Chapter 4 pt.3 (Draft)

Anyway, early on, one evening close to the Christmas holidays I had scheduled a lesson. She was adding tinsel in a complicated pattern to an already (in my opinion) overly decorated tree.

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ I said, intrusively, as though she was the pupil rather my teacher. The cat will see that and soon the cat and the tree will be on the floor.

'Oops! Oh. I’m sorry, I got carried away.’ I said. After a week of flying around dealing with client and staff problems. I was in issue avoidance mode.

‘Please, don’t be,’ she said, looking at me and squeezing a smile out of a lemon pucker of a frown.

‘Are you doing OK?’ I asked?

I have been known to be too busy and not to get to my practice material during the week. Well, her mood wasn't about my lesson tonight. I could tell. I hadn't seen her in a couple weeks. But something that was not an issue the last time I saw her was an issue tonight.

She was having a crisis. For so many people, including me some years, Christmas can be a dark time. It is like the approach of winter and the slowly disappearing daylight takes with it a little bit of the life force to wherever it retreats. Her Father had died at Christmas. A lot of people do. Or, at least it seems like it. Doesn't it? A lot of people commit suicide too! Having moved to the area when she enrolled in Curtis, she didn’t have any family nearby. Her transparent melancholy seemed like a cry for help. I told her she could spend Christmas Day with me.

That how it started to happened. She came around and we watched the log burn on the TV with the volume down and drank hot chocolate and eventually wine. We drank several bottles of Blue Nun. A white wine which was all the rage at the time. We talked late into the night.