Thanksgiving is very important to me. It was on Thanksgiving 1976 that I got together with my partner, so yesterday was our 40th Thanksgiving. There was only one that we didn't spend together: 2006, after we broke up and before I began taking care of her again. As I posted on Facebook, I walked into her apartment that Thanksgiving (the kitchen and the front of the house looked better than they do now, because she had a roommate), one of three guests, but invited earlier than the others, to the sound of Stevie Wonder singing "Isn't She Lovely". Of course it was on an old fashioned record player, because that's where music in the home came from in those days. I was smitten, and the rest is history. I laughingly say that if I had done my Jane Austen style due diligence, the way, apparently, young women do today before they get "hitched" (also, I know of almost no middle class professional woman who ended up with the person she dated at 25), I would have run like hell. Here was someone who had been on public assistance for quite some time (you actually used to be able to live on it if you took the odd babysitting or dog walking gig), who was in trouble with the City Marshall for having defaulted on a credit card, and whose bedroom looked like a war zone, but she nailed me with her charm, wit, and flair for romance. And so she has kept me. Even now, when all we have are fragments of a relationship, she brought tears to my eyes by, when we were walking home from the bus stop, pointing out some ginko leaves that had fallen and saying "see, these are shaped like hearts, just for us!" Priceless.
As for Thanksgiving, I was realizing that the last time I sat at a table in someone's home where the people were related by blood, I was in my 20s, my grandparents were still alive, and my mother and her sister were still on speaking terms. After that I spent Thanksgiving at my mother's house with my partner and some of my mother's neighbors, or at an AA party (sometimes my mother's boss would invite her for the Thanksgiving weekend to her house in the country, knowing that I actually had somewhere else I would rather be). In later years, when my partner no longer could climb the stairs to my mother's apartment, we all ate in a restaurant. And now that my mother is gone, my partner and I continue that tradition.
I know that AA says "don't project", but I worry a lot about what will happen when I am left behind (if I am not killed by a terrorist or run over by a bus). I will have noplace to go on a holiday that is so synonymous with family. Which is why I don't damn, across the board, stores that are open on Thanksgiving. Whereas I think no one needs to buy a flat screen tv on Thanksgiving, maybe some of the store's employees are lonely and would like to forget that it's a holiday and have something else to do. (I definitely think that no stores should make anyone work on a holiday. They should ask for volunteers. I'm sure there will always be some, particularly if there is extra pay - or a free tv! - dangled as a carrot.
It also makes me sad that my Thanksgiving is so simple and bare boned, rather than a rich tapestry of the good, the bad, and the ugly that I can talk about afterwards. Not much to say, really, about a meal at El Quijote. We were probably in and out of there in 45 minutes. Then we had some pumpkin pie at home, from La Delice, a pastry shop on the corner near where my partner lives, which I think is the best pastry shop in the city.
When I was a teenager, I hated Thanksgiving, because I saw it as a time when my obese maternal relatives all got together to stuff their faces, and I, with a BMI teetering around 25, average for an adult, but huge for a 14 year old, struggled to try to say no to all the rich desserts. In retrospect, though, what I remember was all the jollity as well as the food, and how lucky I was to live amidst all that abundance, that I wasn't medically obese, and that I could have had a different life if I had had different values.
Now I am even a tad heavier than I was then (although not when compared with my age peers) and have no family and little jollity. Just a lot of hard work caring for someone I love, and trying to ferret out a few treat crumbs.
When I came home, I got some very sad news, via Facebook. My upstairs neighbor, a coloratura soprano with a Juilliard pedigree, apparently died the day before, while waiting for a kidney. I know that she had been on dialysis for a very long time. She was five years younger than me. She was one of the loveliest people I have ever met, certainly among professional singers, most of whom are snooty and snarky, at least in my experience. When I first moved into the building in 1986, I would hear her warbling the Queen of the Night aria and other coloratura standards, or she would be playing the piano for students (I think she was also a coach). A few years after I started singing she stopped me once and said that she admired how hard I worked and how much I practiced, and that she could hear that I was sounding better and better as the months went by. She even came to my DIY performance of Samson et Dalila. And I saw that she had "liked" my little DIY Facebook fan page. My heart is heavy. All this reminds me that life is short and that I am of an age when people die and that it's sad, but it's not a freak accident. How ironic that her life ended at the age when my life, at least as a singer, was just beginning.
I feel now, even, as a senior citizen, that I am only just beginning. Obviously I am not a "beginner" in terms of studying voice, but I feel it's only now, in the past year or so, that I have a solid technique, that I don't get as tired (do the extra pounds, which may partly be muscle, help, I wonder?) and no longer panic or at the least strategize every time I see a note above an F sharp. I just sing.
My Christmas solo will be "O Magnum Mysterium" by Lauridsen. The other day I sang through it and all the high climaxes on G (and there are a lot of them) were just business as usual. So when I step into the church to sing this I have to remember that this new voice is now me. (It also will help that the accompanist will be the Director of Music Ministries, not the original choir director who simply does not like big voices and makes me feel inhibited.)
And I have been singing up to a high C sharp every day now. If Lani were there now, she would be proud of me.
RIP Lani Misenas 1955-2015
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