My beginners' hand bell choir is learning to play THE ROSE. We don’t have enough players for this piece, so Friend Wen (who isn’t even close to a beginner and technically doesn’t qualify for our group but we tolerate her because she makes us sound half decent) has to play a whack of bells and chimes at the low-note end of the bell table.
Until last week, in the spaces when I didn’t have notes to play myself, I watched her floating up and down the table in a complex choreography of hands and feet, suppressing envy by telling myself I was a writer, not a musician, and didn’t aspire to that level of expertise. It was hard enough for me to play two notes, forget the twelve or so at Wen’s station.
Then, I made an interesting discovery during my enforced period of visual impairment. While most of my life got harder without glasses, hand bell playing got easier. I could see all the little notes and squiggles and dots on the sheet music without bending over and squinting. I could actually read ahead. My once-beloved G and A bells suddenly seemed boring and pathetic. So this week, when Wen and I arrived at the church an hour before practice began, some previously unexpressed element of hubris took over my psyche. I decided to push my bell-velope and have a go at playing her part of THE ROSE.
I wasn’t wildly successful. If you had been there, which fortunately for you, you weren’t, you would not have recognized the tune and might have assumed you were listening to some avant-garde composition for funerals. But the point is, after several false starts, I managed to play all the notes in the right order without dropping any bells on the floor or, much worse, clashing them together when I changed hands. (Clashing bells together in Wen’s presence is a very bad thing to do, resulting in a lecture on how easy it is to crack the casings accompanied by an estimate of the replacement costs for the bells clashed, which, at the big bell end of the table, would put a serious dent in my merlot budget for the rest of the year.)
I just finished reading The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M. D. It’s about neuroplasticity, the human brain’s ability to modify its pathways and grow new ones when faced with challenging situations. In it, there are remarkable case histories: stroke victims who recovered speech or the use of their limbs, OCD sufferers who rewired the pathways of their neuroses. By far the most interesting chapter for me was the one about extremely elderly people who remain intellectually acute by constantly pushing past their mental horizons.
I’ve always been afraid of senility. Mr. Rassmussen, my eighty-year-old neighbor in Holland, was senile. He banged things in his attic late at night. Black smoke occasionally wafted out from his kitchen window. He frequently forgot his house number, even though he’d lived there for over forty years. Sometimes, he’d knock on my door to tell me excited stories accompanied by airplane sound effects and the shooting of an imaginary rifle, apparently unaware that I didn’t speak enough Dutch to have a clue what he was talking about. He wasn’t an unhappy man, but a constantly confused one, and in honesty, something of a danger to himself and those around him. When he died of a stroke, I was as relieved as I was sad.
After reading Dr. Doidge’s book, I am no longer afraid of senility. Learning to play hand bells has probably added months of acuity to my long-term mental forecast. Next week, I intend to add another month or so by moving to the other end of the bell table and seeing what I can do with those dinky little dingers up there.
I never went to university. For most of my life I considered lack of formal learning to be a handicap. Now I’m glad I saved it for my twilight decades. Imagine how many more years of sanity I’ll enjoy if I finally get myself an education. I’ve always wanted to be an archeologist.
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