Hug Story, Nov. 3

The next day she played piano, practicing pieces to perfection. The vibrations from the music were bliss for her. She tuned the piano herself by ear at least once a month. She worked on pieces for the local opera and symphony company, and a gig with some artist who needed the classics, including pop and R & B. She met many top tier musicians from other genres who needed her collaboration. She loved working with Aretha Franklin. What she did was creative as all get out!

To help her take breaks she bought a tea kettle that whistled. It was just a little more sound. And then she got a cat. An orange tiger cat that had been abandoned. Ali had a soft heart for the abandoned. This cat was old and fat. It was fat because she was feeding it a lot. Now that she thought about it, the cat looked like the cat in Shrek, that children’s movie. She had helped with the score for the movies. Before she became sick, she had made so little money teaching, but then she had found connections to work through the concerts free and cheap she kept going to.

Her friends and professors never forgot her. This made the difference in her life soon after she left the hospital with the news that she would die. Instead she went to concerts, ate better, and in three weeks she was in remission. She had heard Norman Cousins use laughter to heal his disease, and she had followed different diets her whole life, but found that it really made a difference to change to all green and drink lots of tap water with baking soda. How funny was it to find that all that was needed was 3 weeks to change her diagnosis!

It had been years since Ryan spent a lot of time with Ali. He was too busy with work and exercise and research. She heard that men in law, accounting, medicine and science were like this. Busy and not around much. For years she made friends with artists. She had fended off the flirtations. She tried her best to be friendly and not flirt, but sometimes it felt good to wink or just be with another human being and talk. It was very difficult to socialize while married to a work-a-holic. When she was very sick, she had started telling him that he deserved someone prettier, younger and more successful. Ryan looked at her and said he didn’t want anyone prettier, younger and more successful. “It is too much trouble to train someone else, Ali,” he would say with a twinkle. He acted happily married.

So Ali was alone when she wasn’t working. Most musicians need a lot of alone time to practice. Ali was no different. Three to five hours a day she practiced. And the rest of the time she was recording or performing. Finding her niche was really a miracle, after all the under employed life she had suffered through. Being so poor had caused quite a struggle with diet. Finding organic gardening and Adele Davis made the difference for her. Container gardening was enough for Ali. Ryan suffered through her salad breakfasts and he wasn’t there for lunch or dinner very often.

Sometimes she wondered, since she had money, why she stayed. She was alone after practice and performing. She never cared for shopping, or spending money for recreation. Her hobbies were music and sometimes rearranging furniture, petting the cat, and swimming. Ryan almost never got home until 10:30 or 11:00 pm, and then read for an hour, bathed and was asleep the minute his head touched the pillow. He was funny. How would their lives change if they did adopt?

A week passed, she had mailed the application in. If they adopted, then it would happen. The country of the month, almost flavor of the month, was Moldova. Last month it was China, and before that Korea. No one in the US had an easy time adopting in the US.