“May I sit here? I’ve been out. I’ve had a cold, but I think I’m well enough now to sing.”

“Of course,” I say, and scoot my chair to the left a few inches to let her into the aisle. I move my glass of water and my coat.

Her diminutive eighty-year-old frame doesn’t take up the full width of the chair. She sets her bag on the floor and opens her music folder. “What did he go over last night? What did I miss?” she leans over and whispers, so as to keep from disturbing Jamie, who is teaching the basses how to sustain a modified vowel on a note too high for their range.

“Let’s see … ‘Lift Up Your Heads’, ‘And With His Stripes’, and yeah, we went back to the Christmas stuff and did ‘And He Shall Purify’ and ‘For Unto Us’. He tortured us on the melismas.” She scribbles furiously with her pencil on a single sheet of notebook paper in the back of a folder that is shabby from many years of use.

She leans over once more. “I’m Nancy,” she says.

I smile. “Amy. Thank you for sitting with me, Nancy, but you’re going to be sorry because I sound like a frog tonight!” She keeps a straight face. “Well, then, we’ll just be a couple of frogs. This thing still has my throat.”

Why does this remind of me so much of my Grandma? She would have said something like that. She was always a little odd. I think about the name Nancy and decide that she reminds me more of a Ruby.

During our first break, we talk in the fervent, rambling way that people do when they’ve just met but feel like fast friends. We talk about raising kids and fact-checking the media and her thirty-minute drive down for these practices, which she makes without complaint every week because she feels safe in her Buick. She won’t let her husband drive her.

We talk about church choirs and music and why I sing Messiah every year when I’m not a believer. “You are … unusual!” she says after a thoughtful pause. We talk about the piano I’m planning to sell. She says it’s a shame to sell a piano, unless it’s going to someone who’s going to use it. “I played when I was young and I thought I could get it back,” I explain. “I play every Sunday for our little church up there, but if I sit at the piano in my living room, I can just play for hours. Such a joy, and you never lose it,” she says, and she gives me a keen, piercing look, convicting me for giving up, then lets her eyes fall because something has occurred to her.

“I used to play the violin, too. I played for years, honey, and sometimes I even did a solo in church on it. And you won’t believe it, but ten years ago, we had a windy day, as windy as I’ve ever seen it be, and don’t you know, I was carrying the violin back into the house — “

I know what is coming. The violin neck is about to get crunched or the whole case is going to be blown out of her hand and the instrument smashed to pieces.

” — and the wind caught and the door slammed right on my hand and broke my finger!” She holds out her right hand, so frail with its paper skin and liver spots, and shows me the ring finger, knuckle swollen with arthritis, bent and misaligned. “My husband took me to the emergency room, but you know, they let me sit out there for so long that it didn’t get set right, and now look at it.” She looks at the finger and rubs it. “I haven’t played the violin since. It hurts too much to hold the bow. I have to have that finger to hold it, you see. Ten years,” she muses.

The break is over. We sing through ‘Glory to God’ and ‘His Yoke Is Easy’. Jamie makes jokes and Nancy glances over each time with a smirk. “He is just something else, isn’t he? So funny,” she whispers. Something in that half-smile is my Grandma. Nancy stands at four-eleven, the same height, the same tiny form. Her wit is sharp.

I am suddenly overcome with love for this woman, a gem like Grandma was, and I know what to do, because they make damned near everything these days. Things an eighty-year- old woman would not necessarily know about, I realize.

At the next break, I sneak off to an empty room in the church fellowship hall, take out my phone and bring up Amazon. I search for “violin bow arthritis”. There it is, a grip mod piece for the bow frog that is made for players with arthritis, complete with five stars and multiple, grateful testimonials about finally getting to play the violin again after years of prohibitive pain.

I order it. It won’t be here in time for me to give it to her in person, even with Prime, but I have her name and her town and addresses are easy to find in online voter records. I see she is registered as a Democrat in a sea of Republicans. I think about how she just told me she loves NPR.

It’s terribly difficult to keep from grinning for the rest of the rehearsal. I manage to solemnly charge her with being careful on the way home and resting up and taking care of that cold. In this moment, I know that my heart has adopted a grandmother.

I’ll stand beside her during the performance, transported back to twelve years old, standing beside Grandma in the church choir.

You never lose it. I want to give Nancy back this music, because I think she’s really a Ruby. I can close my eyes and envision a violin and bow in her hands again. It gives me the much-touted Christmas warmth I seldom experience. This is how gifts are given.