Good morning, Friends,
Since I’d been having such a hard time enjoying my walking, I decided this morning to shift the routine and return to walking as the very first thing I do in the morning. The results were gratifying. I’d forgotten why the early morning suits me so. First of all, I’m rested and walking on an empty stomach. Then, the freshness of early spring, frost still on the roofs but the air alive with bird song, few cars on the road, the village just waking up. I returned after an hour, totally charged and feeling like my old self. I don’t see this change interrupting my writing time. In fact it might enhance it, coming at it physically relaxed and receptive to inspiration.
No sooner had I gotten in the door then Kornelia, my Muse and housemate, and I started talking about last night at the Elks Club. Kornelia’s mother had invited us there for Karaoke with which we had some previous experience at the H2O restaurant in Anacortes. Seating at a large round table, sipping champagne in celebration of having just emptied and closed out our storage unit that afternoon, we began once again to build up our courage to sing publicly. I finally settled on three different songs, “oldies”, of course, since I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I started off with Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody Somewhere” followed by Frank Sinatra’s “Embraceable You” and “Sentimental Journey”. I had trouble finding and keeping the pitch on the latter and won’t do that one again. I had a harder time convincing Kornelia that she should follow suit, get up there and sing something, and finally she did, singing “Killing Me, Softly”. She did a good job, too, bringing a lot of body language to it. Earlier we had listened to our friends from H2O, Tillie and Jerry, sing a duet which Kornelia liked and wanted us to sing together. She didn’t care that it had already been sung that night, that’s what she wanted to sing, so we did and Oh, what fun!. The song was Billy Preston’s “Woman, With You I’m Born Again”.
The theme of the song, being ‘born again’, resonated in our minds as Kornelia and I looked back on the evening. She had sensed immediately that heaviness in the Elks Club that night, many of the round tables empty or half filled, so many members having died over the last few years and not many new members, It was a hassle to get anything to eat from the bar area in the other room so we didn’t try, munching instead on a home-made cinnamon roll Tillie had made, just what we hadn’t needed. Of most significance to Kornelia, though, was her exchange with her mother, her mother urging her daughter now to get up there and sing which recalled for Kornelia a much earlier time in Germany when the opposite was the case. Kornelia saw the irony and just as quickly accepted it and her mother in a way she’d never been able to before. Kornelia, she saw in herself, had changed, had in fact been reborn. It was gratifying to me to be present to witness it, love breaking through in this incredible way at this time at the Elk’s Club. At Kornelia’s insistence, I found myself, as tired as we both were, standing in the dark hallway leading to our respective bedrooms, rehearsing one more time, Billy Preston’s song about rebirth. I could see why. Billy’s song had become Kornelia’s song.
