Readers and writers blog

Once again, I went to the annual dinner that a local nursing home gives for its volunteers. And once again, they didn’t suspect a thing.

The fools.

Everyone was so nice. They had little gifts for all of us. And the food was great, as good as any local restaurant, and that’s saying a lot because just across the Hudson River is the Culinary Institute of America, which sends trained chefs into the local economy as well as across the world. I’m not saying this nursing home is the fanciest place where I’ve ever played music for senior citizens, but it’s a lot fancier than the first place where I did.

That was the county infirmary, and it was 15 or 16 years ago. How I came to play my guitar there is a long story that I will try to shorten here:

My latter-day musical career was inspired by a girlfriend I had 16 or 17 years ago — that’s right, about a year before I moved here to take an editing job with the local newspaper. This girlfriend . . . how can I say this? Well, she was, as I once told her in a moment of exasperation, the Girlfriend from Hell. Self-absorbed, narcissistic, rude, argumentative, ungrateful, spoiled. But she was a pretty good musician. She had a passable voice, basic guitar skills and — now, this is what killed me, because she had such short arms — was an accomplished trombonist.

One of my attempts to improve bonds between us was to try to get involved with her music. I got out my old guitar and sang with her. She, of course, said my playing sucked and my singing was too nasal. That was shortly before she drifted off somewhere else and I came here to New York.

And I vowed that I would prove her wrong.

So my old guitar and I went off to a local music store to sign up for lessons, and, to give me incentive to pay attention, I signed up as a volunteer at the county infirmary to play backup guitar at singalongs. I figured they had plenty of singalongs since it’s a large, multistory facility that cares for hundreds of elderly folks — and, as I later discovered, does a remarkably good job of it. (Yes, New Yorkers in some cases do get something back for their taxes.)

Now, I was no musical novice. As a kid, I took piano lessons for a number of years. And in the 1960s, I too switched to the acoustic guitar to impress all the young hippie women, although by now, I’d forgotten most of the chords.

The activities director at the infirmary was glad to see me, handed me mimeo sheets of a half dozen old songs with words and chords, and off we went to a singalong, she on lead guitar, me on backup. It was great.

But then, the second week, she didn’t show up — and never did again. But I did. Elderly people in a nursing home aren’t very mobile, and I needed that captive audience.

Since then, I’ve collected about 250 old songs, gotten a lot better on the guitar and tried to work my nose out of my voice. And something even better than that happened:

My musical career led me to my wife. Well, actually, to my wife’s parents, both retirees with musical talent who also played at local nursing homes. So we started playing together, and I eventually managed to inveigle their daughter to join us. And me.

By the way, she’s an excellent singer — much better than the GF from Hell — and a good basic guitarist. And, what’s more, she likes me.

The four of us still play once a week at the local nursing home, and we all again enjoyed the volunteer dinner. The difference is, they’re all altruists — they do it out of the goodness of their souls. But not me. Because when I look out over my guitar, I still see that captive audience that I’m still taking advantage of.

But let’s just keep that between you and me.

This week’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 9: San Bruno of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones talks about his career as a Kinney shoe salesman where he meets an attractive brunette who likes her feet played with, then remembers he has promised to tell his readers about his first date with Virginia Good.

• Chapter 15: Progress of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which a team of scientists brings in a world-class mathematician to help them decipher a rune-based language found within an alien ship unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

– Sid Leavitt

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