Scheherazade

My mother sits in her grandfather's wing chair upholstered many times over, now covered in worn fabric with a creamy yellow background with small blue flowers. We have just moved all of her things, again. Her paintings fill the opposite wall, two and three deep, almost up to the ceiling. The high ceiling of the room, which we call an apartment, provides the space for my mother's precious drawings, prints, paintings, and found art that make up the framework of familiarity and memory of her 80-something-year-old life. We feel comforted by that and hope she is, too. Her children, my sister, the baby and now in her 40s, my brother who is retired, and myself, the oldest, have moved her choices of furniture and keepsakes into the "apartment" with one door leading out into the world and one door leading to the nurses' station and the cheerful atrium with dining tables and comfortable living room sofas.

I sense that Mother feels numb. I think she wants to laugh and smile and cry again. She wants to be interested again in life, love and adventure. She has always had such a strong inner life, protecting her most prized possession, her creativity. But now, her eyes have lost their gleam, their energy and willfulness, their life. Her life. She often complains of the intense pain in her lower back and has focused on her pain, the pain of going on and on and on, the pain of living beyond her routine, her fulfillments, her husband, her friends, the pain of having to learn everything, and every person, in a new place, all over again. She seems tired, worn with living. She often falls, sometimes head first, sometimes against the bed or the bureau, leading to more pain, more confusion. And fear.

Her muscles have contracted to nothing, her thin-skinned arms hang with flesh instead of flexing with taut muscles as they did in her gardening days, symbolic of all that has faded, evaporated, gone away. Her skin is paper-thin and so wrinkled, cream crepe with dark purple, light mauve and brown tie-dyed colorations, in strange patterns. her own patterns. She always covers her arms now with fabric, not with the lively colored stones of her many, many bracelets. She avoids deep v-neck shirts and blouses, for the same reason, and has lost interest in her vast collection of earrings and necklaces. She still takes some glory in her beautiful silver white hair. She hangs on to her weekly hair appointments like they're the last life raft available from the sinking ship of age. And she does perk up visibly after having her shampoo and coif; she clearly feels comfortable reminiscences of her former beauty and self.

I flew in from California to see her. We have had a heavy schedule of movies this week. My mother loves for me to take her to movies and restaurants when I am in town. We go in the early afternoon to avoid the crowds. Moving her body from car to wheelchair through the thick, slow-opening doors of the theaters is hard work. She always goes to the restroom afterwards, which is arduous for both of us.

"Mother, do you need anything or would you like anything?" I ask as my mother and I return from an art movie. We've had an early dinner at the French cafe next door to the film house, sitting on the terrace, enjoying the sun in our faces. My mother looks so small in her wheelchair. "Would you like some particular kind of food? Or books?"

She shakes her head and then suddenly brightens. "Classical music," she whispers.

"Great. So you've been using that CD player I got you?" She nods. "OK, what would you like? Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Vivaldi?"

"Yes, yes," she shakes her head up and down slowly, looking at me intensely. "I've missed music."

I hope so, I thought. This is a woman who has always had music in her life. I feel a pang. My sister and I sold her beautiful white enameled grand piano. She loved playing and owning that piano. She loved composing. She loved singing and playing for others. She loved to dance, too. Music brought joy to my mother's face, everyday as she played a few pieces alone for herself. As a child, I felt calmer and somehow more loved when I heard her magical soft touch on the piano. It meant Mother was having a happy, small spiritual energizing interlude. And I was included if I was in hearing distance.

Her short-term memory is shot. Her body is frail and broken. Her hand-eye coordination is pitiful. She's lost her sense of humor, her saucy edge, her flirtatious kick, and her multitude of interests. She has had many batches of TIA's, those nasty clusters of little strokes that put roadblocks on the brain's neural paths. We call them MIA's because the mother we knew is missing in action now.

I stop by the local music store and run in to buy an armload of classical CDs: Brahms, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov. "Art, music, reading, writing, travel, and appreciation of nature are all manifestations of the great spirit within us that needs to be heard, " my mother often told me as I was growing up.

"Can you help me dress for bed?" Mother says, even though it's just now 6 p.m. We've arrived at her apartment after our afternoon foray into movies, food, and CD-buying.

