Nina(rhymes with Dinah) and I went to a piano concert on Saturday evening.

“I am so looking forward to the couch,” I said as we set off.

“So am I.” Nina said.

We headed downtown to Sherman and Clay to hear Fred Kronacher.  It’s something we do three times a year.  The first two concerts are always at Green Lake United Methodist Church where the platform is staged to resemble a drawing room and the lamps and flowers obscure the keyboard.  We always complain about it. We sometimes ask a staff person to do something about it.  There was one memorable occasion when we re-arranged the stage ourselves. 

The last program of the series is always downtown at the Sherman and Clay piano store where they re-arrange the showroom to accommodate an audience.  Rows of uncomfortable folding chairs dislocate a couch and two armchairs to one side of the room.  Nina and I always sit–and sometimes lie–on these renegade pieces of furniture.  They face away from the performer but we don’t care.  We sit –or lie—on them because we are middle-aged women and we can.

I had had a long, busy day on Saturday and I was looking forward to claiming the couch for the duration of the recital.  This took precedent in my mind over the actual content of the concert which in any case is always brilliant.

“What’s he playing this time? I can’t remember.” Nina said

“I don’t know either.  I just want to lie on the couch.”

At the door we rummaged for our tickets.

“Oh, it’s Schubert and Schumann. Oh good, I like them,” I said.

“We couldn’t remember what the topic was,” Nina explained to the ticket takers who we privately call Fred’s Groupies.

But when we got into the showroom, the couch and armchairs were gone.

“You moved the couch!” I said to the first staff person I saw.  I didn’t know if he was Mr. Sherman or Mr Clay. (He was Oscar Spidahl.) I might have sounded a teensy bit accusing.

“You liked the couch?” he inquired

“It’s the only reason we came.”

He looked at me like he was appraising me somehow.

“I like demanding and entitled people,” he said. “I think I can help you.”

Nina and I looked at each other. Demanding and entitled. Huh.

Oscar pulled two armchairs –not as plush as the ones to which we were accustomed, but more comfortable than the folding chairs—out of an office.  He set them up for us well away from, as he put it, the riffraff.

“Demanding and entitled,” I said. “I like it.”

Fred is an exquisite pianist.  He also has a gift for transmitting his enthusiasm for classical music.  He tells the audience a little about the composer, and demystifies some of what we will hear in the work he is about to perform.  He plays snippets from the pieces and suggests what to listen for.

He has two other penchants which I, as a teacher and performer, applaud.  He understands attention spans.  His lecture/concerts last one hour and thirty minutes. The end. 

Secondly, he silently directs audience etiquette.  He sits at the piano and looks at the offender if there is any talking or rattling.  He is much nicer than the sister at Late Nite Catechism but he gets the same message across: we are not going on until it is quiet. Once the concert begins people do not talk and they do not rattle candy wrappers and programs.  Even so I don’t feel the terror that I do at a Wagner opera or a Gilbert and Sullivan show, terror that I might breathe too loudly and cause someone to miss an iteration of a motif or a line in a patter song.  I especially don’t feel the terror when I’m lying on a couch.

Alas, there is nothing Fred can do about helicopter parents such as the one who sat in front of us. The father and the two boys sat still and attentive but I swear the mother did not come to listen to piano music.  She came to watch her youngest child attend a piano concert. 

She turned to look at him. 

She fussed at him, put her arm around him, and smiled at him. 

She looked at the piano and nodded two or three times to the music.

She sat still for five seconds.

Repeat.

Though I was in danger of falling off the chair which I wouldn’t have been if I’d been on a couch, I closed my eyes. It was a good call anyway. The work was Schumann’s “Carnaval,” a musical description of a series of characters entering the ballroom for a masked ball.  Fred had given a wee introduction to the characters and the musical themes and then suggested that we not follow along as he played the 21 short pieces because, as he said, “This is music.”

You, too, can have an excellent musical experience: http://www.musicalexperiences.org/ but I get first dibs on any couches.

I discovered Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s writing when I was 18.  Her Diaries and Letters from the years 1922-1945 were beginning to come out in print and I read all five volumes. (Bring Me a Unicorn, Hour of Gold Hour of Lead, Locked Rooms and Open Doors, The Flower and the Nettle, War Within and Without.) I read her eight other books.  (North to the Orient, Listen, the Wind, The Wave of the Future The Steep Ascent, The Unicorn and Others Poems, Dearly Beloved, Gift From the Sea, and Earthshine.) I read every magazine article of hers I could find, many of them on micro-fiche or only available through inter-library loan.  

