It has been an eventful week for me. In fact I would call it a sentimental tsunami week focused on a thousand and one different things including my late and lamented wife Ismay. She was a soul-stirring soprano.Often Ismay would be intercepted, even in the street, and thanked for an unforgettable rendition at various times and places. She would be told by one or another, ‘I want you to sing at my wedding or my funeral.’Every day or night Ismay, who taught herself how to play the piano, would be at her home playing not so much as rehearsing, but singing for relaxation or inspiration such pieces as ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ the ’Holy City,’ or ‘Jerusalem,’ with an emotion as if she was walking through its streets of gold. Or singing spirituals, like ‘Nobody Knows the trouble I’ve seen,’ as if she was sending me a subtle ‘doghouse’ rap.One particular piece I’ll never forget was ‘The Lost Chord.’ It went something like this, as I remembered:Seated one Day at the Organ. I was weary and ill at Ease. My fingers wandered idly over the noisy keys. I struck one cord of music, like the sound of a great Amen…. It entered the soul of the organ and flooded into mine …. It maybe that death’s bright angel will speak in that chord again, It maybe that only in Heaven shall hear that Cord Again! Just this week alone, several eventful ‘lost chords’ have flooded back to me, as a journalist, who has covered the broad Bermuda scene for more than 70 years, during all of the second half of the 20th Century, and many years before, right up to the present time.Engrossed in my most recent tsunamis were the revolutionary political and social happenings at Hamilton City Hall; then on Mothers Day at Packwood Old Folks Home in Somerset, as it used to be called; next day at the quiet celebration of the 36th birthday of my granddaughter Odessa. And finally Wednesday at the repast when members of the Loyal Mayflower Lodge No. 9387 of the Hamilton District of the Independent Order of Manchester Unity (IOFMU) celebrated their 93rd anniversary at Unity Hall on the corner of Victoria Street and Union Square, Hamilton.We will have to deal with the Lodge event next time around.But back to Odessa. I was reminded that the day she was born I was making my first bid at gaining public office as an Opposition PLP Candidate. I can hardly believe that 36 years have elapsed since that highly publicised Cox-Philip ticket in the 1976 general election, succeeded only in turning what was the ruling UBP’s utterly safe Sandys North stronghold into a marginal constituency.The Cox on that ticket eventually became the Hon. C. Eugene Cox, Finance Minister (now deceased) after the PLP’s historic 1998 Election. In the next general election there was another Cox-Philip, Sandys North ticket. The Cox on that occasion was Paula Cox, Eugene’s youngish daughter, having completed her extensive studies abroad, was making her first bid for public office. Again the UBP stronghold prevailed. Paula transferred her concentration from Sandys to Devonshire, and it is now history how she ascended to her present office as Premier of Bermuda and Finance Minister. And the PLP gained dominance of Sandys seats up to this present time. As for Odessa, she’s doing her own thing outside the political realm.I was at the Packwood Home when Mothers’ Day homage was paid to Bermuda’s oldest resident, 104-year-old, Aunt Hilda Smith, a former school headmistress. She welcomed a considerably younger but similarly inspired niece and educator Prospect Primary School Principal, Dr. Shangri-La Durham-Thompson and other close family.As a cheerful looking Aunt Hilda was being readied for a for a picture-taking session with her visitors my mind flashed back to the day, decades ago when I covered the formal opening of the Packwood Home for the now defunct Recorder newspaper. The central personality then was Aunt Sally Simons who was marking her 100th birthday.I had serious lost chord flashbacks remembering a few things. Firstly that the Home was the residence of Dr. Arnold Packwood. He was one of Bermuda’s first black doctors after the 1834 Emancipation of Slavery, who qualified in the United States. That was long before the King Edward Memorial Hospital was thought of. In that era Dr. Packwood operated on patients in their homes or at his surgery/residence, ‘Andover Arbour’, removing limbs, tonsils and tumours alike.Dr. Packwood bequeathed his residence to the community with members of the Somerset Oddfellows Lodges operating it as the Packwood Old Folks Home from the 1930s. A Packwood Scholarship Fund was also set up, enabling a boy and a girl each year for four years to be educated at the Berkeley Institute.Here’s where the ‘lost chord’ hit directly home with me. In October 1938, I was one of the two Packwood Scholars, at age 12, entering the Berkeley that year. The girl was Central School (now Victor Scott School) student Phyllis Simmons. She put her roots down in Canada where she went for higher studies after Berkeley.REVOLUTION AT HAMILTON CITY HALLThe real ‘tsunami’ of the week for me was at Hamilton City Hall. That’s when so-called Team Hamilton swept into office and put ‘paid’ to the last vestiges of a centuries-old system that enabled generations of the old oligarchs and ‘first families’ to seize and hold on to the reins of power both at the national and municipal level.Just to be diplomatic, I’ll call that blatantly undemocratic system, as voter manipulation or gerrymandering. It was wiped out not so long ago at national level with implementation of the ‘one man one vote of equal value’ programme. And it finally hit the Hamilton and St, Georges Corporations just in time for last week’s elections.I was trying to keep a low profile among the media people and others standing in the draughty foyer of Hamilton City Hall when the city official came out to announce the final count of the voting. Charles Gosling was out and Graeme Outerbridge was in as Mayor. It was stunning.After my esteem ZBM Radio and TV newsman Gary Mareno had finished with Mayor Graeme and fellow ‘team’ members, he quickly turned and asked me for a reaction. When all I said was “This is historic. A revolution!” Moreno held the mike to my mouth as if expecting more. But the ‘lost chords’ flooding my mind needed more than a sound bite to reveal.I was thinking of other contenders down through the years I had seen electrifying city hall. Two in particular were W.E. Rudolph Joell and barrister Sonia Grant. Then there were Cecil Dismont and Lawson Mapp who became the first of only two black mayors. Then there were Reginald Minors and Carvel VanPutten.Back to Joell and Sonia. Joell never could make it in, despite his persistent attempts. Being the grandson of WHT Joell, the first black man elected to the House of Assembly. Rudolph probably was too much of a political and social activist for the city power structure to stomach.Sonia Grant totally upset the hoary old city hall establishment, when in 1994 she became the first woman elected to the Corporation. Next she was elected an Alderman, serving many times as Acting Mayor.After 13 years on the Corporation, serving with four different Mayors, Sonia claimed all the “unfair and undemocratic” stops were pulled out against her, not so much because of her challenge to become Mayor, but rather because of her efforts to change the city voting franchise in a campaign that went as far as the Bermuda Supreme Court and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.