Baruch dayan ha-emet

[cellio]

I met Leigh Ann Hussey at a Darkover convention in the mid-80s (1984? 85?), at the bardic circle. (I was a newbie, so either not yet performing or doing so very timidly.) She performed one song in particular that caught my attention, "The Riding of Idath". (It was rhythmically neat to my ears -- later discovered to be in 5/4.) It sounded like it might be part of a larger story, and I worked up the nerve to ask her about it. She told me that it was based on her short story of the same name, and she told me where to find it, and I later sought it out. (Later, before I knew anything about period music, I performed that fantasy song in the SCA a few times.)

I was, at the time, tape-recording the bardic circles I went to at cons, and I learned "Idath" and another song of hers, "Uncle's Gun", from those tapes. I transcribed the lyrics by hand; I remember the following year asking her about a couple words that I couldn't quite make out on the tapes. There must have been more of a conversation, because we ended up with each others' email addresses. (This was a decade before the web and search engines; I'd never have found her on my own.)

We started corresponding about fiction and music. She sent me drafts of stories she was working on and I gave her feedback; I'm not quite sure how that happened, since I was really a nobody when it came to professional fiction, but I guess she saw value in feedback from "just plain folks" and I was happy to oblige. Somewhere in my attic is a binder with some of that correspondence; I didn't yet have a way to preserve electronic copies of email (or anything else), but I printed out the important stuff.

And then, gradually, for no particular reason other than that these things happen, we started drifting apart. The email was less frequent, and she stopped going to conventions I was at (she was on the other coast, so that's not too surprising), and I wasn't enough into cons to go to the west coast for them, and we just lost touch. I noticed a couple years ago that she was on LJ and I browsed her public entries; I think I left a comment or two, but we really didn't have the common interests any more that would prompt a long-term conversation.

This morning I read that she was in a fatal traffic accident last night, and I feel sad not just for my friends who knew her, but for myself -- even though we were barely connected, I feel a loss.

Comments

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

**hugs**

(If you're going to War Practice this weekend you can augment the virtual hugs with real-life ones.)

[cellio]

Thanks. I'm ok; it was just a shock.

We're skipping war practice this year. (It doesn't seem to work very well for us -- nothing against the event; it's just not conducive to day-trips where you can actually find and visit with people.)