I was a confused and depressed young woman reading the works of a confused and depressed young woman who seemed to think and feel much like I did, and who showed me a way to process my reflections and to record my impressions of life.  I learned, like her, to think with a pen in my hand and to go through the day knowing I would write about it at its close. I began my own journal as I prefer to call them, and continue to write in it to this day.

Over the years I have had numerous Bouts of Lindbergh when I have re-read her entire oeuvre.  I’ve been on what I call my Prurient Lindbergh Tours:   A private tour of Next Day Hill, the Morrow home in New Jersey which is now a school.  I rented a car purely to find the home from which the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, now also a school. I walked right in and nosed around waiting for someone to throw me out, which no one did.  The Lindberghs have been a weird little obsession of mine.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was a gifted writer, but not so gifted that any of us might have heard of her except that her husband could call up Harcourt-Brace and ask them to read her manuscripts.  She was married to arguably the most famous man of the 20^th century.  When I was 18, I swooned over her references to “C.,” Charles A. Lindbergh.  But as I re-read the diaries and letters at later periods in my life, I got impatient with the hero-worship.  After I finally pulled through my own adolescence at about age 49, I recognized her as stuck in a paradigm familiar to most women of my mother’s generation.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh was unable to see herself –at least up until age 40 when the fifth volume ended– as a person of value apart from being a wife and mother. As a result she masochistically tried to conform to her husband’s control and definition of her.

I was wildly excited when I noticed that a sixth volume, Against Wind and Tide, Letters and Journals 1947-1986, had come out posthumously. (AML died in 2001 at the age of 94).  I knew from reading her several biographies that Anne Morrow Lindbergh had learned to stand up to her husband, had gone through psycho-analysis and had had extra-marital love affairs. Here would be the writings of a mature woman who had finally come into her own.

The book wasn’t like that.  She sounded happier and more confident than in the previous volumes but there was so much left out that she doesn’t come across as psychologically believable.  It’s not surprising, I suppose, given that she wasn’t the one editing the book,  The editors were several of her own children who, God knows, have their own agendas and axes, whether conscious of them or not.

But here was the worst paragraph –for me– in the entire book:

“Women write for different reasons than men (That is, true women—who fufill women’s roles as well as write—not masculine women who are in another category.) There is a creative urge in men which I think is not as strong as in women who, after all, satisfy that in having children.  It seems to me that true women often write out of an excess of the mother instinct in them.”

After all her reflecting and thinking, after everything she went through with a husband who today would probably be diagnosed and medicated, after psycho-analysis, for God sake, this is her conclusion?  It sinks me without a trace.  It’s paragraphs like this that give idols a bad name.  It took me a day or two to consider that Anne Morrow Lindbergh was merely a person who came as far as she came in her life and whose writing influenced me.

It’s Mother’s Day.  I’m happy for my friends who are mothers.  Me, I love to write, to paint, to sing, and to teach.  I believe that the last time I checked I was still a woman.  To those of us who aren’t by strict definition mothers, we aren’t just “another category.”  We are women who give life in incalculable ways.

In a grumpy mood on Sunday morning, I realized that I seldom project my gray side at church.  I am a one-woman side show whom everyone knows because I play the piano, direct the choir and occasionally sing.  I am always smiling, always say hello to everyone, and always listen to what people tell me even when I don’t know who the hell they are and in the case of a few, can’t understand what they are saying.

On my way out the door, I grabbed a book of Beatles tunes.  Jerry M. once asked me if I was going to play something jazzy instead of “that hymn crap.”  It was news to me that anyone paid attention to what the bulletin grandly calls the “Gathering” music.  Since then I have tried to remember to take some Brubeck or Bach –who I consider “jazzy.”  One Sunday, just after the benediction had been pronounced, I launched into “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”  This past Sunday was definitely a morning for doing it in the road.  Something to jolt me out of my mood at least enough to be civil to people.

The church was over-heated so I wasn’t going to need the hot coffee that I spilled on the rug under the piano bench.  The rug is coffee-colored so unless it instantly mildewed there in the tropics I should be safer than the time I messed up the altar during an OK Chorale rehearsal.  But I still wanted that coffee and spilling it didn’t help my mood.

