Last week I received news that a friend had been admitted to hospice; I’d not seen Sylvia in decades and unexpectedly she was slipping away thousands of miles from me.
Once upon a time we played music together in uni, performing recitals of piano duo – and occasionally duet – material. We even persuaded two other pianists and a handful of string players to perform a Bach concerto for four keyboards. The stage of the tiny recital hall was so crowded by the time we squeezed musicians and instruments into place that the conductor nearly fell backward into the pit during rehearsal.
It was the intimacy of the duo repertoire, though, that we loved best – Copland, Bartok, Arensky, Pinto, Haydn, Poulenc, Brahms, Ravel, Milhaud, Mozart, transcriptions of Mussorgsky and Prokofiev … I fell in love with Copland one autumn (along with any number of other composers) during rehearsals of the suite from ‘Billy the Kid’ in which our professor continually challenged us to play “orchestrally”.
I can still see the ubiquitous cups of coffee and paper plates with danishes grabbed from the student union littering the practise room; coats were tossed on the floor and piles of scores covered both pianos. I remember her insistance that we cover the window in the door with paper (against university regulations) to give us a bit more privacy amidst the perpetual cacophony of dozens of other students practising dozens of different musical works.
I can’t remember who wrote first, but last winter we began emailing. Over the course of a few months we corresponded in depth catching up the lost years, sharing current endeavours, and, not unexpectedly, falling silent when the conversation had run its course. There were no regrets; nothing was left unsaid and it felt good to know that the friendship remained easy and comfortable, with no strings or expectations, after so many years of perpetual Christmas cards and little else.
Our paths had been very different; she was a “returning student”, 20 years older than the others in her classes. I was rather in awe that she had ridden a motorcycle across the western half of the US and of her repertoire of swear words which she used when it amused her to do so. We read different books, liked different foods, practised different forms of spirituality, and had distinctly different tastes in cinema. But music was another matter. We shared everything from 2112 to the Beatles to Stravinsky to Sondheim to Miles Davis, and pretty much everything else in between.
She was a generation closer to my mother than I and they had a warm friendship. When she had a jumble sale before leaving town we went and my mother picked out some pans to buy; then they sat and talked for an hour or so while her husband and I handled the passerbys who looked but rarely bought. Before we left Sylvia gave my mother a necklace; I can’t remember what it looked like, but my mother never forgot her kindness. That was the last time I saw her, and oddly, I can’t even remember saying goodbye.
She died this weekend and I seemed to sense the day of her passing. I am grateful beyond measure that the universe brought us together for that brief correspondance so that there is no room for regret. The memories are warm, vaguely blurred, and occasionally bittersweet. I rather wish we’d talked about Jonathan Larson, but I think she probably liked his music too.
