Feeling: sad
Listening to: Paradigm - Not the Only One
Reading/Watching: --

I wanted to see Libby off (into the wild blue yonder, a.k.a. Americorps in Albequerque), and so after working 8-3, driving an hour to a bridal shower, staying and eating cute girly food for forty-five minutes, then driving back through rain and infuriating traffic to arrive, late and panting, at the playhouse, late for calltime (with permission to be thirty, not forty-five minutes late), through the occasional hot bucket of crazy that is our show on a Saturday night, and dropping Bork off at a party he wanted to attend, I finally arrived, mon coeur in tow, at Libby's house after 11 p.m., ready to "party."

There was the obligatory alcohol, watching mon coeur win at his first game of Beer Pong, talking with Libby's friends (only two of whom I had met before), and catching up.

Libby told me she had something of Evelyn's that she wanted to give me. After Evelyn died, Libby and Mini-Me were allowed to take mementos from her office, and Libby felt bad that I didn't get anything, because I wasn't there to help "clean out" her voice studio.

She handed me a little paperweight of a thing, something my mom would call a "dust catcher": a small, pointless object that is meant to sit and look pretty on a flat surface. It was three rows of small pebbles, painted in rainbow colors like candies, arranged like a choir, with each pebble painted with a pair of eyes and peeking through the "window" between the two pebbles in front of it, as we were all taught to do from fifth grade on. Above the rows of little pebbles with eyes was a sign reading "Rock Concert."

I held it in my hand, and through my head flashed the image of the little doohickies cluttering her desk, the countless dust catchers collected over forty, maybe fifty years of singing and teaching. Because when someone needs to give you a gift, and doesn't know what you like, but they know you're a musician, you tend to accumulate random musical doo-dads. I myself have a small assortment of treble clefs in various sizes, colors, and materials.

And I used to look at her desk, covered in these useless, hilarious objects, and think "Someday I'll be a teacher with a collection like this."

Looking at the "Rock Concert," I remembered pointing at it and giggling, and how she said, "Oh, yeah, isn't that funny?" and how "funny" to Evelyn could mean any variety of things, being it silly, stupid, cute, or simply humorous. I remembered the way she would do impressions of people, telling stories where she stretched her mouth wide open, her bouncy, bumbling walk, that laugh that was a cackle and a guffaw and a crow, so damn loud that Mini-Me and I could pick out the nights she came to see our plays.

And my eyes filled with tears, and Libby hugged me hard and long. I closed my eyes and hugged her back, and for one more second I let myself hear Evelyn's voice on the phone that last time, tired and croaking, but still so excited that I was teaching, so happy that I was getting married, and yes, please send her an invitation... all the while, knowing that she wouldn't last that long.

(I put an invitation aside, months later, in a drawer, because I didn't exactly have an address to send it.)

And it's a bunch of painted pebbles, without a single functional use, but it's her. It's simple and silly and punny and the little innocent pebble-eyes are so "funny."

I think I'm glad that I didn't get it until now. I like being able to put it on the shelf by my desk, knowing that I'll be studying choral conducting in the fall, and it will be there when I'm doing all my piles of homework. It would have been hard to look at when I was flailing and stagnant.

But now, it's my little good-luck charm, another piece of functionless musical doodadgetry that my students will see and laugh at. She's part of my collection.

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