Time To Say Yes

Having Time To Say ‘Yes!’

Words: Anna McLamb Photos: Anna McLamb & Susan Rountree

When our first child was a toddler, I bought “No!”, a CD by They Might Be Giants, because the songs were enjoyable both for the kids and for us parents. Ten years later, it’s still in the CD carousel in my car. (Yes, I still drive a car with a CD carousel.)

I loved the title track because it could’ve as easily been sung by the parents about kids saying “No!” all the time, as it could have been sung by a kid about constantly being told “No!” by the adults in their life.

The number of No’s exchanged within our family has always been robust, but saying “No” to people other than my children was hard for me to learn, whether it was turning down work that I didn’t have time to do, or about avoiding “opportunities” that really were pits of quicksand, or putting up other boundaries around my well-being. Over time, though, I got pretty good at it.

With my personal boundaries under guard by my “No!” reflex, I was reluctant to let even good things in the gate, but every now and then, it would happen. Recently, the St. Michael’s Adult Choir made it through. On day 10 of the new normal, Kevin Kerstetter emailed the Adult Choir about a Virtual Choir being organized by the Episcopal Church’s Washington Cathedral for Easter. The catch was that you’d have to learn your part, record it (on video...yikes) and upload it within the next two days.

I joined the choir last fall, and when the pandemic forced us all into our homes, I was just getting used to the rhythm of weekly rehearsals on Wednesdays (the logistics of which were, trust me, complicated) and getting to church by 9:10 a.m. each Sunday, ready to sing. And then, just like that, I traded in my choir responsibilities for things like designing a “home-school” curriculum for my kids, building a home office and finding acceptable toilet paper.

In normal times, this sort of thing would have been way outside of my “No!” fence, but now, with no choir, no church, no school, almost no extra-curricular activities for our kids (music lessons on video calls being the exception), and with everything that mattered in my life happening inside the walls of my house, this chance to be part of something musical and even possibly joyful, was irresistible.

Step one was downloading the music and the “click track” for my part (a recording with a metronome beat that emphasizes your part over the backing music).

Then once I sang through my part, I realized that my daughter, Nora, could sing it with me, which would be cool because, even though she has a beautiful voice, the demands of middle school had caused her to step back from singing in the choir. So I asked her, and she said yes!

Then came step two: practicing. Though I struggled consistently with one high part, singing with my daughter definitely made up for it.

While we were at it, we noticed parts on the website for all sorts of instruments, so Nora got to work on the cello part, and her brother, Anson, got to work on the snare drum part.

Step three was recording the video. Since my husband, Jeff, is one of the

volunteer video producers for the St. Michael’s Sunday worship services during the quarantine, it was clear who would be in charge of the camera. Unlike yours truly, Jeff is loath to put anything off until the last minute, so while we were given an extravagant 48 hours to submit our entries, he made sure we got our stuff in a day early.

Was it perfect? Hardly. Was it up to Kevin Kerstetter’s standards? Doubtful. But did we work on it, all of us, together? Did we enjoy it? Did we send it in anyway? Yes, yes to all.

And once the videos were submitted, this unexpected, wonderful, vaguely familiar thing happened: We awaited the future with hope.

I mean, no one was losing sleep about whether we would make the cut, and who knew if they’d even be able to pull off the mammoth feat of reviewing the submissions (all told there were 800 of them) and then synthesizing them into something that the world would want to hear. But it sure would be cool, with or without us, and with three entries, our chances weren’t bad.

While we counted our blessings of jobs and good health, our lives had suddenly become untied from so many things that had given us meaning, that daring to look forward to something more than three days into the future felt, well, amazing — almost revolutionary.

The days turned into weeks, and eventually, Easter did come. Though it had no dresses or hats or white shoes, I’ve never experienced an Easter where the world has

Anna McLamb and her daughter, Nora, above on bottom left, sing with the Easter Day Virtual Choir produced by the Episcopal Church for its National Cathedral service. At right, Nora plays her cello and Anson McLamb the snare drum (both circled in yellow), as a family effort during the pandemic.

been so obviously inadequate and the promise of love and reconciliation with Jesus forever has been so literally life-giving. As the day filled with breakfast, candy-filled baskets, couch church and then a big lunch, I didn’t even think about the choir thing until Jeff’s St. Michael’s video teammate, Chris Carson, texted him that Nora and I were on the Episcopal Church feed. (We were where?!).

And there it was, this glorious video of 600 musicians and singers playing and singing “The Strife is O’er!”

And there WE were! ALL of us! Nora on her cello and Anson on his drum around 0:13 in the opening instrumental, and then Nora and me singing, in the opening Alleluias around 0:26, crawling across the screen!

Honestly, I didn’t like the song as we were learning and recording our individual parts. It certainly was no “Jesus Christ is Risen Today!”, and it was a far sight from the experience of singing in the Adult Choir, but WOW, what a beautiful thing it became with all our individual parts woven together. All those Easter people, performing their parts in the darkest Lent of my lifetime, and throwing that little piece of their creative selves into the universe, met with the hardworking team of musical and video people who did all of the weaving, all with God’s help. It was more than I ever knew how to hope for.

If you haven’t heard it, just Google Episcopal Church Virtual Choir and turn up the volume.

“Let hymns of praise his triumph tell. Alleluia!”

Anna McLamb is an attorney with Wyrick

Robbins, wife to an adventurous husband, and mother to two interesting, if not always good, kids.