"My Life", The Musical.

Sometimes you have a moment, when the events around about you create a vortex, and you realize that your life is not a mere cacophony of accidents, which just happen to form a pattern because of the serendipity of random events. Yesterday, the violins swelled in the background, and the harmononious symphony of life sprang into glorious orchestral proportions, as it occasionally does, from time to time. A crescendo of joyful noises, which all melded into a refrain that made me want to sing, seemed to ooze out of seemly random circumstances. A series of wires connected, the amplifier was plugged in, and the "stage Musical" of my life and of those around me seemed to jump into action as a beautifully scripted song. If Hugh Jackman had entered the scene wearing a cowboy hat and singing and dancing at that point I simply would have carried on, and not skipped a beat. Bear with me as I wax poetic- there is a reason for it.

 Perhaps I need to backtrack further to events of last week. These relate to someone close to me, who has found herself embroiled in a soap opera of her own. Unbelievably complex in dimensions, a series of connections and dramas had touched her own life, in a way which to me that seemed to be straight out of a daytime TV drama. Someone she thought she had feelings for was in love with someone that another friend had loved for many years.  The story doesn't end here, it is ongoing, and the songs which could be written in this tale could be very poignant, stirring, tragic and operatic in the extreme. The "someone" at the centre of the love-triangle was causing a good deal of trouble for all the individuals involved, but trying to do it under a pseudonym. It was all being played out on social media, making it seem even more dramatic. Because real people with real feelings were involved, it could have ended very badly. Do you know of a similar plot line? It was inconceivable to my friend and those of us closest to her that this actual situation could be happening, in real time, and yet it was all too real. The 'conclusion' however, has been a much more pleasant one than was predicted. The score at this time could be written by Lloyd Weber himself, and the aria sung by my friend was prophetically belted out by her in a karaoke bar one drunken night not so long ago: "My Heart Will Go On". Little she realize it really WOULD go on, and eventually, happily, because her own musical is thankfully veering away from this Greek Tragedy scenario.

 So what is the refrain behind my musical at the moment? Well it's not something from anything more musically wonderful than the very weird but wonderful HMS Pinafore, I've often thought. It is true, I found out my real dad was alive, and living in another country, at 33 years of age, 14 1/2 years ago, and that I had another whole family, another whole dimension to my life, and a whole new future to walk into. I heard the violins at that time. I knew I was no "accident" or hiccup in my mother's life. Not just a haphazard arrangement of molecules called Briar, a thorn in the side for most of the family, but someone whose life suddenly made sense. The words and lyrics seemed suddenly to me to be in harmony, my feet were dancing, and I was, momentarily on stage, as a player in a colorful scene from something like a Rogers and Hammerstein musical. It was a cathartically wonderful event to walk into that reality; having a father as well as a mother, and life has seemed to be more musically charged ever since.

 I always have had theme music I guess, but it seems more significant to me, as I go on. It changes from day to day- I can get stuck on a plot line... The music can falter and fade from hearing at times, as I doubt the worthiness of a tune... The authenticity of a lyric...but the melody always comes back in, on cue, when certain other things work together...the rhythm, the timing, the inspiration, working in harmony. Like now.

 Yesterday the simple exchange of excited chit chat and banter between myself and my son's partner of nearly three years revealed a connection that blew us all away. Her new friend has a husband who happens to be the son of people I knew in a very different context, almost 30 years ago. There, a simple coincidence, maybe, but then, what a wonderful one! When I knew this young man's parents, I was younger than these young people are now. I knew them before they got together, and was at their wedding,about 28 years ago. I remember when this young man was born, as he shares my birthday. They lived in another state, as I did, and our sons were born at the same hospital, about 18 months apart. They have gone their separate ways, but I remember them both as remarkably intelligent and compassionate people, and I do happen to be a Facebook friend of the mother of this boy. We're not in conversation much, but perhaps we will be more so now. I can't wait to tell her about this connection, through our offspring. She writes, too. That our kids have become friends in another city, 26 years later, in a city of 4 million people, in another state, just makes me feel as though we are all in someone's very big, Michener style epic. Maybe we are? What is the song playing today, you may wonder? I'm not entirely sure. It could be a Bob Dylan-style ballad of 48 stanzas (so far), one that is still being written... One thing I do know, the music score is simply magnificent, full of light and shade, depth and drama...