Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Early morning reminiscence

Saturday, May 13, 2006
7:15 a.m.
eggsaucted�s present predicament suddenly rang a bell in my memory as I was reading her diary this morning.

When I was a teenager I studied at the T0r0nt0 R0yal C0nservatory of Music, taking singing lessons with Margaret J0hns who was a rather terrible singing teacher and a smoker with a voice like sandpaper, but who at one point in her youth had been a good singer so somehow she now had (at age 60-something) a studio in the basement of The Kremlin (as the building was [and perhaps still is] lovingly called). I don�t know why I said �now� as that was over 30 years ago and she is probably long dead, but anyway, I guess that�s literary licence.

One of the things Margaret J0hns encouraged was that I join the C0nservatory choir, a group of young people which met on Saturday afternoons under the directorship of a very sweet man whose name I have totally forgotten and that bothers me terribly (It�ll come back to me eventually, I hope) and it was there that I met and made friends with other singing students, one of whom was under the tutelage of a much better teacher with whom I also started studying the following year. After choir practices a bunch of us would adjourn to the R0yal Ontari0 Museum, which was just around the corner, getting in free with our student cards (you can�t do that anymore) and taking refreshments in the cafeteria (which is not the same place it used to be). I loved those Saturday afternoon tea parties. It�s funny how I�d forgotten them until just now.

Anyway, one of the girls in our group was Christine M, my age, rather bohemian in nature, I thought, who lived with her mother and sister. Her mother was called Mrs. M, although I learned much later that she had never been married to Mr. M and had never actually lived with him, even though both her daughters were his progeny. One summer Christine introduced me to her half-brother, a young man only three months her senior, with whom we went to the Ex and I nearly threw up on after being on one of those rides designed to pull your body into the next dimension.

The brother (whose name I also cannot remember, although that doesn�t bother me so much) and she had both been born in England where Mr. M was living with his mother and spending lots of time with her mother. I don�t know if the two women actually knew each other or were even friends, but they certainly knew of each other. Christine, of course, wasn�t too clear on all that, but then she was just a child at the time.

Over the years, Mr. M has had many families. He has always been a responsible father and given, if not financial support, patriarchal stability to his children�s lives, unless the mother vetoed that involvement (which I think happened in one case). I don�t know how many wild oats he sowed in total. It�s a little scary, actually. I lost touch with Christine a very long time ago, but the weird part of her story is that she too had a child out of wedlock from a man who was married to another woman at the time and with another child. She, having had a good experience with her own rather strange familial arrangement, wanted the baby�s father to take some responsibility or make some kind of acknowledgement of his contribution to the gene pool. It was not to be. Even the grandparents, to whom she sent a photograph of their new granddaughter, remained tacet. The man left her (and his wife) for someone else, and the two jilted women eventually became friends as they now had a common enemy. That was interesting. Christine was interesting.

I just remembered the name of the choir director (see, I said it would come to me).

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