“Family isn’t an important thing, it’s everything.” –Michael J. Fox
How could such a thing have happened? Didn’t you have a clue you had family living near your house in Vermont?
It’s not like I just moved there, and that house had been part of my plans for bringing chamber music to Northern Vermont for a couple of decades. It just seems like too much serendipity to be believed. But I was there as the fateful unwinding happened, and so should have no trouble believing the magic of that moment.
Maybe fate is just what should be taken most seriously. I’ve always had a feeling that certain key events and specific traits are bound up and around my family’s history so tightly that they have a permanent place through time, and if that’s so, then when one least expects it those threads of existence will make themselves known without any particular intention. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel both miniscule and massive at the same time.
I spent a few minutes chatting with a couple I didn’t know in the audience before our July chamber music concert this summer, trading names and origins as one does when far from home. I’ve always wished my family could set up a permanent life in Vermont, but have never accomplished more than a sporadic domicile there, except during the pandemic when we spent six blissful consecutive weeks. I’ve known of some cousins floating around in the ether who lived in Vermont from time to time, but I was never a part of their lives when Vermont was ‘home’, and in fact my vague recollection of that branch of the family is clouded over and hidden in a different generation with unfamiliar connections to other parts of the United States and work lives I knew nothing of.
As I talked with the couple who’d arrived early for the concert in July, a very strange shockwave traveled through the man who had been questioning me about my name. Continue Reading