Nor did the hymns I had to play.  Here’s my dirty little secret:  I enjoy some of the old hymns.  They are great tunes.  They have some of the same nostalgic associations as Christmas carols.  They are a thread back to an earlier part of my life, much of which I might like to forget but I have learned that it’s often better to not forget because even the wretched years are part of who I am today.  I have passed many a church service sorting through the hymns in the hymnbook picking out the lines I loved and giving a thumbs-down to some of the more sadistic phrases. So I resent that a UCC committee did the same thing and eventually came out with an abysmal hymnbook: politically correct, gender neutral, and utterly lacking in poetry.  Much as I hate the gruesome imagery in some of the old hymns, at least the lines scan.  That makes them easier to parody.

Sunday I had to play a hymn I don’t care for: “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”  Let’s enumerate all the things I disliked about it even before the UCC committee got a hold of it: The use of the word hail for anything other than tiny lumps of ice is too archaic for an institution that is already past its sell date. “Let angels prostrate fall, bring forth the royal diadem.”  Who talks like this? Other than scholars, do people even understand what this means?  Does it mean anything?

Sadly enough, these particular phrases made the cut.  The Committee inexcusably added ones like “Attend the savior’s sovereign claim” and “Extol the wounded one foretold.”   Try saying them quickly because the tempo of this hymn is fast.  Try making meaning out of them.  The only positive thing I can come up with is that the word extol is good to know for Scrabble.

More offensive to my sensibilities, though, is the contortions the Committee went through to pretend that Christianity is not a male dominated belief system and Jesus was not a male.   (I personally believe Jesus was the first transgendered person: a female in a male body but that’s the subject of another post.) So they’ve changed this albeit stupid line “And crown Him Lord of all” which already has no relevancy in the 21^st century to “Crown Christ servant of all.”  It comes up eight times.  Try saying it fast: Crown Christ, Crown Christ, Crown Christ.  Have we forgotten that The Christ was male? No? Can we just go back to singing “Him?” And incidentally did The Committee think they were being clever with the image of crowning a servant?  I don’t think they were capable of expressing paradox. Seriously, there couldn’t have been an English major on this Committee or if there was, she wasn’t left standing at the end.

At this point in the service –5 minutes in– I had zoned into my happy place. This is where I see if I can read the little descriptive paragraph at the bottom of the hymn at the same time I am playing and not make any mistakes.  I see that the tune to “All Hail the Power” was written by Oliver Holden, an early American carpenter, legislator, musician and hymnal editor.  Hmmm.  He had every skill set missing on that hymnal committee.

Last week was awful. I was sickened by the news of the Boston Marathon bombing and I was stunned by the Senate’s down vote on gun control.  Several medieval bills regarding reproductive rights put me in mind of other medieval procedures, like castration.  A few more boulders came down in the on-going avalanche of ignorant ideas about rape.  The new pope is (apparently) upholding the Vatican’s paranoid investigation into those radical nuns.   Sometimes my response to such a week is to obsessively follow stories while chasing antacids with Alka-Selter.  Sometimes I sign petitions, send money, call my senators. Sometimes I go the other direction.  Last week was a good week to read history.

In Foundation, the history of England from its earliest beginnings to the Tudors, Peter Ackroyd has this to say: “History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity.  It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity.  We live again the twelfth or the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonance of our own time; we may recognize that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost. We may conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is fresh and ever renewed.”

Americans effervesce with idealism that pushes for the new, the “better.” When things don’t work out quite like we had hoped, we crucify each other on the notion that “it wasn’t supposed to be this way,” an attitude that makes the shocks of life even more unbearable.

For example, in America, we foam at the mouth that there is supposed to be a separation of church and state and yet the religious keeps leaking in no matter what concept is embedded in our Constitution.  Back in Henry II’s time, the clergy could not be tried by civil law.  They got the benefit of Canon law. Since the Pope was as out of touch with the world then as he is today it meant the clergy pretty much got away with anything.  It wasn’t too long before everyone who could read was calling himself a cleric.  The audition piece was the first verse of Psalm 51 which became known as the “neck verse.”  If you committed a crime but could read the verse, it saved your neck.  It was religious gerrymandering in the 1100’s.

 The privileged classes have always told themselves they deserve their advantages.  People on welfare soon come to feel entitled to it. Power has always been about going to war and amassing personal wealth, protecting one’s own.  Men have always tried to control women.  Actually women have always tried to control men, too, but men are bigger and have louder voices. Terrorism is the last refuge of the misunderstood and the violated.  You’d think we’d have figured this out by now.  Perhaps things are “better” than they used to be, but that’s not today’s point.

