Music of the Heart

Near the end, in the quiet of a San Diego hospital room, the old man began to tremble. His muscles contracted with each wave of Alzheimer’s-induced spasms. The tight restraints had left bruises up and down his arm, and the morphine machine whirred softly at his bedside. His breathing became heavy and irregular.

That’s when Tim Flannery began to play to his father for the final time.

Strumming his acoustic guitar, filling the small room with music and easy voice, he gazed at his father, hooked up to the tubes snaking through the rumpled sheets. Russet skin. Thin face, black hair, blue eyes. A preacher of Irish and Cherokee blood, a man who had packed two worlds into a lifetime, one with his family and one with his church.

As Flannery played, he remembered the days when his father, Ragon, would delight congregations with his sermons, his arms moving, his voice conveying forgiveness. Everyone’s the same at the foot of the cross, he’d tell them. Then, he would come home to his family in Southern California and encourage his two sons and daughter in whatever they did.

But now it was the son leading the sermon in these last hours, the third base coach for the San Diego Padres singing for his small and fragile father, his voice clear and loud in the hospital room.

On a recent evening at Dodger Stadium, Flannery enters the visitors’ dugout, clutching a baseball bat. He has his father’s blue eyes. An easy grin spreads across his face as someone shouts from the second row of seats, “Hey Flann, when’s your next concert? I’ll be there, man!”

To understand Tim Flannery, a Padre for 21 years as a player and coach, one of the most popular and respected figures in his community, a man who loves surfing and is a familiar face around town, it is instructive to listen to his music.

Flannery, a former infielder with a lifetime major league batting average of .255 in 11 seasons, has released four CDs of folk music, with a fifth on the way. And, listening to his music, you learn about his father, and about the final days in that hospital room.

When the Padres play the Angels today at Edison Field, it will have been almost two years since his father’s death, and Flannery still speaks of him as if they talked yesterday. He also talks about the joy of picking up a guitar and running his fingers over it; a musician’s passion, a passion so powerful that it’s hard for him to describe.

A guitar has been at his side ever since he stepped into the Padre clubhouse in 1979. He has played to packed houses at San Diego clubs like the Belly Up. He played in a Jimmy Buffett cover band, which helped lead to his current CD, “Tim Flannery and Friends Live,” a collection of songs, most of them Flannery originals, performed with his band at various venues. His next CD is scheduled for release in 2002.

But it was the experiences with his father that inspired what Flannery considers his most glorious musical achievement--his third CD, “Pieces of the Past.”

Released in 1999 and featuring performances by Jackson Browne, Bruce Hornsby and Mick Hanly, the 12-song collection was a deeply personal work, a tribute to his father that touched fans and earned praise from music publications and personalities.

San Diego’s SLAMM Music magazine called it “a masterpiece,” and Browne has said of his work on the album, “This is what everyone’s in it for. That’s why I sing.”

In another tribute to his father, Flannery put some of his father’s ashes into the body of his old Martin guitar, and he listens for them shaking around every time he plays.

At first, the Alzheimer’s affected the old man’s short-term memory. He had trouble recalling the names of his wife and children, and sometimes became confused and angry. When the symptoms became worse, he was placed in a care facility. Sometimes he would wander out of his room, lost.

So Flannery began to walk alongside his father, only a few miles from where his own children were growing up, well aware that their time together was evaporating. He would listen intently to the old man in those final days, during his last lucid moments.

They held hands as Flannery heard the tales of his heritage, about his father’s days growing up in the rolling hills of Kentucky, about dignity and grace, and about the sweet bluegrass music that echoed through that part of the country.

Flannery also would flash back on his days growing up in Southern California, playing the big piano in their house, his father and mother listening, its soft sounds all around him.

“All this just shows me that music is in my DNA,” Flannery said.

As the Alzheimer’s tightened its grip, Flannery helped his father take baby steps, changed his diaper, bathed him and shared in any sporadic memories the old man experienced.

“He was slipping into the black hole that is Alzheimer’s,” Flannery said.

To fully appreciate what his father was sharing with him, Flannery realized he would have to visit Kentucky before the preacher died. In July 1999, just days before he would hold his father for the last time in that hospital room, Flannery left the Padres on an off day in Cincinnati, took his wife and children and drove south into the Kentucky hills, past rivers and thin trees, until he found his father’s old wooden house.

The experience, Flannery said, was almost indescribable. He felt a sharp connection with the land, he said. And although he spent only one night, he felt as if he learned much about himself.

His wife, Donna, said she saw her husband’s face change that day, his eye-opening experience unfolding right in front of her.

As he was leaving, Flannery said, he picked up a small piece of coal from under the porch, an artifact from the old days when his father rode horseback and smoked his own tobacco.

He came back and went into the hospital room, placed the coal in his father’s hands and said, “Dad, this came from your home--where you grew up.” And then, Flannery said, those blue eyes came back from someplace else, and for a moment the old man returned, right there in the room with his son.

“It was like you turned a switch on,” Flannery said. “I was holding on to a moment that we both knew would be our last.”

Then the old man began to tremble, and the third base coach began to play, and then, in that tiny room, his father slipped away.