You have to get used to losing things in life, or you’re done for

John Kander & Fred Ebb were so linked that the name of one was once a crossword puzzle clue for that of the other. As I've said before, I think they were the greatest show writing team of their generation, and I'm hardly alone in that estimation. But lyricist Mr. Ebb passed away a couple of years ago.

There's an article in the New York Times about what composer Mr. Kander has been doing since. Obstensibly it's about a long-in-progress musical begun with Ebb: Curtains recently opened in L.A. and is planned for Broadway.

I would dearly love to see it; have wanted to ever since Kander & Ebb talked about it in a book they published (and I reviewed) in 2003.

But it (the article) is really about coming to terms with loss. As Kander slowly and at first unsteadily begins writing again to his own lyrics, with the occasional "general ideas, sample lines and help in evaluation" by Rupert Holmes.

Eventually Mr. Kander found the way forward. “I made this switch in my head, quite consciously,” he recalled. “Instead of dealing with it as a big trauma and a big cry of grief, I started to think of it as just a different chapter. You have to get used to losing things in life, or you’re done for,” he added, a thought that evoked what seemed, at first, like unrelated childhood memories. The time his Aunt Rheta put her hand over his to teach him his first chord: C major. And the season, even earlier, he spent isolated on a sleeping porch recovering from tuberculosis. “I’ve always thought that I became a listening person then,” he said. “Listening for the sounds of footsteps coming toward me.”

If your ear, he seemed to suggest, was tuned to the frequency of human contact, it was necessarily tuned to the frequency of human absence as well. Love and loss were not separate channels. “And once I acknowledged that,” he said, “I felt free to go to work.”