It Hit Me

My old friend Andrew once said something interesting. I had been talking with him about how my mother was coping with the death of her mother, and I had mentioned something I'd found noteworthy. Of particular interest to me, I explained, was how my mom hadn't cried on the night she received the news but did a few days later when she realized that she had forgotten to give my grandmother a birthday card that year.

"Yeah," Andrew said, "but that makes sense, right? That’s how it hit her."

In that moment, I totally understood what Andrew meant: sometimes we can’t fully grasp a thing until another thing drives home the point for us.

Such was the case for me recently when I found out that a friend of mine, Claudine Weber-Hof, had died. When I got the news, I was stunned. I can’t say that I was crippled or as sad as a relative might have been; I was more stunned. Still, there was one occasion when it "hit" me. 

I had been in Bamberg, a picturesque town in Bavaria, walking in a pedestrian zone when I saw a street musician, a violinist, gearing up for his next number. Like so many other street musicians do these days, he had a speaker with him, one that played a backing track. It was when that backing track began to play and I realized that the muscian was about to perform "Carnival of the Animals: The Swan" that it "hit" me. 

“Carnival of the Animals: The Swan” is very basic, just piano and violin, but the piece is so beautiful, so able to evoke sorrow and longing—so able to stop you in your tracks—that it just hit me. As I stood there, listening to the music and watching the violinist play, I realized that Claudine would never hear this or anything as beautiful ever again, and I felt sorrow and regret. 

Here is the song, Camille Saint-Saëns's "Carnival of the Animals: The Swan."