I SING THE ONES I KNOW

Barbara Lavallee

It was Wednesday in November so I headed for the nursing home with my accordion to play for my very appreciative audience.  Since we had just celebrated Veterans Day, I included some patriotic songs along with the tunes that seem to have become their favorites.  The hour went by all too quickly and I played my traditional closing "Goodbye Ladies, Goodbye Gentlemen", accepted their warm thank-you's and headed down the hall toward the door.

As always, I found my old army friend in his wheelchair across from the nurses station.  And as always, I jokingly chided him for not going into the room with the others to hear me play.  He told me that he could hear me quite well right where he was located and that he was not alone.  There was in fact an audience in the halls listening to me play, an audience that I could not see from inside the room.  He told me that when he could remember the words he had been singing the songs that I had played.  And then, as he most often did, he shared an army story with me.

He recalled the time when he and a group of army friends had gone off duty where they were stationed in Italy and had found themselves a small Italian bar where they could relaxOne of them began to sing and the others joined in.  They had no music to accompany their singing, but that didn't seem to matter.  There were those among them who could harmonize quite well.

As they sang, each time one of them would empty his glass, the bartender would fill it up again and motion for them to continue with their singing.  And so the evening progressed, all of them thoroughly engrossed in the timeless fun of singing together.

After awhile, my friend realized that his glass had indeed been refilled quite a few times and that he was beginning to feel the affects of it and decided it was time that he headed back to the barracks while he could still walk.  He asked the bartender for the tab and the bartender told him that it had already been paid.  When he inquired who had been paying for the drinks, the bartender motioned toward the doorway of the room.

The singers turned toward the doorway and were greeted with hearty applause from a large crowd of people filling the doorway and the street outside.  The people had been listening to them sing and paying the bartender to refill their glasses to encourage them to continue.  The bartender told them that the people of Italy love music and will gather wherever and whenever there is music to be heard.  He told them, with a smile, that they will probably have difficulty making it through the crowd that was waiting to greet them with handshakes and hearty backslaps of approval and appreciation.