I have not been actually well since we got back from New York on December 30. It started with a cold, then a sinus infection. On my second visit to the doctor, she wrote a week-long prescription for antibiotics, which cleared up the worst of the sinus infection. I've still been congested, and my sinuses are a mess. I'm tired all the time.
I agreed to teach a four-week class about Laura Nyro, a favorite of mine, during OLLI's winter session. My classes are usually full, but in the winter, many seniors leave town for warmer climes, and there was a three-week class about Garrison Keillor scheduled for the same time as my class that pulled away a lot of people.
Laura, whose first album was released when she was nineteen in 1967, left music at twenty-four after five classic albums, then came back and put out a few more albums before her death, at forty-nine from from ovarian cancer in 1997. She is a kind of cult goddess to gay men of a certain age. While no one was officially gay when I was in college, the people who introduced me to her album "Eli and the Thirteenth Confession" in 1969 turned out, later, to be gay. My sister's college roommate played "Christmas and the Beads of Sweat" for me in 1971, and I was hooked.
I knew that her album of covers with Labelle, " Gonna Take A Miracle" was used in several movies with a gay theme. I found two. At the beginning of "Silver Lake Life: The View From Here," a harrowing documentary about a gay couple in Los Angeles living with AIDS, there's a home movie of them from the 1970s, dancing to "I Met Him On A Sunday." In the movie "A Home At The End Of The World," adapted by Michael Cunningham from his novel of the same name, teenaged Jonathan and his friend/sex partner Bobby get his mother stoned while they all listen to "Gonna Take A Miracle." I couldn't find the movie in the library or at a local store, but our library had the book, which I'm reading now. Jonathan grows up and moves to New York, where a lot happens to him, including contracting AIDS.
Now that it's a new decade and I'm seventy, I think more of life and death than I used to, and listening to Nyro, remembering the movie about the couple from Los Angeles, I think back to all the people I knew who died from AIDS, and people, like the characters in that book and movie, whose life has not turned out the way they expected. I think most people are disappointed in some aspect of their lives, especially when you are older and see that not much is ever going to change, that planning ten years ahead may be overly optimistic.
Jonathan in "A Home At The End Of The World" knows something is wrong with his body before he is diagnosed. He says "First you felt a floating sensation, as if your hours didn't add up to whole days and your presence...didn't affect the landscape as human presences ordinarily do." I've felt like that for a long time, on and off. I'll be walking somewhere and thinking about how the world would be different if I were no longer alive. Aside from my husband and my sister, most people would barely notice, and the landscape, the weather and the pulse of things would go on just as they had before.
There are still fans of Laura Nyro out there, and two of the women in my class, who were unfamiliar with Nyro's music before, but are themselves musicians, were teary-eyed, as I hoped they would be, from the gorgeous music. The music got to me, too, but I had added to that the memories of friends still here, but not close, and those who have passed away.
My last class was Thursday, and I played a recent clip of Elton John telling Elvis Costello how Laura Nyro had influenced him. As he moved to a piano to play "Burn Down The Mission," I switched to a BBC video of him playing that same song at twenty-two. Even those of us still here have changed from what we were when we were young.
Yesterday, I found out that two friends had died: Emilie Marlier, a local union activist, kind and gentle and available for every meeting or demonstration. She was about my age. And Ron Meier, a friend from our Jewish youth group, married to one of my sister's friends from childhood. Most of my peers won't make it through the new decade As for me, I'm trying to feel better, sleeping a lot, hoping I don't have some permanent condition that could end my life, getting out when I can to do the things I do.
