"She can do it," a woman said. She was standing in front of me at the cemetery entrance, where Uncle John was hosing things down and I was teasing him that Lilith needs a bath. The woman thrust her cell phone at me, said I should take a photo of her and her partner at such and such an angle, so the palms would frame the picture and the mountains appear in the back. Her partner was a middle aged man with lots of earrings, and a tattoo of a treble clef on his neck. "Are you a musician?" I asked. "Yes," he said. I took a couple photos with the woman's phone. She said something about he teaches piano and composition. "Where are you from?" "I live in Worcester, but teach in Boston," he responded. "Berklee School of Music?" I asked. He flinched. "How did you know?"
I told him a neighbor of ours goes there, a saxophonist named Varma. (I neglected to tell him about the day the young man played the riff to "Love Supreme" over and over on his lanai, and his mother told me later that he was trying for the note the civil defense siren makes.) "What semester?" he asked. "Not sure, covid messed up his schedule." "It messed us all up." Up a side hill I broke my rule of not looking at the internet on my walks. He said his name was Dennis. And here he is: https://college.berklee.edu/people/dennis-montgomery