A Society That Has Forgotten How to Sing

They say that when you are old and losing your memory, music is the last to go. An old woman who cannot carry on a conversation may join in a song she knew when she was a girl, getting all the words and the notes right. Debra’s grandmother used to play the organ in her nursing home. It was a wonderful thing to behold the skill in her fingers and her mind, though occasionally when she was in the middle of a hymn in the Sunday service she would veer off into a riff of big band music; from “Abide With Me” to Artie Shaw and back again. But what happens when you don’t have any poetry or any music to begin with?