Wherever it leads . . . Tonight the Verdi Requiem on Vox is keeping me up late. Pavarotti is singing (in his recorded afterlife) the swelling tenor lines. Also Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne. What would it have been like to hear that performance live???
I am reminded of when my brother bought a small CD player and fifteen Requiems on CD. We were all together after my father died. ("How can you stand it? There's no music here," Richard said.) We played the Verdi several times. I wondered then how Dad felt about classical music. I don't remember that he ever played music, classical or popular, although he sang quite a few songs like Loch Lomond.
all day I've been thinking
how he sang Annie Laurie--
murmuring reeds
Just last night I was reading--in Going Back to Bisbee--about the Arizona-Mexico border unrest in the first couple of decades of the Twentieth Century. New Mexico and Arizona weren't states yet; the Gadsden Purchase wasn't really incorporated into the USA; land titles were in flux. Bandits and other malfeasants ran across the border in either direction to escape legal punishment for their crimes.
My mother remembered a couple of nights that her whole family spent out in the desert--with the livestock--when a raid of Mexican bandidos was predicted. My father said his neighbors also feared border raids. It was a long time ago, but only the span of their lifetimes.
Good night, Dad. Sleep well under your brass plate that says:
He was a very parfit, gentil knicht.
Good night, Mom. Your matching plate bears the quote you chose: We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Sleep tight.
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