We live by the rule of law, not by the Spirit, and not much has changed in that department for a long time. Reading Foundation reminded me of the contortions we still go through in order to get what we want. Corporations are people.  Embryos (but not women) are persons.  Money is speech.  Generations from now people will laugh at how unbelievably silly and gullible we were, just like we laugh at the idea of bleeding as a cure for fever or of the Lydia Pinkham remedy, a “tonic” that was mostly alcohol and that my father used to say was for fallen arches and fading females.  Future generations will come up with their own stupidities.

I’m going with Peter Ackroyd on this one: to appreciate my part in the great drama of humanity.   I felt it last night when after a three week Easter break, the church choir, minus one alto and one floater, showed up for rehearsal: 

Mary Ann (soprano) who whinnies notes, but not a distinguishable part. 

Bill (tenor) who always forgets his reading glasses so the pastor has to root out an extra pair of his.

The pastor, himself, is the entire bass section. 

Maxine(alto),the Feng Shui goddess. She only comes every other week because she has Dream Group on alternate Tuesdays.  She and Tracye (alto), both of them shy, huddled together for protection against a world of flamboyant sopranos and booming basses.

Karen (tenor) and Marvin the Magnificent (Miniature Pinscher) walked from their apartment a half mile away.  Marvin always paws at me for treats during the rehearsal. “I’m working,” I hiss at him.

Tinsa(shy Shitsu), came with Charlotte( soprano) and hid under the pews.

Ruth(soprano), who cuts the hair of everyone in the entire church, came straight from the day’s last appointment.

Dennis (tenor) has a lovely, pure voice.  He is so shy that when he does say something, everyone listens and takes him seriously.

I’m the Squadron Leader.  I’m responsible for morale and for playing the correct notes.  We are all stock characters.  We’ve been doing this for thousands of years. 

My friend Deborah told me a nifty thing to do for garden-variety anxiety:  Focus on my peripheral vision.  When I remember to try it, it puts me in a frame.  It puts me in a context that makes sense of me.  I’m here in this place at this time.  When current events overwhelm us, a sense of history can locate us in a context where we all have a place in the world.

I just returned from four days at the ocean with my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) who had a terrible cold.  I had a wonderful time but if I get Nina’s cold I may have to revisit my memory of the mini-break in which case I will have had an awful time.  But let’s go with my initial assessment for now.  While we wait.

We stayed at an old haunt of mine, The Sandpiper at Pacific Beach.  It had been eleven years since I was last there and the place has gotten a little shabby.  Another thing that had gotten a little shabby was my memory of how to get there.  Specifically, how to get there without going through Ocean Shores, which I loathe.  Off 101 North we took the first left to the ocean beaches but missed the turn to Copalis Crossing because we were talking about the crazy people in our respective families. We ended up in Humptulips (yes, that is an actual place) where Dave at the general store seemed inclined to keep us there all day, chatting.  This has happened to me before.  It hasn’t always been Dave, but whoever is there, he is always dying for company.

Nina cheerfully backtracked the extra and–except possibly from Dave’s point of view– unnecessary twelve miles where we made the correct turn to Copalis Crossing.  It seems like it ought to be fairly simple.  We’re driving west.  We hit the Pacific Ocean.  We turn either left or right.  But as I said earlier, it had been eleven years and the only thing I was completely sure of was that the Sandpiper was on the main road, which we had yet to find.

“Well, here’s Pacific Beach,” Nina indicated a turn-off.  “Shouldn’t we go in there?”

“Hello. Main road.”

We drove north. When we entered Moclips, I said, “We’re going the wrong way.”

Nina got out her phone, turning it up and down to get a reading.  “You’re right.”

We drove south.  We passed Pacific Beach again. “Are you sure it isn’t in there?”

“Main road.”

Finally we came upon the Sandpiper, its gift shop jutting out onto the main road.

“So we could have gone to Ocean Shores and turned right,” Nina said.

“Yeah.”

I opened the car door and immediately closed it.  “I should have brought my winter coat,” I said.

Nina opened her door.  “Me, too.” She added a cough.

“Let’s go home and get different clothes,” I said.

Nina looked at me. “Yeah,” she said. “Now that we know how to get here.”

