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Monday, June 20, 2005
The Band Plays On
Life is a song. Love is the music.
Those words beneath Bonnie Horlbeck's picture in the memorial service program got it just right about her long, good life.
Bonnie was our choir director during my first nine years as pastor here. Before that she'd served similarly with other Alameda churches, and she founded and directed numerous community musical programs as well.
Hundreds of local children learned to love music under Bonnie's direction, and to labor long and hard to perform it properly. At least one of them went on to study at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Two of her prize students sang special tributes in her memorial service -- one of them her grandson Sam, whose buddies in the Pacific Boychoir joined him for the occasion.
She continued giving private lessons until within a year of her death to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. That disease's slow destruction of her lungs silenced Bonnie's own singing, adding emotional insult to her physical injury. And yet she would glow with admiring support whenever one of her voice students sang in some gathering. Like a proud mother. The gift she gave would keep right on giving, she knew, through countless musical generations.
The memorial's music menu smacked of smorgasbord. Angelic boys' choir fare side by side with motivational pop ballads, classical selections, an augmented choir's gorgeous anthem, and a stirring Easter hymn. Given Bonnie's undying devotion to Alameda's community-wide Sing-It-Yourself Messiah, it seemed somehow perfect that the "Hallelujah Chorus" was conducted by a member of Temple Israel(!).
Then, good friends, came the capper. As Handel's last chord slowly faded into silence, from the back of the room came a soft skirling sound. It gradually built to a slow marching cadence as the piper made his way, kilts and all, to the front where he moved seamlessly into "Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound." I joined the family and we proceeded to lead the assembled multitude in following the good Scot out the main entrance into midafternoon sunshine.
Smiles and tears and lots of fervent hugs. Bonnie would be pleased. In fact, I'm sure she was.
Bagpipes... I have a theory: In heaven it won't be golden harps riffing on arpeggios and glissandos or whatever it is they're called; no, no, at the pearly gates we'll be issued bagpipes and banjos and, every here and there, an accordion.
If spiritual flailers like me can make the roster for heaven (and only because of amazing grace, I know I can), then this world's instrumental stepchildren will surely also be redeemed to praise our God with the best of 'em.
posted by Jack Buckley at
3:35 PM
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