At five minutes before nine, nurses gently push in and arrange the wheelchairs. The window-walled multipurpose room at Deerfield Retirement Community in Urbandale, Iowa, has rows of chairs, a glossy grand piano up front, and a projector screen. My grandmother, 90 years old, sits at the piano, playing a prelude. It’s a Sunday morning.
Since she moved in eight years ago, my grandmother, Mary, has become the go-to accompanist for this community’s church services. On Easter Sunday, she (a lifelong Protestant) played for four services, including the Catholic mass. Last summer, she accompanied and taught for an ecumenical service, leading favorite hymns interspersed with stories and thoughts about faith.
I attended that service. We sang “Amazing Grace,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” “God of Grace and God of Glory,” and “Jesus Loves Me.” Many of the congregants in that room would have preferred to be holding hymnals, but age has made it harder to hold thick volumes and read small text. The projector is both a welcome and somewhat reviled accommodation. My grandmother remarked on the inferiority of singing from screens to affirmative chuckles and mhms.
My grandmother knows how to work a room. She has been many things throughout her long life, and even though she’s been a musician since she could sit on a piano bench and reach the keys, she’s most widely known as a politician. She served as a state senator in Iowa for ten years, six of those as president. Between 2003 and 2006, she served as US ambassador to the Eastern Caribbean. My family has pictures of me and my sisters sitting with her at the front of the senate chamber, gavel in hand. I have memories of riding in parades on the back of a convertible during election years, throwing handfuls of bubblegum and Jolly Ranchers.
I was 4 years old when my grandmother was elected to the state senate. I don’t remember a time before she was in public service. Long after she retired in 2006, she remained a go-to strategist and resource for Republican politicians trying to navigate the retail politics of the state of Iowa. She was instrumental in helping George W. Bush win the 2000 Iowa Caucuses. Even then, she could tell that something was shifting in our country’s politics and that it didn’t bode well for anyone committed to bipartisanship and constituent advocacy.
In 2001, it looked like there could be an opening for her to run for governor. For a few months, she considered it. But by that time, she didn’t seem to have the kind of profile that would rally the Republican base. Of her changes in the gubernatorial race, an Associated Press reporter wrote, “Kramer occasionally says things that could be interpreted as being moderate and moderates have a poor future in Republican primaries, something she fully understands.”
After her diplomat years, my grandmother started writing and speaking about civility. I always heard her talk about the importance of being “endlessly pleasant,” which I sometimes interpreted as strategic fawning, a response to the complicated nature of being a woman in a position of power. She had, after all, managed to work her way up corporate ladders and institutions in the 1970s and ’80s, when being pleasant was necessary for women with ambition.
Over the past ten years, though, I’ve come to see her commitment to civility as wise, maybe even a little prophetic. She’s been practicing a posture of radical commitment to relationships for decades.
She always had a gift for memorization—she plays the piano almost completely by ear, which drove her teachers to scold and rap at the printed sheet music propped up in front of her. In politics, her memory was a campaign asset. She filed away names, favorite foods, jobs, and pet partisan issues. Now, she commits to memory the favorite hymns of her wheelchair-using neighbors in assisted living, so that when they attend services, she can play songs for them, even though all they can do in response is raise their heads in quiet acknowledgement.
Politics was not part of the plan for my grandmother until her late 50s. She was a virtuoso organist and pianist who deeply disappointed her professors at the University of Iowa when she decided to pursue a career in education rather than performance. She was a church organist, but that didn’t always pay the bills (some churches didn’t pay at all). Her first real “job” was playing the piano at local bars as an undergrad, accompanying pop sing-alongs, which were all the rage in the 1950s. She could take requests and transpose to fit the voice of any slightly inebriated townie.
