Little old lady...says read the notes

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by Barbara Ardis In my younger years I suffered from frequent bouts of depression, only in those days we didn’t call it that…just felt like the moody blues, or before that I think they called it the “vapours.” When I took a psychology course in college, one of our experiments was to chart our moody days. And I found that every Sunday afternoon was my period of depression. No one ever told me what that meant, so what was the purpose, right? For no explainable reason, I suddenly just wanted to be alone, and not engage with anyone. I felt like a misfit everywhere I went. I even asked my mother if I was adopted because I didn’t feel like the rest of the family. She was horrified at the thought but it didn’t make me shake the feeling that I was not who I was supposed to be. As a case in point, I was the only person in the whole school who failed gym class! See if THAT won’t set you apart. I just couldn’t feel like I belonged anywhere, and I started reading books of philosophy and writing vey mournful poems about lonely me. It was many years before I loved me for who I was. I recently read a quote from the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who said, “There are no wrong notes in jazz, only notes in the wrong places.” Hooray, Mama…that is just the way I felt. Surely, someone somewhere should have helped me find the right place for my notes. The jazz pianist Art Tatum said, “There is no such thing as a wrong note. What makes a note wrong is when you don’t know where to go after that one. As long as you know how to get to the next note, there is no such thing as a wrong note.” I only wish someone had helped me find the next note when I was younger. At this stage in life, I know I am not a wrong note, or a note in the wrong place. I am where I am supposed to be, as the person I was born to be. And I have been challenged in physical ways, but God has helped me through it. And the music has played on. There are many people who know they have a disease process that would shorten their lives, but they refuse to stop the music. There are no wrong notes if we know how to get to the next note. None of us have the musical score to follow in the aging process, but we move on and we play it out. And the evening shadows are like a beautiful symphony played at sunset. And we feel peace and joy in the notes. One elderly lady said she felt like she was watching the sun go down and she knew that God made the going out of the morning, and the coming in of the evening as a time to shout for joy. And if it was her sunset she would be joyful. May the music to our tunes be joyful. May our mornings be filled with beautiful sunrises, and our evenings with a million stars. God love you, and so do I. Love is the music of the universe.