"Sure." I carefully pull her pink sweater over her newly coiffed hairdo. Multiple folds of flaccid skin hang from her upper arms but her shoulders look like those of a young girl. I pull her black synthetic trousers down her legs, careful to keep her diaper and her dignity in place. I pull her pink nylon nightie over her head and gently lie her down on her bed.

"Please tuck me in," she says sweetly, like a small child trying to do the right thing.

I pull the covers up under her chin and give her a big kiss on her cheek. "I love you, Mother. Is there anything else you'd like me to do?"

"Yes, I want to listen to Scheherazade forever. Can you make it keep playing?" She softly sighs, worried.

"Yes, Mother, I will." As the wistful and sweet strains of that paean to exotic adventure begins to play, big tears roll from the edge of my eyes. I am overcome with grief and sadness.

Music, Language, and the Brain

I've had music on the brain lately, with my thinking mostly centered on the relationship between language development and music. We know, for example, that the one thing that typically distinguishes non-native speakers is intonation, or the musical tones of a language. Accent, vocabulary, grammar and syntax can all be perfect but if the intonation is off, then somehow we deduce almost immediately that the person speaking is not talking in his or her native tongue. And, of course, as we all are aware, intonation--pitch, for example--can convey meaning more than any other mechanism in language. This was a question I always had when I studied Chomsky's deep structure. What about meaning? What about intonation? Where does it fit in?

I've been wondering if this seemingly innate capability to notice and then learn the differences in pitch, duration, and frequency form the foundation for music in our lives. Or is language development so tied to music that without it, we couldn't develop the ability to understand others and express ourselves? It certainly is the beginning of "hearing" and categorizing phonemes, the smallest sounds in a language that convey meaning. Each phoneme is composed of a very particular pitch, frequency, and duration. Sounds like a description of music, doesn't it? And how does emotion, something we feel so deeply and often when we hear music, fit in? Do we associate touch and sound in a glimmering memory of a mother's coos and rising pitch of delight while cuddling her newborn.

There was a wonderful show today on NPR on Musical Language, produced by Radio Lab. Fortunately, you can access the free podcast. I urge you to take a listen. The relationship between language and music is examined as are tonal languages. One fascinating topic came up: the virtuosity on musical instruments (comparing Chinese students to American kids), which is seemingly quite common at early ages in countries where tonal languages are spoken. There may be very early practice on perfect pitch. Examination of many of the greats in musical composing shows that these artists also had perfect pitch.

And to bring this topic home: what role can music play in keeping our brains healthy? We've all heard that learning to play a new instrument is great for our brains. And learning a new language (with new intonation) helps, too. They both help build cognitive reserve. But what part does listening to, and deeply feeling, music play in keeping our brains healthy throughout our lives?

At 81, Oscar Peterson, You Rock!

Last night, I saw (and listened joyfully to) the piano jazz virtuoso, Oscar Peterson or OP as he refers to himself, perform at Yoshi's, one of the great jazz venues of the world. How many other 81-year-olds are going on international tours? Mr. Peterson, I think you understand the brain's need for novelty, change, and challenge. OP disclosed that he went to high school with Maynard Ferguson, one of the all-time great trumpeters, and his sadness at his recent death. He dedicated his amazing composition, "Requiem," to Ferguson, Joe Pass, and other greats that he's known who have "passed." OP himself experienced a debilitating stroke in 1993 after having had TB as a child, which made being a great horn-player an impossibilitiy. Lucky for us, he turned to piano. He rebounded again after his stroke through therapy. Although he now relies much more heavily on the upper register, he has relearned playing with his left hand, too. The result is nothing less than genius. At Yoshi's, it's possible to sit very close to performers, no more than 8-10 feet away. OP smiled at me. We had eye contact. That's it! I love him. But then I did before I made eye contact. OP, while he was playing, had a look of pure joy on his face. Music does that to us as listeners, too. Imagine what it must be like to be OP. I feel lucky to have caught him on this tour.

More on music and the brain later. A fascinating topic.

technorati: music, Oscar Peterson, stroke, Maynard Ferguson, jazz