As promised, I am well underway writing my memoirs. I tried to do this about four years ago, but really struggled with it, and then came the shocking, unexpected death of my little brother. Quite rightly, this brought the process to a screeching halt. And many things have happened since then...
So what I have decided to do this time is write short episodes and anecdotes by hand on 4x6 lined index cards. I've bought the multicolored ones, so that the cards can be grouped by rough time period. At least as of now, I don't intend this to be a "first this happened, and then this happened" kind of chronological account. Frankly, I have lost track of the exact threads of my timeline. What old datebooks and journals I had have either been tossed, or are in storage back east, and so I'm embracing the rather dreamlike aspect of some of the narrative and working with it, I hope.
One of the things that has become clear to me this go-round is the fact that, given my passion for English cathedral music, most of my life from the age of eight on was, by necessity, a Plan B. In the sixties, young English boys with musical talent would probably find their way into a cathedral choir and accompanying school. If this continued to be an interest, they would study at Cambridge or Oxford and sing in one of the college chapel choirs, and possibly even progress to sing countertenor, tenor or bass in a cathedral choir. This not having been an option for me as a girl and as an American, quite literally most of my life choices went wide of the mark, either slightly or spectacularly. The process of writing about the colorful journey that followed is thus rather bittersweet. I love what I have experienced, and yet I feel angry too at the utter waste of human talent in a specific field. I did my best not to waste divine time (and indeed, I guess my journey to help open up the field was a good use of that time!) but at 63, I can literally feel the pain of how distant certain activities were, and still are, from my core. I realize that this may ultimately be the source of my constant longing to "go home."
The phrase came to me, "my only home is my journey." So far that's been the case anyway! Let's see how many index cards it will take to write about it.
