As quarantine approached, the collage-paper mice of Leo Lionni’s children’s book Frederick came to my mind. Frederick and his family live in a stone wall, and harvest time has come. Frederick is the dreamer-mouse of the family, slow to work, quick to distraction, at best different from his industrious siblings and parents, and at worst a drag. They’re schlepping corn kernels 15 hours a day, filling the crannies of the wall. He’s staring into space, or gathered into himself in a corner, his little paper eyelids at half-mast.
The resentment from his siblings is thick. “Frederick, why don’t you work?” they ask.
Winter comes, and the family enjoys the bounty of their hoarding. Times are good. But winter is long, and supplies run low and eventually run out. The mice can only hunch, shiver, and wait. Days of darkness pass before a sibling remembers what Frederick had said about his own activities all through the fall, when the rest were busting their butts hauling provisions. Frederick had given answers like “I gather colors. For winter is gray.” No doubt they rolled their little paper eyes.
But lo, Frederick delivers. He offers poems. He spins stories. The little mouse thought-bubbles of his siblings fill with colors. They feel the sun, they smell the grass, they hear and taste and see beautiful, familiar things. They didn’t know they needed this, but they did. They were so hungry for it.
Before I get to where this is clearly going — to the quarantine, to our stone wall — I think back to how, as a child, I was pulled and pushed by the character of Frederick. I was a little obsessed with this mouse. He was the object of my own self-loathing, the embarrassment of a kid who procrastinated and forgot to put things away and lost track of time while singing and drawing and reading. I knew I was Frederick, yet I understood the resentment of his focused, industrious siblings. It’s a family of five. If Frederick had worked as hard as they had worked, they’d have had 25% more grain, or let’s say 15% more, since Frederick is probably not winning the grain-procurer-of-the-month award. Would that extra 15% have gotten them through the winter? Yes, probably, with Frederick’s contribution they would have had full bellies for longer. And yet.
They needed food, but they also needed art.
I knew Leo Lionni was on to something. But I couldn’t quite fight the shame I felt that I wasn’t pulling my weight, hauling my grain; that I was destined to be a government-handout mouse. My unruly brain and I went through peaks and dips of hyper-organization and chaos because I was fantastically imaginative and deeply, primally disorganized. I am not a first responder or a nurse; I’m neither journalist nor lawyer looking after our civil liberties in the Fog of Pandemic; I’m not a teacher, not a sanitation worker. I have no fortune to spend, no counseling to offer.
What I am is a professional musician. One by one the freelance gigs were cancelled — choral concerts, solo concerts, a wedding. One of my jobs is soprano soloist at a church. A church position is steady, as musicians’ jobs go, but as in places of worship all over the world, services were cancelled. Suddenly it was winter in the wall.
Holy Week and Easter were coming, as was a shelter-in-place order from the governor. The church had already live-streamed the previous Sunday service, attended by a scant congregation and a reduced choir. The pastors, organist and I brainstormed ways to record services and put them in the bank, releasing them for web streaming on the appointed days. I advocated for the music, knowing what hunger there would be in the wall. I knew that there could be no organ, and no Handel aria rioting off stained glass, in the living room of a pastor reading the Gospel and giving a sermon via videoconference.
The two fundamental parts of a service are the Word (Gospel) and the Sacrament (Holy Communion). The Gospel is a few sentences from a book most parishioners have on a bookcase at home. Holy Communion — even on that last Sunday when it seemed certain we would not meet again as a congregation for some time — was out of the question. Holy Communion is the carnal, physical act of eating together, of drinking from one cup. It’s a public health nightmare on a good day, never mind during a pandemic.
Music was the vapor, the beautiful and familiar thing to fill our thought-bubbles. The thing we were going to need. If word and sacrament were Father and Son, music was the Holy Spirit. Music was what the church musicians, who were neither grain-haulers nor first responders, had been storing up all along. Without it our winter wouldn’t be just cold. It would be terribly quiet.
And so, for three days in March the pastors, the organist and I recorded services: the fifth Sunday in Lent, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. The pastors prayed; the organist played; I sang a hymn and a solo aria for each service. We moved from pomp and triumph to stripping the altar to extinguishing the last candle in the chancel to glorious Easter. It was holy, lonely, and strange.
All the services were meaningful, but Good Friday (even though it was a Thursday) stayed with me, as Good Fridays do. Good Friday has a way of washing over you as you lie down before the suffering on the cross, as you weep for humanity’s frailty, as you wait, as you endure. As I sang “Were you there?” my voice echoed into the vast sanctuary, into a future none of us could see, to a congregation of no one but a little phone camera on a tripod and rows and rows of empty pews.
Sarah Berger is a writer and classical singer living in Baltimore. Her essay “Afterlife” was published in Prometheus Dreaming. She is writing a novel about a cohort of music students graduating in the year 1965.