Hello folks. I thought that I would share a bit about my current professional/musical situation in the hope that some of you will find it interesting.

I am a volunteer live-in assistant at L'Arche Cape Breton. L'Arche is a Catholic-based intentional community for mentally handicapped adults and the people who help them. Our mission is to live together like a big family, each with their own work and recreation, and the more able people helping out the less able people where needed.

When I got here about a month ago, I expected that a simple, rural lifestyle would give me lots of opportunity to work on my musical skills, and I expected that my fiddle, guitar, and voice would be good ways for me to spend quality time with the handicapped folks. But oh my God... I didn't know the half of it.

As the community leader here said "Some of the people here centre their lives around music and food, and for the others, it's food and music." Many of the folks have instruments (or multiple instruments) and many others dance and sing at the drop of a hat. There are two folks who play air fiddle every time they see me. There is one woman who has a set of harmonicas and plays them constantly when she is walking around or saying her prayers. There is another woman who bounces up and down and yells "Yes! Yes! I'm so happy!" when I play a song that she knows. There is a man who, despite autism and a quite severe mental handicap, has a passion for guitars - he will stare intently at anyone carrying or playing a guitar, and keeps track of what rooms guitars are kept in and tries to sneak into them (unfortunately, his passion for guitars can be a little violent so we have to guard them from him). Doing the dishes after supper almost invariably involves a very loud radio and people dancing around the kitchen. Every day, and sometimes more than once a day, I jam with a couple of guys in my household. Singing during community masses or meetings, and campfires, and living room jams with guests from other households are all regular events.

Here are some of the musical lessons that I have learned here:

1. I have learned what a jam is. When I say that I jam with the guys I live with... really, I am the only one who knows anything about how to play, but my roommates just live for the chance to whale away at their guitar and fiddle while I'm playing something. Although this is quite different from the jams I've been used to before, I realized that it is what a jam should be: everybody is welcome, and everybody brings the best that they can. I should also mention that it is always me who brings the jam to an end... the guys are always ready to go on playing. I also reflect that there have been musicians willing to play along with me whose skills exceed mine by just as much as my skills exceed these guys'.

2. I have learned what a musician is. Let me tell you about Dave, one of the roommates I mentioned above. He has both Down's Syndrome and Alzheimer's, but one thing that he never forgets is that he is a proud Cape Breton fiddler. A brutally frank assessment of his chops would be that he knows which hand to hold the fiddle in and which hand the bow, and not much else. However, he greets me every morning by saying "You and me play violin," and I have to remind him every morning not to bring his fiddle to work. He plays air fiddle every time he hears a fiddle on the radio or a tape. He has a fiddle that his late parents gave him, and every time he plays it he starts by solemnly stating, "A violin is not a toy," and he kisses is goodbye when he puts it back in the case. When he plays along with me, he bows agressively, counts in the tunes, taps his feet, and cheers when I start to accelerate a tune or start droning strings.

I think about Dave when I remember a thread we had here once on what made somebody a musician. Does he suck? Absolutely. But is he a musician? Absolutely.

3. I am learning something about playing under adverse circumstances. The folks with instruments love to jam along and it can get pretty noisy, so I'm getting used to playing without being able to hear myself. Also, I'm learning to take in stride while playing if people suddenly hug me, or want to touch my strings or bow, or dance so close I have to dodge, or spit on my fiddle (it's happened once)... and I'm getting used to playing guitar under the intense scrutiny of the guitar-smashing gentleman I mentioned above, and taking it coolly when he escapes his assistant's attention and comes and takes a swipe at me.

4. Unfortunately, I am also learning something about how musical elitism is part of human nature. Dave and Gary are the guys I jam with daily, and there's another roommate, Trevor, who normally just wanders in and out the room when we have music, not paying it much attention. But a few days I ago I convinced him to try the harmonica, and he got really into it, dancing around and tapping his feet and playing runs up and down. I was thrilled... but then Dave and Gary were glaring at him and telling him to shut up. Although Trevor could, in an objective sense, play harmonica just as well as they can play guitar and fiddle, nonetheless they are dedicated musicians and he was just fooling around, so he wasn't welcome.

Marion