"Indian Summer"

I am hoping and praying that this is the last Victor Herbert piece. The text on this one is a little better, it feels more like a popolar song of the period. Possibly because the text was written much later. But the melody's a bit better, too, if, still, not much to my liking.

Summer seems forever and a day away at this point. I'm cold almost all the time, and can't get warm, except when I'm working or sleeping. We live in a lovely old house, where the heat never seems to fully work, and perhaps never will. But tonight we're heading out to a party: warmth, light, good food and drink.

I've gone to this particular holiday party for years now, and there are people I only know from here. It's a strange thing. But I'll see them tonight, and I'll pick up a conversation with someone that I talked to last year. It won't be particularly profound, perhaps, these are not people who are friends, yet, but who knows? Maybe five years down the road they will be, all on the basis of a common friend's holiday party. Certainly I've seen it happen at my house, where people will ask after other attendees (usually, but not always, my friend, Michael): is he coming? And they'll ask in between times, too. There are other situations even further fetched: I feel that I know some of my friends' and clients' families, though I have never met them. But I hear about them all the time, and I ask after them, and care about their triumphs and tragedies. When my daughter was born, and also after my husband had surgery, we received gifts from people I felt that we barely knew. But they knew us, somehow, through two or three degrees, maybe, and they cared, genuinely along that narrow thread of knowledge.

The world is a strange place, but things like this make me feel that it is not so huge, that there are connections that span unlikely divides. It gives me hope.