It’s been a rich day. This morning I went to an anesthesia course (use of ultrasound in nerve blocks) which the Mass. Society of Anesthesiologists was courteous enough to hold in my home town of Waltham, so I practically had to go. (I am not a frequent flyer at these things.) In the lunch line I was standing next to a fellow who looked a lot like my friend Suraj, but when I saw his face I realized he was not, although he still looked familiar. When I sat across from the same fellow at the table, I saw his nametag and realized that he was an old friend named Navil whom I had not seen in over thirty years. We jumped up and exchanged a big hug, and caught up with old times. Also seated at the table was another thirty-year friend Louise and her collegiate daughter. We all looked at each other, and Navil just said “Where has the time gone, Ed?” After a long pause, “I guess the same place as my hair went.”

As I write this I am listening to a live stream of the concert of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum (“the Collegium” we called it back then) in which my brother Harold and I sang (yes, over thirty years ago). Beautiful Renaissance choral music sung in a very special amphitheater (Harvard’s Sanders Theatre) by bright-eyed young college students, just like we were back then.

I remember one Collegium rehearsal where our incomparable director F. John Adams distributed scores of a new piece for us, Josquin des Prez’ Missa pange lingua, scattered us into mixed lineup, and had us sightread the entire piece cover to cover without a break. This was an intimidating, or at least challenging, task for most of the choir, but for some reason I was feeling very much in tune with Josquin that evening, and so I moved into the middle of the aisle and sang my heart out as if I had sung the piece my entire life. I had one similar experience five years ago at a rehearsal for the Brahms German Requiem at my 35th (there’s that number again) college reunion. Since I have sung the piece twice, once with my brother Howie one summer in New Haven, the other under F. John with Collegium, and listened to it again and again in the wake of my father’s death, I had committed the bass part to memory, and I handed my score to another singer and again sung my heart out.

How lucky to have such special friends and special memories to share, over more than half a lifetime.

Thanks for reading, friends.