Dearest Carol
I don’t know where or how these words will find you. In the liminal layer between this world and the next? One world exited, and another still to be arrived at. I’m not sure where that arriving space is for you, it’s not something we ever talked about. What I do however know, and beyond know, feel, is a dimming, some colour less bright, contrast less clear, since your succumbing to Covid on Saturday.
If lives were lipsticks, the colour you wound up into the world was fire-engine red, ‘loudly’ and lavishly applied – not always neatly within the lines. What colour and commitment your lipstick and your laughter brought to this life! What wonders found form and expression through your fingers with their fiery red nails. Fingers that flowed with ease, and equally, pulsed with passion over ebony and ivory, across countless countries and communities. But it was not your fingers alone that brought their mastery to many a Steinway, that classified you, ‘concert pianist’, a concert pianist of comparable technical competence to others past and present. No, what defined and distinguished you: the whole heart and whole being with which you brought yourself.
How can I make such a bold and boastful claim, never having heard you play on a great stage in Russia or China or Austria? How can I possibly make my claim, based not on being part of an audience of hundreds in a great hall in Moscow, but rather, based on being one of an intimate audience of six, in a modest music room, on a Sunday afternoon in Midrand, halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria. An invitation you extended to linger in the light and shadow of Chopin, to travel on the sweeping tide of Tchaikovsky, to be gently and fiercely embraced by the depths of your emotion and passion, to sense your complete embodiment of the scales and scores. What an incredible privilege to be in that small circle surrounding you, to be enveloped in the emotion and energy of your playing, not simply live in those ‘Midrand minutes’, but in the four decades of stories told through the spread of your pianist’s fingers, in the 80 years of being this person of passion, abundance and wholeheartedness, the person seated on the stool.
So indeed I was not in a great hall in Hong Kong, but I didn’t need to be. Being in this audience, invited into and immersed in my own emotions and sensations, was proof enough, of your differentiator, of your uniqueness.
Away from the piano, a richness of expression and expansiveness of stories told, in words and not scores. Stories of people and places and performances; of love and challenge – of life XL – extra-large. Stories poured into the finely gilded espresso cups, cups from a long ago past, stories poured and drunk over a few short years, and again, that end-of-November afternoon. A sombreness and sadness, despite our best efforts, it being the last time we would be together, before your return to Zimbabwe, to live with your eldest son. Unknowingly, the last time we would be together, ever.
What a gift it was for me, Carol, to be able to step towards you, and all that was you, over the past couple of years. To get to know you, to be an observer and listener, not ‘simply’ of your music and meaning-making, but as observer and listener into the depth of your love, your generosity, your yearning for the best for people, your celebration of their celebrations, no matter their size or significance. To witness the wells of your love for your beloved Dee-Dee, your baby sister, and my Dearly Beloved, Dee.
Thank-you Carol for unexpectedly adding to my life, for the travel and tears that Sunday afternoon – for what in reflection, might have been some rite of passage or closing ritual for you, me, and Dee. For the beauty and poignancy of that togetherness, that I told you on leaving, was destined for the soft folds of my precious memory box – the place in which my most treasured moments are stored – a box you were familiar with, having travelled my worded Camino with me.
I thank you for the love and warmth with which you held me, and I hope that you are held now, in the higher realms, that your heart and hands continue to play for both the angels and the mortals surrounding you.
All my love
Sharon
Carol Baron Thompson 31 May 1940 – 12 June 2021
Coda (Italian for ‘tail’) is a term used in music to designate a passage that brings a piece or one movement thereof, to a conclusion.
