frustration to him so we got him a nice stand that he could store his music in with an attachable light. Very professional looking and he was very pleased with it. And lastly, I tucked away his performance book.
Several years ago, in combination, sometimes our family played with him and sometimes he played with us but no matter how you parse it, we called ourselves “A Little Local Legend” or some such name, my memory is bit dull this morning, and we played a few unpaid gigs. It was a great experience and fun while it lasted. And as he continued to age and continued to lose the feeling in his hands due to neuropathy, he would come over once a week for supper and bring his guitar and the family would jam. His ability to remember lyrics and words to songs was absolutely incredible. It was like he had a music library in his head. He once told us people said this gift came down the Albritton side of his family. I have one or two in my family that has inherited this as well but I am not sure it passed down as strongly. When he’d get going, he’d get that twinkle in his eye and say things like, “Have ya heard this one?”, and then he’d start singing things like Under the Double Eagle and he’d end by telling us that Gid Turner and the Skillet Lickers did that one. He grew up on the Grand Ole Opera, it was part of his childhood and I think he must have dreamed as a kid of being up on that stage singing for the whole world to hear. An interesting comment that Mid-kid found signed into his yearbook from Georgia Military Academy was how “he liked all those old songs.”
At some point he must have gotten into Big Band music because people have told us that he and his sister were both “jitter-bugging fools”. (Granted that might not come out sounding the most flattering in print but one must place themselves back into the time when the vernacular was used.) Mid-kid got him
to teach her. q I have a photo of this older man with neuropathy teaching her to jitter bug. You could tell all those years later that he had once loved it.
Well, that is my trip down memory lane for the day.