Certain events embed themselves in memory and, like images on glass, are irrevocably etched.
Someone I knew well for a number of years told me this story.
It did not emerge all at once, like a waterfall cascading over a dam. Rather, perhaps like the life cycle of the grasshopper itself, it came about in fragments, in bits and pieces, as the life cycle of the grasshopper itself goes from egg to nymph to, finally, after a series of molts, an adult.
After she told me, I understood why.
Like a few other things in life, it was too painful to relate all at once.
As well as being an unusually lovely young woman, she was talented. So much so she garnered a recording contract with Capitol Records.
Some people would give their eye teeth to get such a contract. Instead, they wait tables or drive taxis.
So it was that one day she visited her attorney at his home in the hills to put the finishing touches on a contract that had been drawn up. It was a sunny weekend, the weather splendid, no portent at all of what was to come.
She’d had a troubled childhood, starting with her father being torpedoed and perishing in the war.
After an appropriate time of mourning, her mother remarried.
