Reunion Revelation
by Sedgwick Clark
Earlier this month a flash flood of e-mails from old high school friends inundated my New Mail box. How old? The subject was our 50th reunion. But—wait a minute!—that’s four years from now. What’s the rush? I have several deadlines to meet before I can deal with this. That excuse kept me from attending interim attempts to reunite since our 25th.
Sandy Teverbaugh York, my classmate who got the reunion ball rolling this time, had my number when she wrote in one of her stream-of-conscious e-mails, “Sedge I think you work too hard-LOL.” I was flabbergasted a week later when I received a personal e-mail from Sandy. Great heavens, she loves classical music! And how did she come to share that intimate secret with me? I have this line below my address that reads, “Please follow my blog Why I Left Muncie,” and she actually dipped into some of them.
My Muncie humility—you see, some things never die—restrains me from reporting the kind things she said about my blog. But the first piece of music she mentioned among her favorites just happens to be one of my two favorite piano concertos in the whole world, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, in my humble estimation a far stronger piece than his more popular Second and Third Concertos. (My other favorite, by the way, is Brahms’s D minor Concerto, incomparably more passionate and enduring than that emotionally arms-length note spinner, the B flat.)
She said something that pleased me no end: “I have a very limited knowledge of such music-but I enjoy it & that’s what counts I guess.” Right on, Sandy! So many people shut themselves off from so-called classical music with the excuse that they don’t know anything about it. I have a limited knowledge of art, but that doesn’t keep me away from MoMA and the Met.
My friend Sandy lives in Florida and “never get[s] much of a chance to indulge [herself],” but she has a goddaughter who lives in New York. She loves vocal music, and I hope she visits her goddaughter one of these days and lets me take her to the Met, Broadway, Carnegie Hall, or Lincoln Center—sometime before our 50th reunion.