Wrote this a month or so ago…found it on my desktop not published…my only caveat, if you are a Yo-Yo Ma lover: going to this video will take you on a magic carpet ride of videos and you may just not getting anything done for the rest of the day.
Just returned from North Carolina where I visited Tammy and Patrick, a lovely four days on Lake Norman, putt-putting around on their pontoon boat in beautiful weather. North Carolina near Charlotte was surprising similar to Northern Illinois in topography. I felt like I was home! Then on to Atlanta as Terri’s daughter Anna was graduating from PT school at Emory University. I never for a moment thought I wouldn’t attend, both as surrogate mom and fellow PT.
To anyone who reads my blog knows I believe in angels, or whatever you want to call the non-corporeal world in which we exist. I believe the energy of our corporeal selves remains somewhat intact. No proof, of course, and yet…my awareness tells me it is so. Coincidence? Co Incidence?
I have already written that I was going to see Yo-Yo Ma with the Pacific Symphony the night before I left. The last and only time I saw him was with Terri. When I landed these tickets – fabulous seats stage left in the choral seats, “behind” the stage, where we watched him watch the conductor as he played, his childlike facial expressions clearly visible to us as if we were in the first row. (I will never sit elsewhere. To see the conductor’s face is the best way ever to see a symphony.)
This video clip https://youtu.be/U2CGnUSEBzI depicts the standing ovation that went on and on (worth watching once anyway) and prompted him to play an encore. This season is Carl St. Clair’s 25th anniversary season and it is Yo-Yo Ma who is saying “ just so beautiful, so beautiful” of the Pacific Symphony. Orange County cultural wasteland? I think not. Anyway, he came out for an encore (the crowd reminiscent of going wild at perhaps an Allman Brothers or The Who concert many years ago) and played this lovely Song of the Birds which had me walking out of the concert hall weeping. As he described it: “the idea of taking flight, of inner freedom and outer freedom…” I closed my eyes and I knew at that moment Terri would be accompanying me, guarding me closely, to Atlanta, just as we accompanied each other to Yo-Yo Ma the first time we saw him together.
On to North Carolina the next day. Tammy took me to a quilt shop in Mooresville, NC. Terri is always with me in quilt shops, that’s a given, usually just in my imagination. Nothing angelic there. Unless her favorite discontinued fabric shows up in a pile of fat quarters, or….in this case I walk out the front door and there I see a pot full of her favorite flower: pansies. Ok, I get it. Nothing particularly angelic there either, except…I’m going to her daughter’s graduation. Two days later we headed to Asheville, NC, another quilt shop. I walked in and a fellow quilter was standing there, as we quilters are wont to do, with a pile of fabrics, deciding which ones will go together and which were hopeful contenders but alas don’t make the cut. This woman’s “inspiration fabric” – the fabric that has inspired us to quilt something and for which we try to find fabrics that match? Pansies. Sigh. My silly imagination cannot make such “coincidences” happen.
Off to Atlanta. The first evening we went out to dinner with Anna’s Dad and a few relatives on her Dad’s side. Throughout our laughter I could see her smile, hear her laughter, feel her presence. I felt it again the next day as we were seated for the graduation. I could feel her excitement, her pride, I could feel her sitting next to me and then…she was gone. I was totally unable to feel her at all. I believe that once we were all settled there was a place more important for her to be – escorting Anna to her seat as a graduate.
I came home and cried a lot my first day home. I miss her desperately and it was so sad to not have her physically present. Today I feel better and settle back into looking at the Pacific, her body’s final resting place, and listen to the song of the birds in my canyon.