I finished A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery this morning (hat tip to Diane at Circle of Quiet). If you love P.G. Wodehouse, Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh this book is tailor-made for you and I promise that you will feel jolly glad you picked it up.  Humor is infused in this mystery: the take-offs on Holmes and Watson kept me smiling.

“My dear Watson,” he said, “you aren’t supposed to be as clever as this.”

“I love being Sherlocky,” he said. “It’s very unfair of you not to play up to me.”

Here’s another laugh – a brief jab at writers.

“Oh!” He looked round the room. “What d’you call this place, eh?”

“The office, sir.”

“The office?”

“The room where the master works, sir.”

“Works, eh? That’s new.  Didn’t know he’d ever done a stroke of work in his life.”

“Where he writes, sir,” said Audrey with dignity.

I nodded and almost said “Amen” aloud when I read:

Anthony could never resist another person’s bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house.

~      ~      ~

I’ve been thinking about music and memory this week.  My sister has lost much of her mobility (brain cancer and a stroke) but her memory is just fine, thank you.  We’ve had the leisure to amble around in the memory vault and pick out good ones to polish and shine.  Since I’m nine years younger, some of our memories don’t overlap; which happily means I get to hear new stories.  Any new story about my mom is a precious gem – another opportunity to better know the mom I lost when I was ten.

Old songs are like old stories. My spiritual pilgrimage from Plymouth Brethren to Presbyterian means I now sing much less Ira Sankey and Fanny Crosby and more Hans Shulz and Vaughan Williams. This week I’ve been hearing, singing, and playing songs from long ago. Revisiting obscure Plymouth Brethren hymns, and attending the chapel of my childhood has transported me back to the sixties – the whole family in one pew singing parts a capella in the Breaking of Bread service. It’s amazing how clearly it all comes back and how pleasant an emotion recognition is.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote about her mother in The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, 

“Music has always been part of the fabric of her life, so it is not surprising that it is the last thing to reach her.”   

Music can find areas inside of us that words can’t make it to. Places beyond language. The hows and whys of this fact is one of the interesting mysteries of life.