Oh, What a Tangled Web!

“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. I could tell something had sparked a surprise he hadn’t been prepared for, and he announced that we must be cousins, as some of the names I’d been sharing with him were indeed the names of his cousins as well. It didn’t take more than two seconds for me to realize he was right as we began to unravel the tightly tangled web of serendipity that had led us to that room on that day and to each other. It was clear that music had been the key thread joining us to each other, and in fact I realized as I thought of it that there could not have been a more obvious way to bring so many members of my family, both living and long gone, together. Music was the binder for us all.

Since that fateful day this summer, the cousins have shared many stories and photographs and rounded out narratives for each other that have given us both much pleasure and a fuller sense of who we are and who we come from. It’s been our own ‘Finding Your Roots’ without the origin stories. That tangled ball of yarn that is our family is unwinding for us slowly and deliberately with the help of the music we all love so well. And as amazing as our discovery of ‘us’ has been and is, it’s made me more aware of how many of those ties that bind are out there for all of us, through the things that make us uniquely who we are.

I’ve always enjoyed unwinding tangled yarn and rewinding it in a neat ball for future use. This time has been no exception. With the help of my newly found cousin, I can feel how the musical outreach is going to expand our lives. I hope others who make up future audiences at our chamber music concerts will untangle connections for themselves, too. I think the musicians already know the power of this magic. Now it’s our turn to experience the connections, too.