Parallel passings

Another Commencement. The thirty-sixth commencement I've played for the same school.

I was not in control of the pedal board. As far as the pedals went, I managed. Sort of.

The performance was fine. The pedal division on that organ is muddy anyway (it's designed not to be clear and contrapuntal), and I was able to adjust as the performance went along, and we had a tuba carrying the bass line anyway, so at the end of the day, everything worked just fine.

Except my feet.

Now, my neurologist says repeatedly, it's always too soon to say "it's over," because with neurologicals, you just never know. And could I do this gig without using much of the pedal board? With the tuba player in the brass quintet covering the bass part, most of the time? Probably.

But it feels like the "organ" part of my life, that used to be... isn't, any more.

The funniest thing about the evening... the organ was not at its fullest, either. The solo division had been deactivated; a note from the tuner said that it needed too much work, so it was unusable, they left me only one stop (and it was a nice stop, better than nothing, certainly). So I had less than half the organ to work with.

This was--is--a truly great organ. A famous organ (I'll tell you about its history another time, but it has amazing history), an organ that made a lot of wonderful music.

And it's just ... falling apart. We're the only people who use it, and I'm sure there's no budget to renovate it, so I think it's probably on its way to slowly fading away to becoming forever unusable, and thus forever unused. And if not "forever," certainly "until something radical changes for the better."

Strange, to see your life paralleled in a theater organ.

Well, for both of us, I suppose it's too soon to say "never," and certainly some of my friends in the band told me that I did just fine and I shouldn't give up, but... on one level, I completely agree with them, and on another... I just don't know.