3-18-19 TAP

I sat on a cushioned pew with my sisters in the alto section of our little ward choir after church yesterday. As Ellen tapped away on the piano, her fingers dancing up and down the keyboard, I peeked over by black choir notebook and watched eleven-year-old Heidi keep the beat with her foot. I should have been paying attention to our choir director, and I usually am because although I write music I am sort of illiterate reading it. But young Heidi, of the angel voice, always draws me to her. She’s sort of magnetic that way, with her stunningly beautiful face and her pure spirit and that voice in her. She inherited it from her mother, along with her three sisters… all of it… the beauty, the radiance, and the voice. I suppose I did not need to follow Sally’s conductor’s baton because I had Heidi’s foot. Her soft black shoe tapped up and down, ever so slightly, exactly on the beat, like it could not help itself.

Park plays drums and french horn.

There is always a little thrill that bubbles up from my heart when I see young people unknowingly tapping their feet. Parker does it as he’s talking to me or we are singing as I drive him to his drum lessons. I catch myself doing it when I am trying to learn a new piece of music. It’s an automatic mechanism that probably came with us when we entered the womb and was nurtured all that time in there, keeping pace with our mothers’ heart beats. 

The first time I went to a band concert, when Timo was in seventh grade, I was mesmerized by the dance of forty feet on the stage floor. One per musician. I remember thinking it was interesting how one foot on each musician kept the beat, as if there were invisible strings attached to music angels hovering above. You could sort of tell, or at least guess, if a person was right footed or left footed by which foot they tapped. I noticed yesterday during Sacrament Meeting that I was tapping alternating feet as we sang. Left, right, left, right. It caught me off guard. I don’t even know why I noticed it, but I thought it strange. Maybe my brain was extra balanced yesterday. I got to thinking, as we sat there in our sweet congregation of believers, how blessed I am to be able to tap my feet. First, how blessed I am that these feet work and I can move them if I want. And secondly, that music sits comfortably enough in my soul that it has to squeeze out of my feet as well as my mouth. 

Timo on the timpani in All-State band.

Last month we went to the beautiful Symphony Hall in Salt Lake City to watch Timo play percussion in the All State Junior High Band. The music was so awesome that I lifted my eyes to the heavens, then closed them in order to inhale the beauty. When I opened them again they were angled right there at the feet of those musicians, a sea of black dress shoes rising and falling in unison, as if Heaven’s choreographers could not resist getting in on the show. 

Marching band is serious toe tapping.

The rhythm of life does the same. We tap our figurative toes to it down here on earth, breathing in and out at the very same time as every single other human, in syncopated time. We all keep the beat, whether we know it or not, while above us the silent angels sing.