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E. Franklin Dukes (1969)
hi all - my first post I think, although I have been enjoying yours. I attended 5-8th grades 1961-65 but played in the high school band in the 8th grade. I was motivated to post by people reminiscing about Garmisch and Berchtesgaden.
On Dec. 18, 1963, when I was 12 years old, my parents took my 3 siblings and me from our home in Paris to Garmisch, Germany to ski; as I recall we stayed at the General Patton hotel but my memory could be wrong. This was our second visit. My third day of fearless skiing, wearing bindings my father had newly tightened, I hit a patch of ice and suffered a grotesquely broken leg. It was set in a clinic in Garmisch but I was sent to an American (Army?) hospital in Munich, in terrible pain, away from my family. One evening, a few days before Christmas, I heard the faintest sounds of music from somewhere in the hospital. An orderly told me that it was the world-famous Vienna Boys Choir, whose singing I had recently heard featured in a Disney movie (Almost Angels). To my delight, he promised me that they would be coming down our hallway! I became so excited as the angelic, ethereal sounds grew louder and the words more distinct. But the visit was not to be; I recall my bitter disappointment as the music simply faded away, without explanation, like so much else for me that winter.
This episode was a hallmark of my saga, with my Christmas back at the American Hospital in Paris (sharing a room with a soldier who was a card sharp who taught me a bunch of tricks and who later ran away with a female patient), before finally being moved to yet another army hospital, this time in Orleans. I was the youngest person by far in a ward otherwise full of soldiers. Three weeks after the initial break they re-broke it to reset it (no anasthesia!). And two weeks later I could finally go home. The missed choir also became the center of my family "sad story" of the Christmas season as my children were growing up, although the pain had long since passed. In fact, I enjoyed their anxious responses ("stop!" "no!") when I would pretend to start to tell the tale again.
That is, until one birthday, 43 years later, when the story changed. My daughter mailed me my present as a card. Inside were two tickets and the heading cut out from a promotional flyer: "If You Missed Them Once, Don't Miss Them Again"!!! Yes - the Vienna Boys Choir were coming to the United States and performing at her college! That invitation seemed written for me! It was a sublime if somewhat surreal pleasure to share with her the complete performance that I had missed so many years earlier. And they were brilliant!
I don't recall the song that echoed down the halls of that Munich hospital, but it might well have been "Es wird scho glei dumpa" ("It will soon be dark"). Certainly one portion of the song's lyrics seems appropriate for a child who longs for whatever may be missing during this season:
"Forget now, oh little child
your worries, your sorrow,
that you must suffer there."
But for me that song, and the Vienna Boys Choir, no longer evoke pain, but joy. And the story affirms that the large miracles of recovery are sometimes possible, even as the small miracle of beautiful music may be retrieved anywhere.
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