We stayed in Cabin 4, my second favorite place to stay.  We appeared to be the only guests in the entire complex so it wasn’t clear to me why we couldn’t get the A-Frame, my preferred accommodation.  On the other hand, the great feature of the A-Frame is the feeling that its inhabitants are the only people on the entire Washington coast. Since the new Sandpiper management, Ben and Jeff from Seattle who took over a month ago, had only us to please, it wasn’t a bad arrangement.

We had two chilly days of reading, painting (me), playing the baritone ukelele (Nina), playing board games, eating and walking on the beach wearing every item of clothing we had brought with us.  Beyond that, the big energy expenditures of each day were as follows:

Mornings: getting dressed

Afternoons: visiting the gift shop

Evenings: lighting the duraflame log

This—to me— is the best an ocean getaway has to offer.  Except a little more sun would have been nice.

I’m not sniffling yet.

From the deck of Cabin 4

The Ballard Writer’s Collective took over Egan’s Jam House last Tuesday night to showcase the considerable literary talent that lurks in unassuming little Ballard. (For those of you unfamiliar with the Puget Sound area, Ballard began life as a Norwegian fishing village but was subsequently swallowed by Seattle. It lives on as a distinctive neighborhood and as home to a disproportionate number of writers.) Those of us participating were given an assignment: a three-minute piece, approximately 450 words, that took the form of a voice mail, email, tweet, or some kind of electronic emission.  What follows was my contribution, a tale told by an exasperated choir director.  It characterizes something that actually happened with *almost* no elaboration on my part:

Thursday, July 8,

To: The OK Chorale

Regarding the eruption last night during the rehearsal, I want to reiterate that “The Titanic” is a camp song and it is part of a set we are doing of camp songs. It was suggested by Bill (bass) who actually learned the song at camp when he was a child.  It’s in the same category as “Glory, glory hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler.”  I encourage you to keep that perspective.

Thursday, July 15

To: The OK Chorale

To those of you who are still objecting to the singing of “The Titanic:” Please e-mail me your comments so I can try to understand your viewpoints without using anymore rehearsal time as we have 9 other songs to learn.

Friday, July 16

To: Eleanor (soprano)

I really don’t see that the song is making fun of children.  The line in question is “Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives.” That’s a statement of fact.  I realize we are singing it in a carefree way but no one disputes the next line: “It was sad when that great ship went down.”

Thursday, July 22

To: The OK Chorale

To follow up on last night’s attempted mutiny: we are performers.  Performers entertain audiences who have a wide range of sensibilities.  For example, I was raised by alcoholic parents and there’s nothing about drunkenness that amuses me.  But every winter quarter I pull out the Irish drinking songs, and the pub songs.  I know that many people like them and I see how they can be funny even though I don’t find them funny. Some people will not like the black humor in “The Titanic” but some will.

Friday, July 23

To: Harriet (alto)

Harriet, I understand you to say that your grandparents lived in Germany during the Hitler regime. I do agree that was a tragic time. I wish to point out that you didn’t live in Germany during the Hitler regime, no one is forcing you to watch Hogan’s Heroes, and I don’t quite see why any of this means the Chorale shouldn’t sing “The Titanic.”

Sunday, July 25

To: Richard (tenor)

Yes, I know that before her maiden voyage people said, “Not even God could sink ‘The Titanic,’” and while it may add some historical and, as you say, moral perspective, telling the audience that “God is not mocked” is outside the parameters of the OK Chorale’s mission.

Sunday, Aug 1

To: The OK Chorale

When we sing, “The Titanic,” this week Eleanor (soprano) and Harriet (alto) will move to the back of the group and sit.  Roberta (alto) will wear a black arm band and close her mouth for all the lines she finds too flippant.  In exchange for Richard not bellowing this out during the performance, I have agreed to tell you here that God is not mocked.

*        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *

Postscript: we sang “The Titanic” on a Puget Sound ferry boat and got a write-up in the Seattle Times.

The Lambie

Easter Sunday.  I got up early, read the New York Times, and spent some extra time warming up my voice because I was singing Mozart’s “Alleluia” in a few hours.  I let the neighbor’s cat out.  I had been cat-sitting for the week and Sunday was my last day on duty.  Sulei had been furious with me for tricking her into the house the afternoon before, and she had a point: it was 60 degrees and there were hours of daylight left.  Easter morning she shot out into the yard, throwing energetic meows back at me.

