Friends and readers,
Dance fusion ended on Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence this morning:
1966. Jim was 18, no admiral then. A gifted boy with choices in front of him that he rightly didn’t want in the sixth form in public school.
Today he would have been 66. After dance fusion this morning, I drove to Mason (I had better re-name the university the way others have, so no more GMU) to renew a group of books; this afternoon I go into DC to hear a lecture with the Washington Area Print group at the Library of Congress on”How Televison came to be Novels.” Then there is dinner with those who stay. Last night up late watching a beautifully cinematographic sensitively acted intelligent film by Daniel Antueil (he again [see Marius and Fanny] plays the father too, of another Pagnol novel, Englished as The Well-Digger’s Daughter; I didn’t finish it as it was too long to sit up for so I’ll do that tonight.
I miss him, dislike intensely the beautiful weather, wish he were here to enjoy the soft rain (he never seemed to pay attention to the trees like colored parasols).
I don’t have anyone to tell my little triumphs (like my library card was renewed) or failures (didn’t dance so well, have discovered learning piano is no trivial task and seen how I lack intuition for this, goof and don’t understand). And today I came home to discover by mistake I had closed ClaryCat into my workroom while I was gone. How she slid by me and hid away I don’t know. I felt bad. She is trying to stop my typing just now. She was his cat. Ian has brought a string toy to play.
All the things he might have done, seen, heard, eaten, drunk, experienced last year, this summer, now this fall. I can’t begin to imagine. Oblivion. How does one think death? It defies me. An absence, non-existence can’t look on or hear, or I’d write him letters and tell him all that has happened this year, all the changes in his house, put them on this blog.
1981. Jim and I had left NYC a year ago that summer, and it is probable we didn’t go, but it is the sort of thing we went to regularly and in later years we returned to NYC to go to Central Park for plays and concerts. One of the last movies he and I saw together we saw in a theater not far from Lincoln Center, February 2013, “Koch” and he liked it.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Yes, that sound of silence is deafening. The lack of a person you know cares about your little triumphs and defeats. Who cared about what the kids did or if they were driving you nuts. The birthdays and holidays were the hardest, but the sound of silence resonated throughout the house all the year. However, the silence finally does get partially broken by the sound of others, still one pocket of silence always remains. To this day some thirty-six years later, there are times when I hear the silence again. It is no longer so painful but I become very conscious of it.
I did include the second video — which has a variety of moods and songs. I wish I could write him, but when I try I really go wild. Richard Feynman wrote letters to his wife (she died of TB when they were in their twenties) and people have suggested this to me. But it’s not for me — thank you very much for this reply. It helps.
Thirty-six years — a very long time, Nancy. You’ve been very brave.
Thinking of you, Ellen,that’s not enough, I know. The other day I was thinking how, to me, quickly the year has come around again and how much you have achieved but how hard it still is. Someone once said to me when I was in the middle of a terrible grief that until the first four seasons pass one cannot hope to begin to try to live properly again – that last in itself is an oxymoron. But as the seasons begin to turn again for the second time there is a sort of rhythmn in nature which perhaps comforts in a basic way, maybe as the memory of the seasons return so the memory of the loved ones renew? x
Gwyn
Maybe more memories will come — or different ones. It’s hard for me to call them up. Yvette does better than I — she will suddenly say something in this gently funny way he had which is just like him. As in Dad would say this if he were here.
Elaine: What an incredible song! I don’t think I’ve ever heard it quite like that before – so beautiful yet so sad. It must have bowled you over to hear it this morning. Thanks for sharing,
Elaine.
Me: What happens in Dance Fusion Workshop is we dance active athletic type dancing most of the hour but at its close each time, there is a kind of “cooling down” dance — often more old fashioned ballroom or tap dancing modified and then a final close. Each time something deeply moving which at the same time has a strong quiet rhythm allowing for a kind of final stretch and raising the body to the sky — only we are indoors.
“Silence like a cancer grows.” Wow. Devastating application of one of the iconic songs from our youth.
I can’t find it now but I received a long letter from a friend where she enclosed a persuasive informed letter from a doctor friend about the cancer epidemic spreading yet further in the last 10 years. The argument is cancer has increased in the human population exponentially in the last 10-15 years. Not just the sudden increase in once rare cancers, but also in very young and middle age people. That most research is put into these “prolonging” life techniques (agony often) because that’s where the money lies — the letter also covered England where the gov’t is not putting enough money in (as in the US there is much dependence on corporate money).
Atul Gawande argues that a movement which is successful (gay men fighting AIDS) needs not only a centrally galvanized group who identify, but important people on the “in” to spearhead it. It has to be top down as well as grassroots. He doesn’t say this: he wouldn’t. But they have to act out, demonstrate wildly and make a huge perpetual nuisance and stink to get their message into the media to shame and scare others and get people to identify.
Thanks for the post, Ellen. Yes, it is the small intimacies that matter. I know it can’t be the same, but it is something that you can tell us about the piano lessons and the dance fusions classes, that we can feel pieces of your life.
Yes as I just said: after the dance fusion was over, a very thin older woman came over to me. My guess is she’s in her 70s. she said we had spoken before — she began to tell me of how she is German, and can’t return to Germany as it’s too far and she has no relatives or friends left there now, only one niece and nephew in Fairfax, Va — where the JCC is. I told her about myself a little and I just took her hand. She looked more cheerful at that. She made me feel not so alone either. I meet people who talk to me in all sorts of ways: for years I didn’t go to the dinner in the restaurant after the monthly lectures (Washington Area Print Group) because Jim was home alone and I feel awkward at these liminal transitions, but now I enjoy these suppers and wonder why I didn’t do it before, and regret I didn’t try to get him to come somehow. She came half-way home with me on the train. After the Mason OLLI gothic class, one of the students, a woman around my age (maybe a bit younger) showed me the beautiful landscape around the facility and told me of herself, why she is at Tallwood, a retired high school teacher who loves reading and her husband, both Irish, runs an Irish dance and music club. It was a cruel distortion of Mrs Thatcher’s to announce there is no society.