Oh dear! Tomorrow I face a stern test. It will be the first meeting of this season of the regional Italian Circle. The bad news is that I am Il Presidente! Several months have passed since I had to apply myself to actually use my (fairly basic) Italian, and in my worst moments I fear that it might have deserted me. Perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much. In the past, when the right signals are given, it all comes welling up again.
Memory is like that. My wife and I have just finished watching a recording of a Joan Baez concert from (I think) 1965. My word! That released a flood of memories! At one time in my past I actually used to play the guitar, and quite a sizeable part of my repertoire was pinched from Joan Baez. Faced with the decision that, if I were to continue to take music seriously I ought actually to learn to sight-read, I regretfully decided to quit the guitar because I didn’t feel I could find the time to put in that commitment. So, back in about 2000 I hung the guitar on the wall and determined to limit my artistic ambitions to painting instead.* The words are all in there, however, a quarter of a century later. I hope my Italian language will turn out to be as durable as that.
*More decisive than that was the fact that I left the instrument with a friend who undertook to repair it, and it never came back. Where are you now, Bob?