It has been quite a weird week. Past and present intermingling.

Started off with a song. I hardly ever listen to music while driving. But recently I had to empty out my car for a professional cleaning. So all those side pockets, glove compartements and oddment trays, even the space underneath the seats and the boot had to be emptied. Thus, I stumbled over a few CDs I knew were ruined. Maybe storing them in the scorching car parked in the sun all day did them in. Or else the endless repetition of favourite tracks made them skip exactly these. I threw them out, finally and searched for acceptable car music in my music collection stored at home, for replacement. All my music sat in the cupboard unlistened to for a very long time. Some of it for decades, literally. As I found out. I popped in a CD by Annie Lennox  (Medusa – live at New York). Hadn’t listened to her songs ever since her music helped me through separating from my husband. And snap – the music took me back to that time in an instant. No wonder I shied away from it all those years. The memories attached are not very nice, to say the least.

But, to my surprise, after the first ackward whelling up of emotions, I found the music still good to listen to. Seems to be the same with music as it is with books: if it is really good, it still remains so after time or events have changed the recipient. I sometimes try  books that way: are they still a good read, if I return to them after five or ten years? Maybe have to widen that experiment to music, too. However – this particular music brought back a time long forgotten. And somehow, at the back of my mind, I kept asking myself, how said  husband might be doing these days, calculated his recent age (60+) and so forth…

This morning I switched on facebook to stare directly at his photograph, taken yesterday in Scotland. Shared by our last mutual friend. Apparently he stays there for a visit to support his daughter at a golfing event. Quite a coinicidence after many years passed, during which I hardly ever thought of him.

To sum up coincidences, later this morning I had to attend the funeral of one of my customers. Working at a golf club with roughly 1500 members, this – sadly enough – is the case a couple of times a year. I think of these occasions as training opportunities to be ready to face my father’s funeral. I hope it will help me, when the time comes… But back to today: Among the fifty odd mourners, I met another ex, this time my ex-boyfriend, the bridge teacher, who also taught the deceased at cards and thus came to be there, too. After the funeral was over, I offered him a ride to the next tube station and we had a little chat about how families and friends are faring. Which was nice. Quick question about the current relationships – both going great. A little overall comment on how things are: too old, too fat, too slow for our own liking but otherwise still looking and doing fine was the respective answer. A goodbye laugh at his comment, that this happened to turn out to be “a schöne Leich” (the Austrian term for: “a beautiful funeral”) after all, because of us meeting up.

Odd events. Leaving me hovering back and further back into the past, at the same time considering the present. Which is good. Despite the “too old, too fat, too slow for our own liking” part, I mentioned earlier.