Break a Glass

I continue to be amazed at how a person can be alive and breathing one moment, and the next moment he's dead.  My cousin's husband passed away this morning after battling cancer in his shoulder.  We knew it was coming.  In fact, we know death will come for each of us at any moment, yet still we're surprised.  I think I know the exact moment he passed this morning.  I was loading the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher when something or someone startled me, causing me to drop the glass in my hand which landed on two other glasses in the dishwasher, shattering them all.  I didn't know glass could splinter so.  Looking back, it wasn't so much that the glass slipped out of my hand, but it seemed like it was knocked out of my hand.  My theory is that Mom was hovering around me, as she often does, and in her efforts to help me lighten my task load, knocked the glass out of my hand at the moment when Ivan passed. Undoubtedly she was being summoned to help guide him to the light.  I just knew, or felt, that at the exact moment that the glass dropped, he was gone.  When my older daughter awoke a short while later and received a text from Ivan's granddaughter, she only confirmed what I already knew.  There's got to be an old-wives' tale about what it means when you break a glass.....like dropping a knife means company's coming.....or is that a spoon?

A Quick Note to Note the Notes About Notes

It's a rare moment anymore that I'm able to sit at the piano and play a piece of my choosing.  But tonight, playing Mozart's Sonata I, a piece I first worked-up for an All-State audition in high school, I came across some notes.  Not just the musical ones, but the notes my piano teacher made almost 30 years ago to remind me how to play certain sections.  Mozart was criticized by some for having too many notes in his compositions, the musical ones that is.  Maybe my teacher should've made more notes, or I should've practiced the notes more.  Either way, I wasn't selected for All-State, but the measures of the section I played are still numbered.  In college I worked up more of the piece, and the red-inked lines drawn by my piano professor still remind me how to play the triplets against the eighth-notes.  Years from now when a great grandchild inherits my music, she may not even notice those red lines or numbered measures, or if she fancies them in passing, she may wonder who marked up this music and why.  She too may struggle to play triplets against eighth-notes, and for a brief moment we will be united across time -- two pianists who needed a reminder on how to play a tricky passage.  I know I've looked at old pieces of music that I've inherited from who knows who and noticed the sections that pianist struggled with.  Sometimes I appreciate those notes that warn me of difficult notes ahead, and sometimes I get haughty and scoff at the notes needed to play notes.  "How could you not get that?" I question the pianist of the past.  But I must refrain (pun intended) from being too disdainful lest my future great granddaughter be a pretentious pianist patronizing her predecessor.  Alliteration duly noted.