Music and Memory, Part 19: Reparations

For most of my life, my behavior was so selfish, willful, amoral, and defensive that, in recent years, my fervent wish has been not only that the people I've known along the way would have peaceful and happy lives, but also that they might forget me completely.  So it was with some trepidation, and a great deal of embarrassment, that I sent a check to the workplace of A., the Columbia boy I'd borrowed money from years ago.  Although it was during Lent of last year that I remembered this unhappy incident, it took me until the end of the year to make reparations, because, although I went out on gigs with some frequency in 2010, after travel and childcare expenses were figured into my fee, I generally returned home each time with something like fifty dollars.  In December, however, two large-ish fees came in that did not need to be offset by as many expenses as usual, so I took myself to the post office, praying that paying off this old, until-recently-forgotten debt would not open up some unpleasant can of worms.

A letter from A. came in the mail yesterday, and I opened it grimly.  To my astonishment, he was not only happy to hear from me, but also, unbeknownst to me, he'd been at a concert I gave last month in Boston, where he now lives.

He wrote: 

. . . I don't want to be a creep, which is the main reason I didn't approach you at your concert.  That and -- well -- certainly the memory in my mind is not the actual person you are . . . . it was at a recent bored moment at work [that I undertook a "Pentimento" internet search and] saw that you were giving a concert soon, and in fact it was in my own backyard. . . . And the performance [brought] tears to my eyes.  [Your] voice was soothing to the soul, and especially exciting given that I knew you back when you were first going down this path . . . .

Most striking [were your] expressions after the songs.  The bashful turn to the pianist, the being exposed, the being vulnerable and showing it.  I could see why you have specialized in [concerts given] in salon or intimate settings.  You share yourself with your audience.  You are there with them, not above them . . . You share their vulnerabilities. . . To see how that path you started -- to see the beautiful place it has progressed to -- that also brought tears.

The letter brought me to tears too.  I thought of how the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had told his friend, my old voice teacher Barbara Conrad, that she must never give up singing, because she could never know when it might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience.  I doubt that my singing carried that import for A., but perhaps some healing did come out of it, some reparation for the past.  If only A. knew how bitter the road was that led me to the point of being able, now, to be vulnerable onstage, and to share in the vulnerabilities of the audience.  For so many years, I sang defensively, acquisitively, planning what I could get from it.  Life -- everything -- has changed so much since then.  Once, when I mentioned to my husband that my singing had changed, he suggested that one can't compartmentalize one's life; when one's heart changes, everything must change along with it.  As the poet Jane Hirshfield writes:

let one animal/eat from your hand and the whole herd comes.

Hirshfield's poem, "Letting What Enters Enter," concludes with the line

she forgave me nothing that I love.

But after reading A.'s letter, I believe that God, in His mercy, somehow forgives us everything that we love.