So I was doing a little community service a few days ago, in this church where all of these old people gather during the day. They watch movies, play pool and everything like that. My job was to make sure that everyone had something to do, and everyone was kept busy. So I played pool, watched movies with them, played wii bowling with a few people, and everything was fine. They had a piano over at the side of the room, and I guess you could say I consider music my forte, so I decided to open it up and start playing.
What happened next was simply amazing. I started to play my own song, "Memories," and improvising a little bit as well, and this old lady comes over and sits down near the piano. I didn't see her at first, but then I heard her after a while, humming along with the piano.
"You play very well for such a young kid," she said. I nodded and smiled back to her. Once the song finished she smiled and said, "That was a nice song, I have never heard that one before." She paused for about half of a minute while I started playing around with the piano again and then she asked "Do you know who wrote it?" I looked up from the piano and was about to give her the answer, but something stopped me. Something inside of my head stopped me from telling her that I was the one who wrote that song.
"Ruairi Wolf," I ended up saying. She nodded. "He isn't very well known really, so I'm not surprised if you have never heard it before." She nodded once more, and then laughed.
"It's funny how much you can get from a song," she started, "You can learn a whole lot about an artist by the music that they create, just by listening."
"How can you tell?" I asked, "There aren't any lyrics to the song or anything."
"Boy, I'll tell you this, music does not need words to make sense, music is a language of its own." She said, as she put her hand on the piano. "What you see here is a translator, one of thousands of kinds." She paused for a bit, and then smiled again. "This Ruairi person can use this language well, even if he doesn't know how, sometimes it just comes from the soul." She then shook her finger at me, "I bet I can tell you exactly what Ruairi was trying to say with these notes." I couldn't help but laugh and ask:
"Alright, what do you think he was trying to say?"
"The song starts off nice and bright, which usually means everything was happy in the beginning, then it stayed steady, maybe even got faster and brighter, and then it seemed like something was missing... like you just ended up not playing the center-part of the song." She got up out of her seat and continued, "It sounded somewhat like a memory someone was trying to forget, like... like someone had just left, a family member, or maybe just a friend, someone special at the very least." I was shocked, I had not told her the title, and she had basically guessed it. "Memories." I couldn't even remember why I made that the title in the first place, but what she said seemed absolutely true, and once I thought about it, it just was true. I had written a small short paragraph that goes with the song. Everything she described is in there. A friend passing away, and a repressed memory. How could someone know the meaning of MY song better than ME? "Well, it looks like its time for me to leave, the bus is finally here." She started walking toward the door, and turned back only for a second. "I actually forgot to ask you for your name... but I don't think that is needed." She said with a smile, "Because I think I already know what it is."