Another file from Patrick’s computer, this one dated 6 Dec 2013.

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I  put my hands in the middle of the table between us.

I like the way you are.

She placed her hands, soft and small, in mine.

I like the way you are, too.

We had met ten minutes before.  We stayed together for twenty-nine years.

Allison, then five, looked at me and then at Stephanie.

Is Stephanie going to be my new Mommy?

So begins this story of love.

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Every day, from the beginning until very near her end, it was a physical relationship.

The undercurrent from then to now – in musical terms, the ground bass – was physical.

We both had devoted much of our lives to partners of the opposite sex.  Indeed, it might be said that was the motor of our lives, though always there is much more to relationships.

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In our case, we adopted things each from the other, and adapted each to the other.

She taught me TM. I taught her silver flute.

She helped me in writing. I started her singing in a choir we made together.

We together made the core of a Baroque ensemble and began the Festival together.

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Even our homes we joined, each selling a house and buying another together.  She mixed cement, I fixed the roof. We made music, a wonderful garden, met literally hundreds of friends and musicians over the years.  We shared walking over the mountains, swimming in the sea, later on, when our luck changed and we invented ways of earning from our natural gifts, traveling around Spain, France, and Italy.

However, as you might suspect, there were large patches of gray in our life.

Money was constantly a problem, though somehow we kept things together.  Vegetable garden.  Preserves and chutneys in the cellar. Playing for weddings and private parties.  Touring with a folk group (the Valldemossas) all one summer to pay for the musicians in the Festival.

Stephanie was the rock, the anchor.  I was the wind and the waves.

She was faithful always to our dream, while I fell in and out of despair, especially in the beginning.

And of course, I had one serious fall to what was both my strength and my flaw, with a German woman who haunted our life for a couple of years.  But S never lost faith in the permanence of our bond, and we weathered that storm as we had other storms of other kinds in other times.