Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 29, 1994 TAG: 9408300001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
We were considering how to respond to people who feel they are without value.
Goldie, in her 80s, said she sometimes believes her usefulness is gone. She wonders what her purpose is, with her children and grandchildren grown and her great-grandchildren on the rise.
Several of us pointed to the piano.
Goldie is the regular accompanist for our choir. Just the night before, she had provided spirited music during a gospel sing at a church down the road.
We told Goldie we'd be lost without her. She smiled, we laughed and the lesson moved on.
If I had been thinking clearly, I'd have expanded on our answer, for the church's need of Goldie Garman, and others like her, goes beyond the musical.
Our oldest members, who are mostly women, have seen much, heard much and been through much. Their experiences are evident in everything they say and do.
Never was this more vivid than when my wife, Sharon, and our son, Michael, were injured in a traffic accident a few years ago. That wintertime disaster threw our family into disarray. Michael and Sharon were in the hospital. Katherine, our daughter, was staying with her grandmother.
Throughout that exhausting period, I fielded phone calls and inquiries from friends and colleagues concerned about my family's condition. While heartening, none was able to lift the gloom that enveloped us.
Then I received a card in the mail from Polly Sirry, a lifelong member of our church who lived down the road from us. In it she said she had heard about the wreck and hoped everything would be all right. She offered to help us in any way she could, and she concluded with a sentence that touched my heart.
``We have you in our prayers, '' it said.
Those words were just the medicine that we, as a family, needed. We heard them many times as the weeks went by.
One evening a few months later, several of us gathered at a house to rehearse for another hymn sing. When we broke for refreshments, Goldie Garman, at the piano, turned and sat on the bench with her back to the keyboard.
Clutching a cookie and a glass, I sat down beside her. She asked how Sharon and Michael were.
``Fine,'' I said. ``We were lucky.''
On the morning of the accident, Goldie said, someone called and gave her the news: Michael was in intensive care following surgery for internal injuries.
Goldie said she had lost a son in a car wreck a few years earlier. He was in his 40s. The doctors told her he had internal injuries. He was in intensive care.
``I visited him twice a day for 14 days,'' she said, ``and on the 14th day, he died.''
She looked at me: ``When I heard that your Michael was in intensive care with internal injuries, I said, `Lord, don't tell me I'll never see that boy again.'''
I told her I had been thinking the very same thing.
As people get older they may easily assume that they've seen it all and done it all and that other, younger people now are seeing and doing it better. They may think they've fallen from the mainstream, that high technology has left them in its dust.
But the computer hasn't been invented that can console the human heart, and not one of the billions of words transmitted electronically each day can provide the solace of a single sentence spoken in love by someone who's been there before us.
By living long and well, Polly Sirry, who died in May, Goldie Garman and so many others achieve something the rest of us are still laboring toward. Whether it's perspective, wisdom, faith or grace, it is, I believe, something none of us can do without.
We are fortunate to have them - especially those who, like Goldie, play a mean piano, to boot.
by CNB