Letter to Avon 2024

Dear Avon,

 

Today is the day you passed from this world, 35 years ago. I wrote my usual annual e-mail to Mary, Judith and Rick, these three people who you brought together and who loved you so. Each passing year of your absence brings astonishment at how long ago it was that we got to hear you laugh and be lifted up by your soulful singing voice. And yet, you stay by our side, for me, just about every day of my teaching life.

 

Today I biked through the Slovenian countryside trying to enjoy everything yet a bit more knowing I was living it on your behalf. The world, left alone to change organically and naturally without excessive human interference, remains a beautiful place. The bright green fields made so colorful by so much rain, the ever-present distant mountains, the constant bubbling streams and rivers. 

 

I evoked your memory when I taught recently at the Orff institute and there you were in the movie we showed in Room Five. There is no one left teaching there who remembers you pushing a piano out into the hall and leading a rousing Gospel session. Sonja Czuk, long retired, never stopped talking about it. 

 

I don’t know how things work in your world and if you’re aware of all your Orff colleagues who have recently crossed to your side. Danai Gagne, Arvida Steen, Barbara Grenoble, Mimi Samuelson, Marilyn Davidson, to name just a few in the past year or so who were around your age (but made it into their 80’s). Don’t know if there’s an Orff Welcoming Committee or indeed, whether any of you would actually want to see each other again, but I’m just giving you the report. 

 

Tonight I will go to a concert here in Ljubljana of Orff students sharing their compositions. Their teacher is someone I taught and I am someone you taught and that’s how it goes on, all of us connected in a long chain in which we all became necessary to each other and we in turn to the kids we teach. It’s the way the world works in all professions, but I like to think that ours has a special spark with the joy, connection, inclusion and great music and dance it helps generate. A legacy of unabashed delight and enchantment.

 

So, my friend and forever teacher, that’s the report 35 years down the road. I hope these words and thoughts somehow reach you and give you a tingle. 

 

Love,

 

Doug