BUFFALO
For years, the donated piano sat upright and unused in a corner of the nursing home’s cafeteria. Now and then someone would wheel or wobble over to pound out broken notes on the broken keys, but those out-of-tune interludes were rare. Day after surrendering day, the flawed piano remained mercifully silent.
Then came a new resident, a musician in his 80s with a touch of forgetfulness named Boyd Lee Dunlop, and he could play a little. Actually, he could play a lot, his bony fingers dancing the mad dance of improvised jazz in a way that evoked a long life’s all.
The lean times and the flush. The Saturday night hop and the Sunday morning hymn. Those long drives in a Packard to the next gig. That fine woman Adelaide, oh Adelaide, down in North Carolina. The deaths of a beloved aunt and a difficult marriage. Some things you don’t forget, so Mr. Dunlop keeps a white towel handy to wipe his eyes dry.
And so Mr. Dunlop would have remained, summoning transcendence from a damaged piano in the Delaware Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, his audience a couple of administrators, a few nurses and many patients beset with dementia, loneliness and age — were it not for a chance encounter and some cheesecake.
Instead, Boyd Lee Dunlop, 85, is the featured performer at a concert on Saturday night at the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Buffalo. Admission is $10. And if you want to buy his debut CD, that will cost you another $15.
Sitting at Table 8, guarding the cafeteria piano beside him like a jealous lover, Mr. Dunlop accepts all of this with boastful humility. He thanks God for the talent, shares a few unprintable thoughts, and turns to play a soulful take of “Come Back to Sorrento.”
“I got to be Boyd,” he says, as aides scrape the remnants of pork fried rice from plastic dinner plates. “If I die Boyd, I’m still Boyd.”
Mr. Dunlop arrived at the brown-brick nursing home nearly four years ago, a strong-willed but slightly bent half-note. He had 50 cents in his pocket, too much sugar in his blood, and a need to be around others. He liked to sit in the lobby and greet people, especially the women.
After a while, Mr. Dunlop let it be known that he was a musician. This did not distinguish him in a place where someone might claim to be a retired concert violinist or President Obama’s mother, and, in the first case at least, be telling the truth. Also, music here usually meant something to be endured — the weekly sing-along, say, with a resident armed with his own electric keyboard.
The broken cafeteria piano was a tease that Mr. Dunlop could not resist. He played when no one else was around, between meals, early and late. He learned how to dodge the piano’s flaws, how to elongate the good notes and suffocate the bad.
Nothing like his music had been heard in these cleanser-scented halls. The sounds of Boyd, including the occasional yowl, would flow from the empty cafeteria to greet Kate Wannemacher, the director of nursing, as she arrived early in the morning. “He plays right out of his heart,” she says.
Life kept time to a nursing home’s beat. Breakfast lunch dinner, breakfast lunch dinner, with occasional riffs of bingo, sing-alongs, insulin shots, paranoia, and more bingo. Mr. Dunlop had his bellicose moments, but mostly he was
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