My grandmother was an only child; sometimes I wonder if the discovery that playing the piano could gather people and make them laugh, sing, or dance was like unlocking a path out of isolation. She told me once that she didn’t want to “spend her life in a practice room,” which was a relief to hear as a 19-year-old clarinet performance major who felt like she was missing out on so many things in order to perfect scales and breathing exercises. I felt like a failure, but she told me that I might be made for something else.
Watching her lead a room in hymns and deliver a few remarks in between, at age 90, I wonder if she’s rediscovered the social power of music—for others and herself. Her husband, my grandfather, died in 2018. They were married for 60 years.
After her ambassadorship ended, Mary was a sought-after political speaker and consultant, but age and shifting political currents have changed that. She’s not as mobile anymore; walking long distances is painful. Furthermore, her “moderate” profile and lack of enthusiasm for the current administration have made her a relic of politics past.
Politically powerful people in the state don’t need her anymore. Her community needs her, though. They don’t need talking points or connections. They need a pianist.
At times, I’ve wondered to myself if my grandmother’s commitment to civility and pleasantness is simply a form of tone-policing. As someone who supports public protest and nonviolent civil disobedience in the pursuit of justice, I find it hard to defend the belief in civility as a first principle.
My grandmother’s civility isn’t saccharine or prim, though. It’s not a form of stonewalling; it’s deeply grounded in the belief that love of neighbor and mutual respect will make it possible to disagree and solve real problems.
She’s a fan of good satire. Even before her political career began, she recognized that some equally distributed ribbing is good for all of us.
In 1974, she and her friend wrote a musical revue for the Iowa City University Club titled “Good Night, Ladies.” The opening number is a satirical song called “Objects of Reverence,” a corny and rather on-the-nose send-up of romanticized domesticity that could easily have been written today as a spoof of tradwife content: “We’re frosted with deference, so courteous and kind. Submissive, dependent, we’re quietly resigned. And God help the woman who tries to use her mind.”
A selection called “Rosie the Riveter” featured women on ladders with tools and hard hats singing, “We think that marriage is nifty when it’s really fifty-fifty,” and “I’ll be your friend and lover but no slave.” The song “I Need All the Support I Can Get” is a dig at second-wave feminism: “Tell Gloria Steinem, I’m not quite ready yet. Don’t ask me to burn my bra—I need all the support I can get.”
I’m 37 years old; my grandmother was 39 when she cowrote and put on this farcical production for an assembly of University of Iowa faculty members and their wives. In the preface, the two composers insisted, “Our show doesn’t expound a philosophy, it doesn’t take a position on issues—it is meant to entertain and amuse you—and maybe give you an idea or two to ponder.” A civil and “endlessly pleasant” way to introduce a show that probably poked a little at each attendee’s worldview.
It’s too reductive to say that there is a bright and clear through line in my grandmother’s life or career, and I’m not going to try to impose one. She says that she’s “come full circle,” returning to her first job as a pianist for hire. There’s no pay and no acclaim or external reward for her playing. Church services at Deerfield aren’t taproom sing-alongs, but they are social, spiritual, and deeply needed. Her neighbors want to gather and worship together, so she helps them do it.
The tone of our national politics is such that we are all susceptible to the lie that everyone who aspires to public service is either conniving and power-hungry or self-deluded. My grandmother keeps me from getting cynical. I know she is committed to public service because she is still serving when no one cares to notice. She’s not the only one.
Praising the value of civility verges on sentimental and naive, I know. So does the song “Jesus Loves Me.” But that was one of the songs Mary chose to close the service I attended last summer. In her remarks before it, she sat at the piano and talked about why she picked it for us to sing together. She paused for a moment, then described having a moment of clarity about what the song meant as a child, “Jesus loves me. Me!” she said, and put her hand on her chest. “What a thought.” Then the whole room sang the song together—the strong voices, the weak ones, and the barely audible groans.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. She is coauthor of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting and writes broadly on Christian music and the intersection of American Christianity and popular culture.
The post At 90, My Grandma Is Leading Worship at Her Retirement Home appeared first on Christianity Today.
