So It Goes: parallel lives

I know I’ve engaged her best friend in a few conversations.  I know her friend through her brother and we’ve been friends for at least 20 years.

My head sings like the strings of her violin to think about it.  The world is indeed a small place and we remain ensnared in its musings.

I am talking about my husband’s cousin, someone we have only recently discovered.  We met her and her mother at a family reunion and again at my mother-in-law’s funeral earlier this year.  My husband decided it was time to get to know the aunt he never knew about and so, we visited.

It’s a funny thing to look at other people’s albums and point to people in common.  My husband’s aunt and his mother had almost been living parallel lives, unknowingly moving about Queensland, possibly walking past one another in the street and not realising they were, in fact, siblings.

It’s a long story, but suffice to say that it has now been unfolded and, just shy of his 70^th birthday, my husband wants to grab his dwindling family heritage and learn more.  The album at his aunt’s place is littered with his relatives.  How could it be that he knew nothing of his aunt’s existence but there were other relatives attending weddings and having picnics with a woman who so closely resembled his mother?

But I digress.  It is his cousin I want to speak about.  We discovered on this recent visit that she is a violinist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.  So of course, you ask if she knows the handful of people that we know in the QSO.  And yes, she is best friends with one of them.

Not only that, but she also flatted with one of our children’s music teachers while they attended the Queensland Conservatorium together.  We threw out a few more names and each one was greeted with a little laugh and great familiarity.  Not only were the parents of the cousins living lives in parallel, so too were their children.

And finally those lines have intersected.  

Call it karma. But one can’t help but think that the big conductor of the universe may just have stopped waving his baton so furiously and be listening to the dolce calm, broken only by the turning of the pages of our own albums, scattered with some new family faces.

- Linda Muller