I COULD BE THE OLDEST PERSON IN THE AUDIENCE, but so what. My age drops to the floor and I step on it with my dancing feet. Mavis Staples is shaped like a muffin, dressed in a swishy black top and matching and swinging black silk pants. Her hair is like a blonde bowl. It sparkles. She is escorted onstage by the hand of a dark-suited assistant. She needs help, but when the band starts to jive, she rolls across the stage like a loose marble.
Her shoulders pump up and down to the music, her arms are swinging, and her feet kick off gravity. Then she opens her mouth and out it comes: a powerful voice that blasts into the crowd. She’s got it, they clap, she’s still got it!
“How old is she?” I ask the woman sitting next to me, who seems to know all the songs.
“I don’t know,” she replies.
I guess. Mavis tells the audience that the Staple Singers have been singing for sixty-five years. Let’s see, eighty, or eighty-five, maybe?
“I’m so excited,” Mavis exclaims more than once between songs.
She is outrageously happy. Then she pauses, spotting a familiar face in the audience, and reaches down. He jumps on the stage. Tall, dressed in white pants and jacket, with lanky long hair, he runs to her side and hugs her. They sing a song or two together, and then they dance.
“Did you see me dance?” she coquettishly asks the audience. “I almost fell down, but he held me up.”
I clap with the crowd, moving my feet and shoulders, trying to keep up.
The crowd hoots and hollers. I release my voice. I shout, surprising myself.
When the bass guitarist has a solo, he bends his body in like a straw. He holds his instrument in a lover’s embrace. He makes it sing in a high-pitched voice, a voice so beautiful, so plaintive, like the singing of a loon.
The drummer has his turn. He builds up the sound to a mad tempo, like jazz drummers do, but this time, perhaps because his hair is white, I pound the drums with him. I allow myself to drum the hell out of those drums. It feels so good.
I am not old.
WHEN I WAS SICKWhen I was sick with stinging cramps
I could not carry my eyelids open.
My intestines were like helpless
pebbles tossed in swirls.
I promised myself
that when I returned to
the land of the well,
I would secrete gratitude
from every pore—
God, she, he, whoever.
I would take a deep breath,
deeper than everyday breath,
and exhale a bellows-full that
could blow your house down.
I would thank God, or someone
very much like her,
for being alive, a while longer.
I would look at the lake until I was bored;
I would rest my eyes
where the sea and the sky meet.
I would be content,
with breathing in and breathing out.