Moments

The taste had the vibrations of a cozy evening fire. It was the closest I had in describing it. Warm, somehow. Like a blanket. A slow piano tinkling in the dining room of a Massachusetts apartment, way apart from the hustle and bustle of the city.

I tried to describe the grape. If I could just harness the wine. How the fermented flavor unfolded on my tongue. It was hard to describe. But therein lay the rub, as Shakespeare once said. When I smelled the wine, I felt juicy grapes growing on the Australian hillside. Small but very juicy. Unfolding in juicy drops when biting into them. The color dark red, the color of red velvet. The surface rich but watery. No drops remaining on the surface of the glass when the wine drenched down into the liquid.

The sound of Annie Lennox resounded in my ear as I sat there trying to catch the taste of the Australian wine. "I Saved the World Today" seemed like a fitting song for my wine. That muffled trumpet of the solo was very much like the wine. Like a woman wrapped in a soft blanket in front of a fire somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, not far away from Aberdeen, the birthplace of Annie Lennox.

I moved the wine from side to side in my mouth and discovered how the taste somehow changed according to where the wine was located in my mouth. Like the memory of an event could be regarded from different perspectives. That mountain in Italy with the three peaks looked different from every angle, yet it was the same mountain. Was the wine like the Tre Cime di Lavaredo at the heart of the Dolomites? Maybe.

It seemed to me the music I was hearing, Trusting the Process by Slowheal, was exactly like the wine: it had ripened with age just like the mountain. And I was also a work in progress. A spiritual wine ripening with age. Life was a marathon, not a sprint. Me. That singer with steady opera job with extra gigs, trying to make it work. A house. A daughter. A wife. Trying to roll the punches. And yet, the road remained the way. A process.

And when I put that small piece of chocolate in my mouth and let it mix with the wine, an interesting blend happened. A mix of slow evening jazz and romantic Flamenco. The tender kiss of sweet cocoa with the spicy reflection of the fermented grape.

The glass wasn't even half empty and I had written a sonnet about it. It was like the poem by Thomas Hood, the one about the time of roses.

"It was not in the winter,
Our loving lot was cast!
It was the time of roses,
We plucked them as we passed."

I plucked the rose of tasting of my wine. The rose of music, from Annie Lennox to Slowheal and now to Coldplay and their song "All my Love" and his sweet video with the 100 year-old Dick Van Dyke dancing on a remote dance floor in an unnamed English city. Roses in my garden.

And the chocolate had melted in my mouth, making me think of the 121 year-old French nun who made sure to enjoy her one bit of chocolate every day. Moments.

And I thought of moments, small moments of bliss in warm houses. Paintings painted in high attics. Poems read by aging widows. Piano pieces played by young girls. Coffee drunk by fathers shortly before work. Jokes told by daughters to their parents, giving them a feeling of togetherness. Bonding.

It all happened in the Now.

"We are collecting memories," my father Herbert Eyre Moulton used to say as we sang together. And my mother Gun Kronzell would tell me good night stories of Swedish trolls being aided to solve problems through their own Dumbledore or Gandalf of sorts, Doctor Miracle, a crazy wizard who healed the world with magic bananas. Crazy. Unusual. But completely logical. Outside the box.

Moments. No big moments. No fireworks. No huge galas. No peace treaties. No political agenda. Just moments. Small personal moments.

Maybe healing lay not in the big things, but in the tiny moments where one person felt truly able to strip reality down to one single factor: love.

Maybe thinking big was the wrong road. The real challenge of humanity was reducing life to one single breathing mechanism: the human heart.