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We met in the mid-90s, at my first TES meeting (Don and Suzie Q, wherever you each are, bless you for introducing me) when she lent me a Spider Robinson collection (Antimony), although we both later lost our taste for him. Later, I left TES; having only sporadic Internet access then, I fell out of touch with this unique, wonderful person. Five years later, a random LJ search for a friend’s scene name led me to his LJ, and via a comment there, to an LJer with a very familiar user picture. One night in March 2002, she posted saying that she’d be in Rose’s Turn, a piano bar in the Village I dimly remembered. It would be lovely to see her, if I could I thought. I wonder how she is? …and, as happens mostly in bad fiction, someone popped their head in the door to tell me the server had crashed, we could go home. I remember standing outside the steps leading down to the bar, and feeling as though I were going to walk onstage… and then I did. As much as things have changed since then, I never regretted it.
We bonded over SF (although I was never a member of fandom; she, on the other hand, was for at least three decades); Sondheim; laughter. Perhaps most of all, the sort of bond that happens when you meet someone’s gaze during a song, and you are both there, helping to make this beautiful thing happen. We stayed together well after the original Rose’s group had pretty well come apart, though I saw everyone there at least once, in the days leading up to the sudden end- ten days between the word being shared and the closing, if I recall. That was the week Deathly Hallows came out; I was somewhat underspooned at the time, and left that night before the end.
We stayed in close touch through the aftermath; I will never forget that Wire’s Chairs Missing album was playing, with a song about a fly, when Helen called. Stroke. Watching Soren slowly come back to himself; helping them move, and move again; talking with her through tears and terrors, until slowly, the world began to feel like the world again. Doing what I could to help with that. Hearing the Buzzcocks’ “Why Can’t I Touch It?” playing at Quarter as she held Soren’s hand and wept, and feeling that this was almost too personal of a moment. Afterwards, I never played that song (or that Wire album) again.
After she moved to Seattle, we fell out of touch to a certain extent, even when I moved out here: she had posted many times about her missing New York and the piano bar scene, and I was certainly part of that. That said, there were emails, texts, invitations to visit; plans that might have come to fruition, in a kinder world; songs that would play, and take me back, for a moment ("...a person could develop a grippe..."). It is an odd fact that the last time I heard her voice, Elise and I were talking to her on the phone, as we walked through a cemetery.
There’s a person on LJ called Jon Singer who’s renowned for being a social nexus- a Kevin Bacon for his circle; Velma was that for me. I met enormous swathes of people through her (but not, as I has originally assumed, Patrick and Teresa: that was Eleanor’s New Year’s party); saw Sondheim shows I would not have seen; read book I would not have… someone I knew from high school pinged my Facebook as I wrote this paragraph, to say that she remembered Velma from Mother. Such a wide swath of people, memories, feelings, like the wake of a ship, leading back to her.
Goodbye, Velma.
We bonded over SF (although I was never a member of fandom; she, on the other hand, was for at least three decades); Sondheim; laughter. Perhaps most of all, the sort of bond that happens when you meet someone’s gaze during a song, and you are both there, helping to make this beautiful thing happen. We stayed together well after the original Rose’s group had pretty well come apart, though I saw everyone there at least once, in the days leading up to the sudden end- ten days between the word being shared and the closing, if I recall. That was the week Deathly Hallows came out; I was somewhat underspooned at the time, and left that night before the end.
We stayed in close touch through the aftermath; I will never forget that Wire’s Chairs Missing album was playing, with a song about a fly, when Helen called. Stroke. Watching Soren slowly come back to himself; helping them move, and move again; talking with her through tears and terrors, until slowly, the world began to feel like the world again. Doing what I could to help with that. Hearing the Buzzcocks’ “Why Can’t I Touch It?” playing at Quarter as she held Soren’s hand and wept, and feeling that this was almost too personal of a moment. Afterwards, I never played that song (or that Wire album) again.
After she moved to Seattle, we fell out of touch to a certain extent, even when I moved out here: she had posted many times about her missing New York and the piano bar scene, and I was certainly part of that. That said, there were emails, texts, invitations to visit; plans that might have come to fruition, in a kinder world; songs that would play, and take me back, for a moment ("...a person could develop a grippe..."). It is an odd fact that the last time I heard her voice, Elise and I were talking to her on the phone, as we walked through a cemetery.
There’s a person on LJ called Jon Singer who’s renowned for being a social nexus- a Kevin Bacon for his circle; Velma was that for me. I met enormous swathes of people through her (but not, as I has originally assumed, Patrick and Teresa: that was Eleanor’s New Year’s party); saw Sondheim shows I would not have seen; read book I would not have… someone I knew from high school pinged my Facebook as I wrote this paragraph, to say that she remembered Velma from Mother. Such a wide swath of people, memories, feelings, like the wake of a ship, leading back to her.
Goodbye, Velma.
