Love Walked In. . . and it never left.

It shouldn’t surprise me too much that I’ve fallen down the Gershwin rabbit hole once again. It was a full nine years ago I became fascinated, devouring every book I could find on the boy genius’s life and art (including Oscar Levant’s fanboy adulation), and of course immersed myself in his astoundingly powerful music.

 

So here he is again, all because of the comment I just received from a woman who is related to Alan Schneider, the man who for decades posed as George’s illegitimate son. Wow. DNA doesn’t lie, does it? And for all the criticism of the internet, all the ranting about the evils of social media, this could not have happened without Blogger, a nearly-obsolete program (or maybe it’s an app, whatever THAT is) and my 12+ of posting on it nearly every day.

Through this magic portal, I once received an email from a woman in New Zealand commenting on something I wrote in 2016. It was about a poem I studied in school in Grade 3 – it was about elephants, and I remembered more than half of it – but at the time, when Google was far less efficient than it is now, I couldn’t find anything at all about it, who wrote it, when, where, nothing.

 

Then after my usual bloodhound effort, I found SOMETHING in a very old newspaper archive from 60 years ago. Yes. They had published the winner of a poetry contest, and the thing was written by two people (can’t remember their names), and there it was – the elephant poem, in a newspaper archive in AUSTRALIA. Yes!

 The archive was one of those snapshots of an actual page, and just under it was a notice for a “cooey contest”, apparently a competition for calling a sheep dog or whatever it was. Very Australian indeed.  This woman from New  Zealand said to me, “YES! I also studied the elephant poem in school, and never knew where it came from.”

 

Getting back to Gershwin. I won’t repeat all the ins and outs of it, except to say I felt – believed – I had some sort of mystical connection to him. I felt his presence, shy at first, then gradually coming closer, a sort of warmth, and a kind of yearning to be heard, believed, understood. After his untimely and gruesome death of an inoperable brain tumour in 1938, people began to “see” him about town, hurrying along a busy street, hanging about at music festivals dedicated to his songs, and even – I swear – playing a piano that was NOT a player piano. Several people saw it, and they knew it was him.

My own connection with Gershwin’s ghost deepened and broadened, and it was exceptionally beautiful and mysterious - until I made the mistake of sharing it with someone I knew, a university prof (I had taken his anthropology course) and self-styled spiritualist medium. What he said was a slap in the face. It was a fantasy, a dream, I was imagining the whole thing to try to gain credence as a spiritualist. (I wasn’t.) Then he pulled rank, as he often did, citing his superior education (two Masters degrees and a PhD) and the fact that I had a psychiatric condition (and he didn’t) that made me prone to fantasy.

 

So George went away for a while. But where he is now, there is no time, which is extremely convenient for me (I’m still in my fleshly form, after all). So is he here again?

Why not? Paul Biscop isn’t. Paul died suddenly about eight years ago, dropped in his tracks with a stroke and was dead before he hit the ground, His partner of 20 years, also called Paul, emailed me with the news, so I must have still been on file somewhere (in case he needed someone to harass). Paul had died suddenly, he said, and we should pray for his soul. But then I saw something on Facebook that shocked me: a page for a spiritualist church that Paul Biscop had actually founded, and from which he stomped away years ago because people weren’t doing it right, were listening to their own hearts rather than slavishly following what he told them to do (and when and where),.

 

Paul was dead, and I wasn’t sorry, but there was more to it than that, and it was awful. The posts from the spiritualist church (and very few had posted their condolences, likely still feeling burned by his narcissistic bullying) sent out an urgent call for financial help for his long-time partner. Paul Biscop had left him with a massive debt that he had known nothing about, and the other Paul was now literally homeless and left with nothing.

So the church set up a GoFundMe page which only garnered a few hundred dollars. The church did not host his memorial  - that was held in a Masonic lodge, and the lady on the Facebook page stated that there would be a table set up in the back selling Paul’s books (no doubt on anthropology and other dry topics) to try to earn some funds for his now-destitute partner.

 

OK, this is very long, but I’m on a roll here The thing is, I of course never abandoned Gershwin’s music (my two favorite pieces are the Cuban Overture and the stunningly beautiful Love Walked In), but his presence had faded as if he too had been stung and had to retreat. But it’s OK now, George, I still love you and feel you and know you are immortal. You ring in those songs, songs that will never die. Like a latter-day Mozart, he would sit at the piano composing, then play the piece that same night in a concert hall. His improvisations were heard only once in human history, because they were different each time. This is what I was originally going to write about, but now – hell, I am exhausted already from visiting the past, something I try not to do these days.

Past-tripping can be counterproductive and even traumatic, and the reason it’s called the past is because it has PASSED. So I will try to get on with my day, such as it is (plunged  back into the rabbit hole), and of course I will revisit the music I never quite walked away from.

Love walked in, and it is apparent to me now that it never left.