Wistful

Full of wist? Well, yes, though wist is now obsolete, and the meaning of wistful has morphed over time – from closely attentive to yearningly eager to musingly sad.

We went to the ballet the other night – to see New York City Ballet, and to sit, perhaps for the last time, in my mother’s seats. She’s had a subscription to City Ballet since they moved into the State Theater in the sixties, and for most of that time, she’s had the same seats – a pair in the third row of the center section of the first ring. In other words, she had great seats.

When she started going, she was still married to my father, so they’d go to the ballet together. She’d get dressed up and wear Youth Dew, and we kids stayed home with a babysitter. Later, after she was divorced, she’d take one of the kids, or go with a friend, but she always went. She knew the people in the seats around her; she knew all the repertory and all the dancers. She observed Edward Gorey holding court at intermission in his fur coats and sneakers and rings. And this spring season was the first time she hasn’t gone to any of the performances; she’d renewed the subscription back in the winter, before she started her decline.

So, my brother and his wife went to two of the four performances, my sister went to another, and W. and I went on Friday night. I looked around and recognized the man to our right, and Clive Barnes across the aisle. We saw Tom Gold’s penultimate performance and I saw Joaquin de Luz dance for the first time.

And I was wistful.

I thought back on how many times I’d sat in those same seats. And how many times I’d been to other performances in the same theater. I thought about the times that my mother took me out of school to attend a dress rehearsal - like the 1973 dress of Cortège Hongrois and the 1971 dress of Goldberg Variations. I remembered that my mother and I had been at the performance the night after Lincoln Kirstein died – when Peter Martins gave a little eulogy and everyone in the audience got a shot of vodka at intermission.

My husband said “why don’t you keep the subscription?” But it’s ferociously expensive, those tickets, and, it feels as though the moment has passed. That was her thing, her constant extravagance. But I don’t know. The renewal for the winter season hasn’t come in yet.

Maybe I’m wistful in the “yearningly eager” sense of the word, and not just “musingly sad”.