I Like My Version Better

I Like My Version Better

"Miss", is what our teachers were always addressed as. Didn’t matter if they were married with children, we addressed them as Miss. Miss Alice wasn’t a teacher (at school anyway), but that’s what we called her. Miss Alice had a last name, but that doesn’t really add to her story. We didn’t think of her as being anyone’s mother, or anyone’s wife. She was just Miss Alice, one of the most genuinely kind people I have ever encountered. A lady who made an impression on me for all time, as a little girl growing up on Long Branch.

She and her family moved from the North to settle in our community. The house they bought was a plantation house of sorts, that I had never noticed before. In going to and from church and school I had to have passed it on a daily or weekly basis, but it never had significance before now. It was on a hill and to me it stood tall in all of its two story glory.

She and her husband built and operated a small grocery store with a gas pump. That was wonderful for I had never lived in walking distance of a store. Having the money to purchase a piece of candy was a treat, even if it didn‘t happen very often.

It was Miss Alice that gave me the desire to play the piano. She had one. She was the musician at her church, and to hear her play the hymns just by reading the notes was so awesome to me. It think she must have loved playing for inevitably she did me a mini concert of sorts each time I found an excuse to go to her house. She saw my thirst to learn, so she began giving me lessons. Nothing major, but enough to feed my hunger to touch the piano like I knew what I was doing. We didn’t have a piano. A guitar was the instrument at our house, but I felt like I had a piano when she gave me permission to “play”.

I left the farm life on Long Branch when I graduated from High School. Jobs, more education and family kept me away from the farm for the most part. I did see Miss Alice on occasion when I visited home. Mama did fill me in with the answers to my questions concerning her. She gave me updates when I’d ask; about Miss Alice’s boys going to college, and moving back up north, or about her losing a brother in death, or about her husband who took ill.

When I did settle down to see her, it was an accident. An accident, in that, it was a pleasant surpise to know she was close by. "Miss Alice is down the hall," Mother said while we visited.

"Oh Really!" I responded gladly. It is amazing how situations work outside our little box of a mind, to bring the gig saw puzzles pieces together. Mother's health had deteriorated to the extent that she needed constant care and the Nursing Home was the most likely choice.

Miss Alice husband had died leaving her alone in that big ole house. Her boys lived out of State so they were faced with a big decision.. After selling the farm, they too were forced to make the choice of giving their mother constant care they were not able to give. I had heard she had Alzhiemers but was not prepared for what occupied the room down the hall.

I had the crazy idea she’d know me and we could reminisce. I could tell her how I had taken a few piano lessons, to add to the basics she had taught me, and I had learned from practice, practice, and more practice and played quiet well. I wanted to tell her I was the musician at the church where my little growing family attended in another state. I knew she would be so excited that my children and I did concerts, that we traveled in several states and was having a blast doing so. I would ask her about her boys. Maybe ask how she was coping with the death of her husband.

The hopes I had died when I saw an old woman come out of the room. Surely it couldn’t be Miss Alice. "Maybe it was her roommate" I thought more in a wish. I didn’t recognize whthis woman was. I figured I must have misunderstood Mama’s directions. So I walked back and asked again. "Someone told me she was in room 210 down the hall." I didn't take time to tell her why I asked again.

Sure enough the woman I saw was only a shell of where the Miss Alice I knew once lived. Alzheimer’s had taken her mind and ravaged her body. She never looked up as we passed in the hall. With her head down, she mumbled unintelligible words and kept shuffling on down the hall. I’m glad my memory of her was imbedded in the eyes of that pre-teen who walked the mile down the road. Picking up pace as I got closer, I sloped up the hill, rang the door bell only to have Miss Alice welcome me as if I was a long lost relative, or an important celebrity.

Shortly after we passed in the hallway she disappeared into the dining/fellowship room down the hall out of sight. However for a moment I was back in her living room listening to her play the piano. She had found the piano in the dining room and set down to play. It was still a hymn. It wasn’t perfect, but it was beautiful just knowing that her love for the piano was still inside that shell. What I heard helped my memory of yesterday to stay alive. I don’t dwell on what the disease had done to her. I like my version better.

July 2006
Doris Thompson