Dear reminders,

It has been a long week already and it's not over. Each day it has been my sweet reward to look forward to the long walk I will take around my neighborhood when the light is still bright, but shining aslant, in its last hour.

The other morning, my friend Paula said that she was listening to Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations to help her focus on a cold morning. I remembered the copy I once bought of this artist, this same piece. It was within just a couple of years of our getting a CD player. It became one of the small coterie of essential recordings for me, and I played it over and over. I remember listening to him play the aria, the enunciation of the theme. How spare, how quiet, before he plunged into the invention of the variations.



Tonight, I ran into this, Simone Dinnerstein playing the Bach Partita No. 1. Clarity, like light falling at a slant in the last hour of the day.


All during my walk, I kept thinking about playing the piano, whose keys are usually dusty, and I don't mean that as a metaphor. What would it be like to move those muscles again? To play Bach, or anything, at the end of every day?

At the end of my walk, when the sun was in the west and almost gone, and I was heading east down the street to my house, I took off my sunglasses, no need for them any longer. The sky was blue, the trees were yellow. Bright, bright.

Dear reminders, thank you for bringing this music back to me.

yours,
htms