A few days before the lockdown began, I sent a message on Facebook to someone I didn’t really know.
The virus was advancing. Containment efforts in Lombardy and Veneto had not worked. Word had gotten out that travel restrictions were soon to be imposed so thousands of people left those regions, taking the virus with them. We were all worried, and a quiver of fear was beginning to creep into previously benign social interactions.
That evening on my walk, a song from years ago and miles away came into my head:
I shall not fear my body takes me there
I shall adore this hour within my skin
I shall release myself through words that bring forth tears
I have refused to be alone
My cries are yours
and it goes on to its joyous ending,
Sing the glory of your life to the world
Dance the story of your life to the world
Tell the tale of living flesh to the world
Till the pain that you feel goes away
I didn’t remember all the lyrics, and only knew some of the music, but I was startled at that moment to realize I had been hearing and singing that song – and quoting what I remembered to friends – since the mid-seventies. It was written by Donald Currie, and he sang it, along with many others, with musical partner Pilar Montaine. They called themselves, appropriately enough, Don & Pilar, and I was a stalwart fan for almost all of the six years they were together, following them from venue to venue like a purring cat.
Then in August 2016, and totally by chance, I saw on Facebook that they were planning a reunion concert for the twentieth of that month at a church in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. I was in the Bay Area when I discovered this, but had already booked my return to Italy for the sixteenth. Had I known sooner, I would have planned my trip around them.
That night before the lockdown – a day or two more than a month ago – on my walk home, I also realized that there were a host of songs Don & Pilar had given me that I have woken up to, walked, gardened, and driven with, for most of my adult life. I owed them a thank you, and social media made that possible. So, I messaged the Reunion Concert page and hoped for the best.
Donald wrote back immediately.
“Give me your address, I’ll send you a DVD of the concert.”
Emails were exchanged.
“Can it be coded for region two?”
“I’ll check.”
“May I reimburse your costs?”
“It’s a gift from the heart.”
I felt like saying that their music had already been that, and for decades. No further gift was necessary. Instead, I ardently watched my mailbox for three weeks.
Last Friday night I found it. It was too late to play immediately, so I put it aside for Saturday.
I used my DVD/CD remote drive for my computer, that I had bought just before I moved here in 2015, for the first time, steeling myself for technical difficulties. Everything worked as it was supposed to. The recording was of a good quality.
It was like seeing a dear cousin after a forty-year separation – my gosh, we’ve grown up.
If they took all those years off from performing, it certainly didn’t show (and I know nothing of their intervening histories). The performances were masterful. The music was so rich, so elegant, detailed, complex. The variety of experience encompassed by the stories the songs told, a dazzling mosaic. The first half left me feeling like in some mysterious way I had been brought home.
One problem. I couldn’t find the second half.
Maybe I’m playing it wrong. Check the envelope for another disc. Click on “menu”. No, no, and nope.
So, I risked being a nuisance and wrote Donald. He didn’t know why act two was missing either, but as a kind of recompense, sent me a dozen mp3 files of recordings from 1974-75.
Yesterday, on my circular evening walk, I listened. Same songs, same wonderful voices, same committed performances. But, my gosh, we were so young! I remembered myself in the audience as borderline crazed, gilding the real beauty of the moment with my own over-reactive fandom; an act unto myself. They were virtuosi in speed and vocal dexterity, technically wondrous, exceptionally sophisticated.
The Reunion Concert, on the other hand, was so much more; informed by all those years of living — passionate, deep, and thrilling. The songs were let free to express themselves. Maybe I was also impressed by their talent and technique, but found their music so transporting that I had no attention left to notice.
Donald tells me that the second half was even better.
A personal effect of quarantine has been a stretching out of time to embrace friends, family – even difficult friends and family, even relative strangers – from far distances and decades ago with fresh appreciation, love, and affection. That gift of the heart from San Francisco acted as a vortex, focused all that love, made it strong, made it worth having lived for, and worth reliving. Every bit of it.
The power of art is immeasurable.