Just last month I was writing here about how alternate Parlando voice Dave Moore and I used to perform pieces live and unrehearsed. Infirmities, personal matters, and a little thing called the Covid-19 epidemic meant we haven’t been able to do that for 18 months — but today we did that again.

Rusty? Yes. We’ve always been rough and ready, which means we persevered today because we love our common attempts at spontaneous performance, even though your ears will be spared most of them. Personally, I’m overjoyed to hear Dave’s keyboards mixing in with my guitars again. Perfect or imperfect is another, subsidiary, matter.

Here’s the very first piece we performed today, using for a text one of the sonnets I’ve written this year about infirmities. My sonnet, “Until Memory is Only Forgotten,”  tells about an older woman with Alzheimer’s disease which has removed, and is removing, many of the layers of her memory, and who is traveling from the Memory Care Unit where she is presently living to visit siblings back in the farming community where she grew up.

Pictures of the Gone World. The young woman who raised blue ribbon dairy cows.

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Long time readers here will know this Project normally features us presenting and performing texts by other authors, but since summer tends to bring in a smaller audience, I may be using more of our own texts when I can find time to present work here this season.

I chose to tell this woman’s story without following a time-line, because as with memory (even a degraded one) the scenes aren’t linear. Dave and I repeat some motifs in our playing, just as the subject of the poem sees different crops in the fields and can only see corn and speak again to her daughter-driver of that crop; yet in unmarred memory she recalls her Jersey dairy cows like the other Memory Care Unit resident who can still tout his Holsteins. Structurally this is a free-verse sonnet, though I think the old patterns of iambic pentameter remain rustling distantly in the fields.

Here’s the sonnet used as the text for today’s audio piece.

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The player gadget to hear The LYL Band performance of “Until Memory is Only Forgotten”  will appear below for some of you. If you don’t see it, you haven’t forgotten, you’re just reading this in a mode or reader that won’t show such things. That’s OK, this highlighted hyperlink will also play the performance.