The church choir arrived at church en masse and on time to run through their anthem, proving that UCC churches can also have Easter miracles.  Tommie, my accompanist and one of earth’s treasures, arrived early to do a sound check with me, giving all the elderly and deaf people who come 20 minutes early a preview of my high C.  The service started.  The Mozart went beautifully.  Tommie and I changed places on the piano bench and I played the service.  My hands were a little shaky from the adrenalin after singing the Alleluia, but “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” is in the key of C so there’s not a lot to think about.  Toward the end of the service the choir sang “Jubilate, a Jazz motet,” which would have scandalized my mother.

It was a tiring morning.  Besides playing the service, singing a solo and directing the choir, I felt a certain amount of pressure to not be the Elena Show—so tacky to attempt to show up the Christ.  Maybe I shouldn’t have gone looking like an Easter egg in turquoise blue and bright white but everything else in my closet is either black or similarly flamboyant.

Home by noon, it took ten minutes to get a sighting of Sulei.  Then I had to explain to Winston, Artemis and Freud why I love the neighbor’s cat better than I do them.

At one o’clock I put the spiral ham in the oven.  In an hour I would be sinking into the bliss of a made-to-order, stress-free holiday dinner with my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything.  Gwen and I have created our single-persons, child-free holiday celebrations by choice.  I want to emphasize the choice part.  We’re not losers.  We both get other invitations and sometimes we opt to do something different than our little routine.  But speaking for myself as a working musician, I find that by the time the actual “family” celebration rolls around, I have had enough of any given holiday, am nearly comatose with fatigue, and don’t want to rouse myself to cheerfulness.

For our celebrations Gwen and I choose items of the traditional holiday meal we liked the most as kids.  For this Easter, the menu was ham and cake.  We put in a relish tray as an afterthought and it was heavy on the olives.  It was my turn to buy the ham.  Gwen had clearly given herself the cake assignment because for weeks she had been going on about the Lambie cake she was making.  I was too busy with cats, emissions tests, taxes, and choirs to pay a lot of attention.  I envisioned a flat round cake with little ears or something.  But Gwen has a cast iron mold in the shape of a lamb’s body over there.  It turns out it was her mother’s.  It’s the Lambie cake mold of her childhood.

“What kind of cake do you want?  I want it to be something you can eat.”

“Easter is my Eat Anything Day.  Can you make that walnut cake you made last year?”

“I didn’t make a walnut cake.  Do you mean the yellow cake with caramel icing?”

“Yeah, what you said.”  The stuff was like penuche.

Gwen baked a dense yellow cake inside the cast iron mold.  The icing is supposed to be boiled white icing with coconut sprinkles to replicate a lamb’s white wool, but in deference to me, the cranky musician who was providing the ham, Gwen made the penuche-like icing, rendering the lambie more of a goatie.  The heaviness of the icing started to drag down the lamb so Gwen cleaved its little head straight down the middle, giving us each half a head and an ear for our first helping of cake.

The Goatie

After the menu, the next most important decision is the entertainment—other than us, that is.  We’re pretty entertaining, just the two of us.  Last year we started watching The Vicar of Dibley on Easter Sunday and didn’t finish the series until the Fourth of July.

“It needs to have a suitable theme,” Gwen said. “Something resurrectional.  Or new life.”

We chose “The Snapper.”  A young woman gets knocked up by a man in the hood and her Irish family takes it all in stride.  There’s not a priest or a Magdalene laundry in sight.  Better yet there are no American republicans to rant about the break-down of the family.  There are no smarmy democrats to put their hand on the girl’s arm and talk to her earnestly about abortion.   No one once uses the phrase “moral compass.”

Life: we figure out what we want to do and we do it without shame.

.

I have a list of time sensitive stuff I need to be attending to and every time I look at it, I can’t focus.  There they are, swimming in front of me, the soul-destroying articles of an over-scheduled, self-employed life: taxes, emissions, ink cartridges, Easter ham, April billing, water-color classes (Five items, all dependent on the first which involves the aforementioned ink cartridges), The OK Chorale (three items), church choir (two items).  I realize it’s no different than the list in everyone else’s life but it’s annoying when I come to write a blog post –something that truly is a joy—and find I can’t come up with a decent idea.  It’s like my mind is playing that game of statues and it’s frozen in the position of trying to focus.  Someone needs to call “Time.”

