The Way It Always Happens

One of my Boulder summer pleasures is to subscribe to the Colorado Music Festival held in the historic barn-like concert hall up at Chautauqua, at the base of the Flatirons. My friend Diane and I get tickets for six or seven concerts, usually heavily concentrated on the offerings from the festival's mini festival-within-a-festival. In recent years the mini-festival has included performances of all of Beethoven's nine symphonies, the world's great piano concertos, the world's great violin concertos, and the work of Brahms; this year the focus in on the music of Russia, culminating in performances tonight and Sunday night of four Rachmaninoff piano concertos by dazzling virtuoso Olga Kern, a favorite of my family.

Last night Diane and I had tickets to the concert with Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" in the first half and Tchaikovsky's lush Symphony Number 6 (Pathetique) in the second half. But in the late afternoon Diane called me to tell me she was sick. I tried to find a replacement date for the evening to no avail. So I headed off alone, feeling a bit bereft, forlorn, and alone in the universe.

But as I got off the free Hop bus up to Chautauqua and made my way to the ticket kiosk to see if I could give away my extra ticket for the evening, who should I see but a fellow writer, Mary, from my writing group, with her husband, Wally, there to buy their tickets for the festival. Hooray! I gave them my pair, and they bought a singleton for me. Mary had brought an extremely delicious picnic with her, which they shared with me during intermission, including lovely Rainier cherries and chocolate chunk cookies. And she reported to me that she's halfway through reading my cookie jar book manuscript, which I handed out to the group last week, and so far she loves it!

So the lonely evening of a Claudia-all-by-herself-in-the-universe turned out to be an evening of fellowship with another writer friend and her husband, with a picnic included. That's the way it always happens, or almost always happens. At least that's the way it happened last night.