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Last Sunday, I stuck around Quaker meeting past my usual 15 minutes of eat-hummus-and-pita-chips-while-making-pleasant-small-talk and stayed for the “second hour,” which is what Quakers call the thing they’ve got that most closely approaches Sunday school. I’d never been to a second hour before, but I’ve gathered that they often involve a fair amount of discussion, usually around topics like “non-violence and my spiritual testimony” or other appropriately Quaker things. For a few weeks, I had been hearing talk of getting a piano into the meeting room so that Phyllis could “do a second hour.” Everyone else seemed to know what was going on, so I went along with it, assuming, perhaps, that Phyllis played the piano, and thus the Quakers would spend “second hour” listening to her play, or else, maybe, that she sang, and so someone else would play the piano, and she would sing songs, maybe even songs about “non-violence and my spiritual testimony,” or something else appropriately Quaker. I hoped that it would be nothing like the last time I had heard a Quaker sing: a man opening up for a really quite wonderful singing group that the Meeting had brought to town. He was backed by a badly-balanced midi-track, and had absolutely no sense of tone, and though he meant well, the entire audience was cringing with that gut-wrenching feeling of vicarious embarrassment.
What I knew of Phyllis was that she was kind, and that she helped her son sell Boy Scout popcorn even though you could tell she hated it, and that the week before last she had spent three hours making cookies with her kids out of hickory nuts. As she passed around the music for “Here I Am, Lord” and apologized for the cold she’d been battling, I tried to imagine what I was in for.
And then she opened her mouth. My goodness.
One night in college, a friend had borrowed Cella and Emmet’s hand-crank ice cream churn to make some vegan “ice-cream” that was heavily cashew-based and which, obviously, was going to taste weird and nutty and not-actually-delicious-you-just-think-it’s-good-because-you’re-a-vegan-and-that-skews-your-perspective.
The feeling I felt when I ate that ice cream is the closest I can come to an analogy for how I felt when Phyllis started singing: I was expecting something mediocre, maybe embarrassing, maybe passably good. I was expecting something that you enjoy because it’s the work of someone you care about. I was expecting something kind of normal and unexciting.
Turns out, the woman whose hair is always flyaway messy and who is remarkably patient with her children is also some world-famous opera singer, and her voice was powerfully filling a room that is usually full of so much intentional silence.
There is so much to say about her, about opera, about her thoughts on art and calling and humor and music and our place in the world, but two things have stuck with me this week: the sound of her voice when I first heard a familiar song belted out as an opera, and an illustration from a favorite picture book in which a caterpillar finally realizes that he can become a butterfly, and then sees, inside of all of the caterpillars he passes, a tiny imprint of a fluttering butterfly.
What I mean is, you can think you know someone. You can think you know what to expect, what is within the realm of possibility. And then it turns out that there’s a huge and beautiful and powerful voice inside of someone who just looked like a mom. All week long, I’ve been looking a little closer at people, trying to figure out what their fabulous secret is. It makes the grocery store more exciting, and the hours spent holding tiny children, and the glimpses I see through car windows when I’m stopped on my bike at a red light. Who are these folks? What am I not seeing? If vegan cashew ice cream can be startling delicious, well then, almost anything is possible.
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Putting Down Roots 