A day of flying and finally I landed in San Antonio, where the hotel shuttle picked me up and drove me to the hotel. Tomorrow I’ll meet up with Lancia and Diana and we’ll drive out to Laity Lodge to see Bruce Herman, Malcolm Guite and JAC Redford’s Ordinary Saints exhibit. It’s a collaborative effort between painter, poet and composer calling us to face the ordinary people around us and see, really see, how extraordinary they are. C.S. Lewis famously said in “The Weight of Glory”:

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. ”

 

On the shuttle to the hotel, it’s just me and driver, a man in his mid to late fifties, I guess. He sets my bag and guitar in the back of the van, but we don’t talk much on the short ride to the hotel. I feel uncomfortable sitting in the back alone.

I’m settled in my room finally, and glad to be finished with airplanes for the weekend. Suddenly hunger catches up with me, and I realize that I’ve only had a muffin to eat all day, so I get online to look for an Indian restaurant, and find one nearby. At the front desk, I have them call up the shuttle. 

The van pulls up and out steps the same driver from earlier.

“Hi again, what’s your name?” I ask.

“It’s Marty.”

He tells me I can ride up front this time saying, “I don’t bite”. I said, “Not usually, huh?”  Marty has classical music playing in the hotel shuttle as we drive.

“What kind of music do you like? Is classical your favorite?” I asked.

“I like classical and country/western and music from the 30s too.”

“Oh really? Like big band stuff?”

“Like Perry Como kind of stuff.”

My Grandad really liked Perry Como. I have several Perry Como albums in my record collection.

“Do you play an instrument or anything?” I asked

“Yeah, I play piano….”

Marty goes on to tell me a little more about himself. He has two grown-up children.

“Well, really they are my sister’s kids, but I adopted them and raised them when she left town.”  

“So you raised those two kids all by yourself this whole time?”

“That’s right.”

I had asked him to take me to the Indian restaurant, and Marty told me his son loved Indian food and so his daughter learned to cook it for him. But, it turns out, her new husband was too picky about food. Marty had taken them all out for dinner one day, and was shocked when his son-in-law ordered a hamburger with nothing on it. “I like a good burger with most everything on it, I couldn’t believe he just wanted it with nothing – not even a bun!”

This part I don’t remember exactly. Somehow, the conversation arrived at Marty mentioning that his son had died four years ago. Until that point he had been talking about him as if he were alive and well, so I was a little shocked.

Marty started, “He was such a healthy, talented boy, and out of nowhere he had heart failure. I always thought it’d be me who’d go first – I’m a pretty big boy as you can see – I never thought it’d be him.” He went on, “He used to paint and spin records. He could play drums and guitar. I used to take him to lessons from when he was real little. All he wanted to do was be an artist, but I told him you gotta make some money too so you can feed your pups!”  

About that time we pulled up to the Indian place, and he dropped me off. Later, when he picked me up to take me back to the hotel, he asked, “Well, was it good?”  “Yeah,” I said, “but I ate way too much.”

It was quiet for a while; the classical music still played on in the van. I noticed Marty was tapping his fingers to the music. I don’t mean he was tapping to the rhythm of the song. He was tapping out the melody softly on the armrest. Each finger-movement matched the instrumentation; this was a song he knew by heart.

“So, the piano you played… was it classical piano?” I asked.

“Yeah, I took lessons for classical. My teacher was real strict. She would make you spit out your gum when you came in there. She didn’t think you could chew gum and play piano.”

“When did you take lessons?”

“Oh, after my senior year of high school. I was working for a jeweler and we both liked classical music, and I told him I had always wished I could learn to play it. He said, ‘Well, why don’t you learn?’ And I said, ‘well, I’m twenty now! I’m too old!’ But he said, ‘You can learn! Go take some lessons!’ And so I did.”

“That’s really cool!”  

“Yeah, there was this Mozart piece that was so hard; it took me something like two months to be able to play it. I worked so hard on it. You know, if you don’t get the time just right it’ll just sound like a bunch of notes all over the place, so, I’d always get my teacher to play it for me before I left the lesson that day. I couldn’t really play it like I wanted by looking at the page, so I’d memorize it and try to make it sound just right. I finally got it at three in the morning one night.”

“You mean you couldn’t sleep – you were practicing in your head?”  

“No, I mean I stayed up half the night working on it, and finally it clicked for me.”  

“Wow! So you must have been really into it!”

“Oh yeah, I bought a piano and everything.”  

“Oh really? Like a real piano?”

“Oh yeah. A real piano. But I haven’t played in years. 

I’m wondering to myself, since he so obviously loves it, why he no longer plays. So I asked, “But you still have a piano at home?”

“Well, yeah, it’s out at my house in the country where I raised my kids. I should go out there, but I haven’t been since my boy died four years ago.”

 

Four years ago, Marty lost a son in a house in the country. A house he hasn’t visited since. A song ended. A piano gathers dust. Still, fingers tap along with a melody on an armrest in a hotel shuttle. I met Marty just a few hours ago, and I stumbled into his story by chance, if chance it was. Nothing all that amazing happened. We didn’t weep and embrace. At the time, I was mostly a little uncomfortable, just talking to a stranger. It was just a conversation with an ordinary bus driver for a few minutes one evening.

Look, I don’t know what it means, except that everything means more than we know or can imagine. You mean more than I can imagine, and more than you can imagine. So many faces and stories that shine through them – who knows what they’ve been through? Who knows what they’ve lost? Who they’ve loved? Only God knows those depths.

The next morning, I arrived at Laity Lodge for the Ordinary Saints exhibit. I can’t help but see Marty’s face in my mind. He could be looking out from among Bruce’s paintings, taking shape in Malcolm’s poetry, and how he would love to sit surrounded by JAC’s beautiful music.  I hope to see his face again. I hope to see his son’s.

 

May the Keeper of all of our stories tell them back to us face to face in his everlasting Kingdom, where the songs we’ve left behind on silenced pianos will ring out resurrected.

 

 

*Special thanks to Laity Lodge for giving me permission to use the audio clip from the video below in this episode. 

 

Visit: www.laitylodge.org 

Follow these links for more on the Ordinary Saints Project: 

Ordinary Saints Retreat Audio

Ordinary Saints Images and Q&A