A LITTLE CHRISTMAS MUSIC
                   by Eugene Hutchinson Mallory 2


     My late wife, Dorothy, has a VOICE and the idea that her
destiny was to sing belcanto opera and flounce about the grand
opera stage portraying the flamboyant emotions peculiar to that
medium. She devoted much time and effort to that end, but it was
not to be. Her destiny was religious music and even in small
town churches with no sound equipment and the acoustics of
double sized hay barns she did it superlatively well. There is
an old story that everyone has one supreme ability if they can
just find it. If this is true, hers was to sing Schubert's Ave
Maria.

     Some quite non-religious people have told me "My your wife
sings like an angel."

     I never thought she was particularly angelic in any of the
other aspects of her personality, but I never heard anyone who
could do more with that beautiful and moving song than she
could.

     When we moved to California she tried out for the choir of
All Saints Church in Beverly Hills and was accepted. I don't
imagine that the heavenly choir is any more exclusive than All
Saints. So perhaps the home town folks were right and she could
sing like an angel.

     Every year the music center puts on a twelve hour Christmas
music show giving many groups a brief exposure. Public T.V.
broadcasts the whole twelve hours. Two seasons ago I was
watching without paying much attention when a Korean choir of
some sixty women came on. They soon had my attention for almost
at once I began to pick out a voice. A voice I had not heard in
song for many years, a voice stilled forever nearly four years
before. Among the sixty odd women in the picture I could not
identify the source, but the voice was surely there.

     I thought at once, a singer like that will surely have a
solo part and she did. An oriental woman, nice looking, but
except for the choir robe no resemblance to my dead wife. The
voice was the same, not similar, but the same. Not only the
voice, but the manner and style.

     Most of the solo singers had put on quite a show with vocal
gymnastics and theatrical gestures, waving a microphone about
and occasionally trying to swallow it.

     Dorothy had often said, "Anyone who has to swallow the mike
to be heard has no voice, and can not sing."

     Not this oriental lady. She just stood there in her robe,
no microphone in sight, and sang, sang with cool tranquil
confidence, just the way Dorothy sang. The impression was that
the singer was only a channel, a conduit bringing the music from
some other realm.

     The strange lady on the T.V. did not sing the Ave Maria and
didn't sing long, but her brief appearance in the long chain of
perceptions that has made up the reality of my life is not
easily dismissed.

     I had been brought up to believe all the events that were
to make up my life would come from the future, a kind generative
mechanism that I could influence for good or ill by my choices
of actions. "Be a good boy and Santa will come. Save your money
and you will be rich."

     The ability to predict the effect of present action on this
mysterious future was called good judgment and my father thought
I lacked it. Presumably because I was young and half Ferris, and
I must agree that events have proved him right.

     Now here was this strange event not conceivably generated
by any conceivable future, an event straight from the past,
striking from behind with no small impact.

     The wise men of the east have long taught that the events
we westerners perceive as reality are merely a magic show and
have no relation to reality. Was this voice from the past just a
bit of magic where most of reality had slipped a bit?

     Or was there a gap in the succession of events wanted and
unwanted that the relentless conveyor belt of time delves into
our lives and takes away again with an equal disregard of our
wishes? Could that gap have exposed a tiny bit of that eternal
reality, not subject to the tyranny of time. The reality those
eastern thinkers urge us to seek, but can not and will not
describe.