There's some sort of fin de siecle thing happening these days. Within the last two weeks, I hit my 15,000th birthday (days, that is), Roy Raja, one of the Chorale's long-standing members, died after a protracted but mostly secret bout with cancer, and Allen, our conductor since the early 50's, announced his impending retirement.



The 15,000th birthday is a milestone because when I first figured out how many days old I was back in junior high, I figured at the time it would be something to shoot for to live to be 30,000 days old, because that was a nice round number that was neither to optimistic nor too soon. At the time I was just turning 5,000, and of course it seemed impossibly far off. But now I'm half way there, and just like an interstellar drive, you start at zero, speedup towards near light speed until you reach the midpoint of the trip, and then you turn around and start to slow down, looking back from whence you came. Of course it could all go pear-shaped (as the British say) tomorrow, but you have to have a goal, and 30,000 (which works out to just past 82 in the more conventional annual notation) still seems reasonable. Neither Dad nor Grandpa Bartlett got anywhere near it, so I'd be one up on them at the very least.



Allen is a good model for clean living, as he's made it significantly past 30,000 and is still going strong, longevity being either a prerequisite or an added benefit of being a conductor. Everyone's known he'd have to retire some day, but at the same time there was no reason not to assume he'd keep going until they pried the baton from his cold dead fingers. So his impending retirement certainly signals the end of an era, naturally for himself but for the Chorale as well, which wouldn't be the august organization that it is today without his long years of service. The transitional period will be difficult for everyone concerned, no doubt, but hopefully things will stay amicable all around. The fact that we've moved beyond community chorus to an incorporated non-profit organization whose reach extends throughout New England I think will serve in good stead.



Roy had been ill for a while but didn't want to bother any of us with it, so he was still singing and helping with the fruit deliveries right up until about six weeks ago. Then suddenly he showed up at rehearsal one night hooked up to a portable oxygen tank, basically to say goodbye. Two weeks later he died. So for all of us it was a sudden loss, made even more difficult to cope with because he was always such a force of nature, and at 69 not really all that old (closer to 25,000 than 30,000). His memorial service was today and, as Rick said afterwards, "Well that has to be the most entertaining memorial service I've ever attended". Several people including Ted, Allen and Ginny got up and told stories about some of Roy's antics, and the general consensus was with someone like him who was immersed in so many things and commanded the presence that he did, you just kind of assumed he'd always be around. We all wrote notes to him a couple of weeks ago at rehearsal, and Ted took them over and read them all to him, and he said today that Roy got a chuckle out of mine, which just said from one fruit-unloader to another "It's lonely in the back of the truck without you". I'll miss his chatting with the truck drivers, swearing a lot and telling dirty jokes, and usually trying to hurry things up because he had a concert to sing in that evening. The Elijah that we're working on now also makes me think of him because the last time we did it he insisted on singing from memory, and there's one particularly exposed spot towards the end where the basses come in all alone with "And when the lord" and Roy came in a measure early all by himself. It was excised from the tape, so it's lost to posterity, but he made no excuses for it, nor would anyone have expected him to.



This all kind of comes together because as I get older I think about the distance between the beginnings of things and the present, and I compare it with the distance from now to an arbitrarily-defined end, and the beginnings get further away, and the end gets closer. You devote more of your time to learning about ways or doing things to cheat death. Every little twinge or sniffle takes on greater potential significance, when in earlier years I would've just shrugged it off without even thinking about it. My pile of books to read is so large now it's quite obvious I could never possibly read them all even in 15,000 days, but it won't stop me from buying more. I could suddenly get religion, or become a hypochondriac, but they both seem like too much trouble. So even though you can't help thinking about it, you can't let it get to you, and instead focus on aspiring to be by the end, whenever that may be, someone like Roy or Allen, polar opposites in many respects but two people who've done well for themselves doing what they wanted to do, and whose absence would be profoundly felt by those around them. Otherwise, you have to think, what really is the point?