The Choir That Sang Under My Window

A choir is a strange thing to be part of. People imagine it is about the voices, and it is, but mostly it is about the standing. You stand in the same place for sixty-one years, in the same row, next to the same women, and the person beside you gets older at exactly the speed you do.

I stood beside Wilma Dettmer for forty-three of those years. She is five years younger than I am and she sings first alto, the higher line. I sang second alto, the low one, the part underneath. Most people in the pews have never noticed there is a second alto. It is the middle of the hymn. You do not hear it when it is there, and you hear nothing but its absence when it is gone.

I was the under-part for sixty-one years. I liked it there. Nobody looks at the person holding up the floor.

The fall, and the doctor in Dubuque

In October I fell in my own kitchen.

I was reaching for a colander on the high shelf, and then I was on the linoleum looking at the underside of the table, and I could not tell you the between. I lay there a while.

In November a heart doctor in Dubuque, a young man with kind eyes and a mustard-colored tie, sat down across from me and said, “heart failure,” in about the voice you would use to read a grocery list. Then he said a great deal more, about fluid and sodium and pills and what he called a reserve. I remember thinking I had never had a reserve of anything in my life, except canned beans.

I came home with an oxygen machine the size of a dorm refrigerator, fifty feet of clear tubing, and a walker I would not use for a week. Dale put the machine in the front room by the east window and ran the tubing so I could get to the kitchen and the bathroom. That was the world, then. Chair, kitchen, bathroom, bed.

Bethel is a good church and an old one, built of limestone in 1893. It has eleven stone steps out front, worn into little bowls by a hundred and thirty years of Sunday shoes. Inside, the stairs to the choir loft are seven more, narrow and steep and turned at the top.

I can do my own porch steps if my son holds my elbow. Three steps, and I have to stop at the top and breathe. That is all I can do. Eighteen steps with a turn was not a thing I was ever going to do again, and I knew it the way you know the weather by the ache in your knuckles.

So I stopped going.