Ten years ago, I informed Facebook:
Reading in Gail Godwin’s Evenings at Five, I come across “typical Rudy-ish melisma” for the second time in about 3500 words of text.

Me, muttering the phrase: Melisma again. I have to look it up.

Ron: [gives the definition before I have the word typed into Google, then sings:] “‘Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia.’ The Alleluia is the melisma.”

And that there, ladies and gentlemen, is one reason I married him.

This morning I opened Pray As You Go to a somewhat twangy version of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” by the band SisterBrother. This is atypical of Pray/Go, which usually favors more formal settings of traditional sacred music, or pop-inspired “Christian Contemporary” ballads sung in an overwrought breathless warble that I skip right over. But there was something about SisterBrother’s rendition that drew me in. The 16-note “Glo-o-o-o-ria, o-o-glo-ria, o-o-o-o-glo-ria” took me instantly to the memory recalled above. At “in egg-shells-iss-deo” I almost burst into tears, recalling the conversations Ron and I had concerning which was the “proper” or “favored” pronunciation of the last bit of Latin. Was is “egg shells” or “ex chel”? Honestly? I cannot now remember which side either of us came down on here. Likely we’d both learned “ex chel” in our Catholic school music programs, but Ron was encountering “egg shells” in the more professional groups he began singing with about the time that I met him.

Such can be the maelstrom of memory. I recall sharply that the 2015 conversation about melisma surprised me. How had I gotten into my sixties, a lifelong lover of words, a teacher of writing, a musician for more than fifty years, without learning what a melisma was? The memory of that conversation was so clear I thought that Ron was right there in the room with me.

But of course he wasn’t. He’s been gone four months and one day now, not that I’ve been counting or anything. He’d stopped singing a while ago, his lungs too compromised for his voice to be an asset to a group, his legs too weak the make the climb up the winding passage to the traditional choir loft in his local parish. Yet the image of him in his tux and cummerbund, worn often in the holiday season, persists.

This evening I participated in a Solstice gathering, an hour-long guided meditation on the turning of the season. Ron would call this part of my personality and practice my woo-woo pursuits, baffling to him as a scientist and a pragmatist. I was directed to conjure an image of myself at this particular moment. Above is a slide I saw some time in the last month or so, somewhere, I have no recollection where, that I saved for reasons I can only guess at now. But there I am, with the long red hair and narrow waist I once had, ready to walk into whatever is next with confidence and joy.

Today was a very good day. And the Steelers won! Time to raise a glass to a shimmering new year!