Encore
We hadn’t performed together in over 35 years, but were about to go onstage. The 1979 Encina High School Madrigal Choir would sing again.
The show had been in the works for months when Joe, a Madrigal tenor, had an idea. He’d been struggling after losing his wife to cancer and, as therapy, he’d been rummaging through cartons of memorabilia. Among the ticket stubs and photographs he found a 1980s-era boom box with an old cassette tape of a Madrigal concert. He pressed play.
“It lifted a broken heart,” he later recalled.
When the tape ended, he reached out to me, saying, “What if we had a reunion?”
I thought he meant getting everyone together, gathering around a piano with some worn sheet music, trading playful insults as we had back then.
He had something much bigger in mind: A public concert.
So, here we stood before a mixed-medley audience of friends and family. The guest of honor was our teacher, Jack Carey, now in his mid-80s and experiencing dementia. We deposited him in the first row: the best seat in the house.
The show mimicked our high school concerts. Strolling arm-in-arm, we started with our signature opener, “Sing We and Chant It.” Harmonies floating through the air around us, we made our way down the center aisle. When the song ended, cheers erupted.
The audience loved it as much as we did.
Over the course of an hour, we performed songs from decades ago, falling back into a familiar performance rhythm. Time travelers, our voices blended in the unmistakable, almost tangible sensation of being together. We weren’t as polished as we once were, but no one cared.
The performance really had little to do with the music itself.
Just being there, some 36 years later, was a testament to all we’d learned from Mr. Carey. We’d begun to understand what was possible for each of us, through the lens provided by Mr. C. We learned how to be through his patience, his love for music…and us. Being seen by him, we began to know a bit of our best selves. Some of us had never truly been shown such a thing before.
At the end of the evening, we invited other past choral members onstage to sing. As people headed toward the stage, something unexpected happened: Jack stood up to speak. He recalled decades of teaching, telling us all, “It’s been a grand life for me.”
Then, he moved toward the conductor’s stand.
For a few minutes, the younger Mr. C. was back. His stooped body stood tall, swaying with the music, stately. He cued our voices with gentle hand motions, his eyebrows raised with that same wonder we’d seen every day, so many years ago. He was the 50-something teacher of our youth.
We couldn’t have known Mr. Carey would lead us again or how it would remind us of what a gift he had been. Our encore performance was a reminder: This man was a maestro.