Jimmy walked into the space holding Jenny’s hand. The usher welcomed them and motioned them to their seats near the front. They had great expectations. The Candlelight Concert ad had said the quartet would play Lord of the Rings music and Harry Potter tunes, too. That sounded familiar and intriguing to a mind that had loved the movie series enough to watch them repeatedly. The outcome was always the same, a bit melancholy and wistful as if some things had been lost and some found.
They still held hands as the music began, violins and bass tearing the air with their bows, their guardians shaking with the emotion of the vibrating strings. The melodies were so recognizable that the mind called up scenes from the movies, fantastic backdrops of mountains and castles, of great heroes striding across the plains without fear and with great purpose.
‘Oh, to have great purpose,’ Jimmy thought, wondering if life were worth living if he did not. He squeezed Jenny’s hand lightly and looked at her with recognition. She mirrored him, grinning slightly, and he could see that she felt the same as him. Of course, she did. They loved each other and had pledged to share the dream as One. Just like they each had always wanted. Just as they had dreamed it from scenes and drama of the past. Just as they had longed for this great peace of love. Just as they each had imagined Love could be.
The violins crescendoed and whispered, howled, and cried in the light of the candles surrounding the stage. Time had let go and let go, and in each pause, they clapped in delight for the music in the night. Who had created such music? Patterns of sound that triggered feelings, that built mountains and oceans of memory? What Mind had made this music, spinning it out in a frenzy of life and death, filling the space with it, and offering it as a human sacrifice to the God of creation and imagination? And how could the strings be played again and again, recalling the same feelings? Who directed this? What actors played out the scenes? Who dreamed?
“Jenny?” Jimmy spoke softly, almost reverently, as they left the church when the concert ended. “Wasn’t that amazing?”
Jenny nodded and slipped her hand into his, matching his pace, looking up at him as he spoke, acknowledging agreement, mirroring his sentiment.
“How does someone write this music? So exquisite. So rare. So wonderful.”
“You know how we sometimes wonder, Jenny, when we dance, if the music is dancing us or if we are dancing the music?” Jimmy looked excited now as the soft spell of the night was broken by the Mind figuring things out and finding joy in the knowing and the sharing. “This made me feel like that again. Chicken or the egg. Spontaneous, synchronous creation.”
“I know,” Jenny was excited now, too. “Somehow, memories and imagination happen at the same time!”
“That is what is so amazing, isn’t it.” Jimmy nodded, and gestured as they walked to the truck and the way home. “That we can touch in time and space, traveling the path of sound and light that began as a gush of creation by someone in their dark closet of imagination, and reached out across the universe to each of us sitting in the audience, listening with great expectation, and hope, even, of recognition. ‘Do you hear what I hear,'” Jimmy sang softly into the night sky, looking to face of Jenny for her soft acknowledgment of his existence, of the smiles they shared in time and space, of the dream of life and love?
“A star, a star, shining in the night, with a tail as big as a kite,” Jenny sang, and Jimmy echoed the tune.
“With a tail as big as a kite.”
“Stay with me, Baby.”