Jul 27, 2014 5 min read

In the 1970 motion picture, “Love Story,” a piano score runs throughout the story of Oliver and Jennifer Barrett in Cambridge, Mass., and later, New York City.

Fast-forward 40-some years, and another love story set to piano and organ music played out as part of the relationship between John and Carol Yanda in Washington.

Carol Yanda has lived at a specialty-care home since she had back surgery three years ago. She’s been home for visits, but John said his wife, a lifelong homemaker and mother of two, has been unable to perform tasks that she did for years.

“Things changed,” he said. “I don’t comprehend that at all.”

She lives at The Greenery Specialty Care Center in Canonsburg, and uses a wheelchair to get around. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a little more than two years ago.

John Yanda, 79, took up piano as a 6-year-old, and he has been playing organ and piano in church for more than 55 years. He decided this past April to do something special for her: perform a concert in her honor at the church where he is organist, pianist and choir director.

He said he planned the program to honor Carol “just because it seemed like the right thing to do. No particular reason. Just because I continue to love her.”

The only publicity about the program were announcements in the bulletin for Jefferson Avenue United Methodist Church, and a notice on the marquee in front of the sanctuary on the busy city street.

He chose selections he’d been playing for years, and he practiced for weeks. Carol found out about her outing a few days before it was scheduled.

The program included 11 piano pieces and three on organ. Performing along with Yanda was Faith Hawkins, a choir member who serves as Yanda’s backup if he can’t be at the church on a particular Sunday.

Hawkins, on organ, played Psalm 28, which has, as one of its verses, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song.”

Yanda for the first time performed his own composition, “Piano Invention,” which he described as “serious-style music, but light and bright. It just kind of grew over time.”

About 50 people turned out for the concert, which pleased him immensely. Much to his surprise, the audience “applauded every selection. In church! I didn’t know what to do – I’m not bragging. I get goose bumps just thinking about it.”

The event was not a benefit, “except that the benefit was for her,” Yanda said of the guest of honor. “She was seated right in front. She had to stay in her wheelchair.

“She didn’t tell me anything was wonderful – the daughters (Diane and Linda) know that, so I heard it secondhand. She didn’t literally make a fuss to me.”

Yanda took his wife back to The Greenery. “She seemed like she was pleased,” he said.

The couple married April 10, 1964. They met when Yanda was working at his first job out of high school, that of a printer at Atlas Lithographing, Carol’s father’s shop. She was six years younger, and they discovered they had grown up in Shaler Township about a tenth of a mile away from each other.

Yanda’s lifelong love of music could have been sidetracked when his hand became lodged in his linotype machine one day while working alone at the print shop. He was able to free it, iced it and survived the harrowing experience.

But he went into another line of work, getting into computer programing analysis when the field was practically in its infancy. He worked for 25 years for McGraw-Edison Transformer Co. in Canonsburg, then was hired as a contractor for Pittsburgh National Bank.

All the while, he was a church organist, pianist and choir director, performing this task simultaneously at Jefferson Avenue United Methodist and Waynesburg United Methodist in 2008.

“I never really retired,” he said.

But if he had any hopes of spending his retirement 24/7 with Carol, that was not to be. He still visits her at The Greenery, and he performed a weekday keyboard concert there this spring.

He said of music, “It was a wonderful diversion. It is still a wonderful diversion, even more important now, maybe,” that he lives alone.

He cherishes the memory of the concert.

“It seemed like the right thing to do for her,” he said. “Might bring some enjoyment to her, for a moment, anyway. She doesn’t act surprised at anything anymore.”