21/01/2014
I wrote this today, as a possible prologue to a book on the polka icon. - Brady
DULUTH, Minn.
At first, there is no music, and it’s evident this retirement home is more sprawling than it appears. Turn a corner, though, and there it is – the sound of music quietly emanating from somewhere, someplace inside. It has the power to draw like warmth from a hearth. Around more corners, the music grows. Until it’s there, through a set of double doors, the sound of one man strapped with an accordion. The audience is rapt.
They are aging, yes. Their voices are thin. Their clapping is light. Their breath, though, still with the capacity to be taken away. They’ve known this man almost all their lives. They’ve all listened to him. At 87, he’s as old as almost any of those in the audience. He is of them. He is kind to them and kind like them. He reads them, he will say later, meaning he doesn’t come with a scripted performance. Rather, he responds and reacts. He is their reflection and in him they see all they have known. He is the music of their lifetimes. And here he stands, on the same floor they do. No stage. They marvel at him. They laugh with him. They sing with him and sing his praises back to him.
They even arrange this dining hall into an impromptu concert hall. This fact is not lost on the retirement home attendant, who, when she walks in, is surprised to find the seats facing auditorium-style the man at the front of the room. It’s clear the efforts taken by the residents to face this man, like a flower turns to the sun, are efforts this woman is unaccustomed to seeing from this group. They are usually pushed in their wheelchairs, or goaded to their seats. They don’t hustle for just anybody. But they hustled today. This was worth seeing. This was worth turning a chair. Clearly, they will scoot a foot if it means they can then tap one, too.
The entertainer before them tells them a 68-year-old story, about the first time he picked up an accordion. A neighbor who was getting married later in the week overheard the strains of music. He asked the player to play the wedding.
“But I only know four songs,” he said.
That’s OK, said the man, you can play them over and over. In the days that followed, the accordion player rehearsed those songs hard. At 3am one morning, he woke stressing to learn a fifth song. His mother reprimanded him, of course. There were others sleeping in the house. Just like the one man in this audience today. The man’s head is hung and he is sleeping through the performance. The entertainer at the front of the room reads this and reacts by not saying a word. He plays to the rest in the room. The accordion is bulky, but it’s a lullaby of movements in this man’s chiseled hands. He is smaller than imagined, like a lot of entertainers seem to be. We imagine them to be as large as their personalities. It’s their personalities that grow in our minds. And their hair, it hardly ever changes. Maybe, only to thin. Just a little.
This man’s shock of hair is a shiny brown like the skin of an almond, and it hangs low on his forehead. His shoulders are narrow, but cut like a rigid box. His smile is a row of white teeth that offer a penetrating smile. This could be a weapon, this smile, in the right time and place. Along the campaign trail, it could melt a person. Today, it’s gracious. Today, it’s reacting and not requiring. This smile is a natural smile.
He smiles between songs, but as he runs through one song and then another, he can become serious. Business. He tells the origin of each song. This one’s a Polish song. This one, Wisconsin claims, the Germans do, too. But, “trust me, I did some research,” and this song, it’s a Spanish folk song. He is a walking catalog of songs. From four have borne 4,000 or 40,000 more. He is an iTunes account in human form. ImmigrationTunes are what he offers his audience. There are polkas and waltzes and ballads and beer-stein crashing anthems. The audience, they lap it up. They sing along. Their eyes are lit with life. Once he asks only the women to sing. Then he asks only the men. He compares them and calls it a tie. “Are you a politician?” one of the audience members shouts, and the rhetorical question receives a round of the audience’s thin laughter.
The hour goes by in a moment. Nothing about it is forced. Nothing about it is long. He is an entertainer and in his hands time melts. He rolls out barrels. He Ob-La-Dis, Ob-La-Das. He tells them they’ll love this one and they trust him because they’ve always trusted him. He plays them the Johnny Polka, which he wrote in his basement, copyrighted then tucked away for years for fear of it not being good enough. It’s a good song, though, and he knows it. The audience gives it a 10 on a 10 scale. He’s humbled and wears the blush to prove it. It takes guts to put a song out there, even in front of this crowd, on this day.
The hour ends. There is small talk. One long faced man in a checkered flannel wonders at the weight of the accordion, and how this man is able to lug it like it’s simply a camera around his neck. “How do you do that?” he asks.
“What?” says the man. “Do you think I’m Superman?”
Laughs abound.
He’s -------- -----------. Like a bird. Like a sweet strain. He is the music of their lives.
