The Sound of Music, Alive!

I’ve finished reading my first book of the new year, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers – by Maria herself – and it is amazing how like “The Sound of Music” it is, which I always thought was a mere fictional, romantic account of a novitiate nun who marries the wealthy widower, Captain von Trapp, and leads his seven children into a singing career and out of their Austrian homeland at the height of Hitler’s reign. Why didn’t anyone tell me, I wondered – during all those teenage years when the movie was popular and I played the album over and over again on our Magnavox stereo at home – why didn’t any adult say to me, Oh, it was true . . . I remember when the von Trapp family singers toured this country during WWII . . . I remember hearing about them on the radio and seeing signs for concert tickets . . . in fact, there was a story about the von Trapp family in a November 1947 edition of Life Magazine . . . why? I didn’t know that, when the movie ends and the von Trapp family leaves Austria, they actually arrived penniless in America, slowly began a family singing career that would take them across America, and ultimately settled in Vermont to become dairy farmers.

I had to read about it in the newspaper only two weeks ago on the occasion of the death of the oldest von Trapp daughter, Agathe, who died suddenly from heart failure at age 97 in Hagerstown, MD after a long career as a kindergarten teacher. She is the eldest daughter portrayed as Liesl in The Sound of Music, and made famous by the song, “I am sixteen going on seventeen . . . “  I was 16 at the height of my album-playing craze, and that song was a favorite. My eyes really widened when I read that Agathe had only recently published a memoir, Memories Before and After the Sound of Music.

I love memoirs by ordinary people whose lives take an unexpected turn of fate – and then spend many years reflecting on it before telling us what they think.  Their own wonder has finally found the words . . .

My plan was to read Agathe’s book (and I will read it next), but my quick research discovered that Maria herself had published a memoir many decades ago, in 1949 – and the first 124 pages of that memoir became (about 15 years later) someone’s inspiration for "The Sound of Music," first a Broadway play and then a movie.  Maria von Trapp sold all the rights to her story for only $9,000 -- with no royalties.

Maria admits in the book she was always a mischievous young person. One day when she was visiting a small chapel with a friend of hers, she playfully pulled the rope to try out the sound of the bell in the steeple. Looking at her friend, she said, “I wish I could become a writer after I’m forty!” She meant it as a joke, but her friend didn’t smile, rather asked Maria if she knew the story of the bell. “Which story?” Maria said.

Her friend replied, “The people say that once in a hundred years it happens if someone rings this bell while pronouncing a wish, that wish, whatever, it may be, will come true, provided the person is unaware of the legend. The people of this valley call it the ‘wishing bell’.”

And surprisingly, Maria only just remembered that incident when she sat down to write the first few pages of her reflections as a middle aged woman living in Vermont . . .

This spirited novitiate Austrian nun (with a tendency for severe headaches while cloistered in the convent) never expected to one day marry a wealthy Captain 25 years her senior – nor to become a stepmother to seven, birth mother to three – nor to leave Austria penniless and to tour America as a singer – nor to become a dairy farmer in Vermont once the family stopped touring. She never meant to write a screenplay of what we now know as "The Sound of Music" – in fact, the book was meant to be a penned therapeutic reflection of her life with Captain Georg von Trapp who had died of lung cancer only a few years after arriving in America. She wrote the memoir instinctively out of both grief and joy – and often reflects on the inability to distinguish between the two. She had now become a dairy farmer, a part-time voice instructor, and a writer – in Vermont – which she says brought her life to full circle because it reminded her very much of her homeland – and of the wish she had once made to be a writer.

Agathe (whom I will always think of as Liesl, forever sixteen going on seventeen . . .) will be buried alongside her father, Captain Georg von Trapp; her stepmother, Maria, who died of heart failure in 1987; and five deceased siblings (another four remain quite alive, in America) at the Trapp Family Lodge (http://www.trappfamily.com/) which is now a ski resort operated by Trapp descendents in Vermont – though it was originally named Cor Unum by Maria, which in Latin means something akin to “being of one heart.”

The Two Lists

Back to my kitchen table for writing after one week in bed, or closely-so – or mostly-so. It was a necessary time after holiday frenzy to get sick and then to regroup, replan, refantasize, review and revise . . . not the way I usually do, or like to do – which is to compose my New Year’s list by careful thought and pen, and in upright position. It was a different kind of list-making this year, different kinds of resolutions – taking place in the heart this time, not so much in the brain, but in the heart . . .

I lay in bed with the flu virus circulating through the brain cells and spinal fluids, even into the bone marrow, keeping my body down and in a death grip – that’s how it felt – like two burly monsters, one on either side, holding me down -- in a death grip. There was something heavy on top of me too – Presence, I called it when trying to explain the feeling to my daughters this week – it was Presence that sat upon me and spoke while the burly guys did the heavy handed work of holding me there – held me till I said . . . what? . . . I said nothing; they did all the talking this time, and not by words. Presence sat upon me till by some osmosis of weight and stealth and time, she made me listen – not with ears and mind, but with heart. The heart gives way, relaxes under such weight; it melts under degrees of heat; it capitulates by force of silence.

I recall a thing that came to me late one night as a bit of consciousness bubbled to the surface: the concept of Two Lists. In my delirium, I thought of lists – the categorization of things, plans, and circumstances, and of how I loved (in my previously healthy lifestyle) to organize my life and daily plans by such visual prompts. But in this case, as illness seared my body, I saw in my mind two lists -- one was titled Serenity, and the other Courage . . .

. . . and I thought of how many things I edged against in my life – and for how many years – things that were not meant to be etched there under Courage for they took only cheap stubbornness and anger to be there – and so I saw them extricated to that other side, Serenity. This is a place I’d have to start visiting in 2011 in order to make peace there; I‘ll have to sit beneath those things as I did beneath those two burly flu virus guys – I’ll have to make my peace with them, relax under their weight, just see by experience if I can still breathe once the peace is made – or not.

And so I started the mental work of moving things over to Serenity – actually, saw them being moved over – all those things that it hadn’t worked to rail against, no matter how long I tried . . .

This all took place in the dark aspects of night – 2:20, 3:36, 4:03 – these are a.m. hours – and each time I was raised into conscious thought I saw the lists had been redrawn or recharted for me. It was a thing going on betwixt the two burly guys as they fought it out over me, wrestled for the heart that still pumped itself feebly in between.  She, Presence, remained calm and on top of me.

I remember one time waking into conscious thought, a profuse sweat and rapid heartbeat enveloping me, and seeing how long and profound that first list had become – Serenity – and how squat and short was the Courage one.

I came out with three gems for the New Year – and those three things I remember – because when I woke to get out of bed sometime in the next day or two, I saw a notecard on which some words had been jotted down in delirious handwriting, a word or two to represent each thought – and I’m glad I found the notecard or I wouldn’t have remembered this experience (a reason to love lists) – they were a surprise to see at all – old friends, a tangible reminder of the two burly guys and Presence who paid me a visit on the cusp of 2011, left a few words – then freed me to go.