who don’t know me very well what my husband does, they sometimes ask, “Principal what?” as in, “which principal instrument in the orchestra?” Which reminds me- we randomly happened upon an episode of Law and Order that was about the murder of a violinist in an opera orchestra, and the conductor was the prime suspect, and people kept saying, “Everyone knew he was gonna make her First Violin!” And I kept giggling and had to explain it to Christopher.)
ANYWAY. There are these mornings when he wakes up at 5 and inadvertently wakes me up and I got home at 11:30 last night from a gig and now I am WIRED. And thinking about how I’ve really crashed into Middle Age, and that’s ok— I’m 45!— and I’ve never had that weird thing about not saying my age because my mom had me when she was 40 so we, like, had a huge 50th birthday party for her when I was 10 and no one’s ever believed me when I’ve told them her age. And the trendy thing now is to say perimenopause, and yeah that’s definitely a thing, but MEN GO THROUGH MIDDLE AGE TOO. What’s with this male aging erasure?? Anyway. When you lose a good friend before they turn 40, everything from 40 onwards is a miracle because she’ll always be 38 in my head. And sometimes I’m like, man, Sara is lucky she didn’t have to go through this. And most times it’s just “I miss Sara,” and sometimes just typing that makes me cry. Because it’s been 7 years now, and the thing about Middle Age (or life really, let’s be honest) is that the years pass in big clumps and you can’t even imagine how it happened.
ANYWAY. My current Middle Age issue is that I have a really shit knee. It’s basically arthritis, it’s gonna be with me forever, the doc said I’m too young for cortisone injections because then my body will get used to them. So I do a ton of leg exercises but mostly I complain about sitting for a long time. And hello, I’m a musician. And that gig was FAR yesterday. So driving. But it was all worth it because it was one of those Candlelight concerts you’ve seen ads for on your Instagram. And it was really lovely! And I got to make new chamber music friends. I call that a W.
Also: both there and back I listened to the Rest Is History series on Charlemagne, whose coronation you could say ushered in the Middle Ages so it’s all connected!!
