We can’t stop ourselves from counting.
Days. Years. Decades.
We celebrate. We mourn.
We mark passings with ritual and count the years since.
Others leave us.
Still others enter our lives.
Counting.
This one, a decade.
The tenth anniversary of the death of Jeff Dinsmore,
our co-founder, our friend:
leader, thinker, partner, reader, cook, artist.
Impacting all we’ve done.
The Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Fund.
Jeff Quartets.
Jeff Day.
It seems like such a short time since Jeff set the color of our tenor section,
set the tone of our visual ethos,
influenced the voice of The Crossing –
the voice writing this email;
seems like a short time since we were left behind to try to make sense of being left behind.
And yet, imagining his voice, time stretches to an eternity;
seems far more than a decade.
We aim to celebrate this Anniversary.
Voice.
Friendship.
Art, Love, Memory, Imagination.
To celebrate by Listening...
…to Jeff.
We’ve chosen a 15-year-old live concert recording.
May 22, 2009.
Our fourth season.
The inaugural Month of Moderns.
(We were first realizing we may be onto something.)
James MacMillan’s A New Song, with Scott Dettra at the organ of the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, still our home today.
We sang a lot of James MacMillan’s music back then.
Jeff loved it.
We all did. Still do.
He loved MacMillan, and he loved us.
And, loving us, he would say that, after a decade,
it’s time to make Jeff Day an anniversary we celebrate in our hearts.
Time to make every day Jeff Day, because he lives there daily already.
Time to sing forward, to listen forward, to care forward.
So, onward, with gratitude for wisdom gained through pain,
pain evolved to understanding,
understanding transformed to thanksgiving.
Time to stop counting, and remember.
I close as I did the announcement of Jeff’s death on this day a decade ago:
Thank you for the hundreds of messages we have received and will,
reflecting Jeff's broad reach, and the gratitude we share for his life,
Donald
for the entire Crossing family