Then I hear Pkgnao!  It’s Freud, my cat, making the sound that is similar to the one made by Leopold Bloom’s cat in Ulysses which, in case you’re new here, I am reading at the rate of one episode a week. Leopold’s cat plus the sac-religious humor was what first convinced me I was going to enjoy Ulysses.  Leopold’s cat says Mkgnao.   Freud’s meow is similar except it begins with a plosive: Pkgnao.  Phonetically, it could read, “pi-cow” with an emphasis and nasally elongation of the second syllable, and a hefty amount of irritation. Freud says “Pkgnao” when he is both hungry and annoyed that I haven’t done something about it.  What with the way I serve my cats, there aren’t a lot of occasions when Freud is either hungry or justified in being annoyed—but that is my point of view, not his.

It’s been a week of cat drama.  Artemis and Freud had their annual exam and shots, followed by Artemis playing the guilt card for 36 hours.  She skulked around the house, giving me black looks that said, “I’ve always suspected you were trying to kill me and this just proves it,” before running away in terror.

Then Winston didn’t show up for breakfast, which is almost unheard of.  I found him in the bedroom looking pitiful.  I put my face near his to talk baby talk and ask him what was wrong, and reared back from the stench.  Probing my way to the odor, I found a furless patch with two suppurating puncture wounds the size of quarter inch drill bits, and half a dozen smaller bites and scratches.

Yikes, I thought.  The former neighborhood bully—that would be Winston– is getting his comeuppance.  He’s too old to be getting into fights.

I poured hydrogen peroxide on the area and started in with hot compresses.  Artemis had probably licked off all the fur.  She’s the resident cat nurse when she isn’t on the lam from me.  Plus she loves smelly pus.  It’s cat Stilton to her.

Freud was quoting Joyce.  Winston, having jettisoned his gold cup for prizefighting, was recuperating. Artemis was doing surveillance on me. I grabbed a key and went across the street to wait attendance on Suleiman the Magnificent.

Sulei is a black kitten, acquired by my neighbor Bill a year ago.  I’ve taken care of her since she was just a scruff of black, whenever he was away.  She’s a fierce little thing, prone to coming into my yard to hiss, spit and strut sideways in front of a bemused Winston and Freud who are each three times her size.

Sulei started out as Suleiman the Magnificent, but when Bill took him in to be neutered, it turned out she needed to be spayed. It explained a lot of things: why she was so tiny and why while the boys over at my house tolerate her, even find her amusing while Artemis is viciously opposed to her being on this side of the street.

Sulei’s people are gone for a few days but I am here, imprisoned by all the work I am not doing.  The weather has been lovely and there’s much in the air for even a human nose to enjoy, so I have let Sulei out for long stretches.  I go over for periodic sightings, and sometimes bring her across the street for classes in feline social etiquette.  All the enrolled cats are failing the course, and they are quite rude about it, like a bunch of punks forced to go to driving school.

I tried to interest Gwen’s cat Lucy in my social etiquette classes but she bit me.  I took that as a No.  I go on Lucy duty when Gwen is out of town so Lucy can’t afford to alienate me completely.  When I have an evening at The Gwen, Lucy and I always have a conversation about how little Gwen feeds her.  She snoozes on her heating pad while Gwen and I watch a movie.  Occasionally she looks like she might curl up on me, but then she remembers the time I tried to abduct her into that class –that cult, that brainwashing seminar—and thinks better of it. She curls up on Gwen and gives me a look that says “there are consequences to your actions.”

Lucy used to be a fearless feline, rather like the up and coming Sulei.  Then there was The Incident.  Gwen was at the family compound on Lake Pewaukee when Lucy got stuck up a tree in Seattle.  It took three days of coaxing, cooing, cross-continental phone conferences and finally a Seattle City Light worker who asked us not to tell his boss, to get her out of the tree.

Ever since then she has pretty much stayed inside Gwen’s courtyard garden, patrolling her defensive perimeter and shrieking at intruders. Sometimes at dusk I see her atop the fence or rolling on her back in the alley, but there’s a lot for a cat to do inside Gwen’s fence. (There’s a lot for Gwen to do, too, as she has a magnificent European-style jardin in there.)

Ok, that’s the neighborhood cat update.  What’s on my list?  Ah geez. Taxes.

Freud, Winston, Artemis

In my last blog post I was a week away from the Just Off Broadview Music Festival and more or less losing my mind with trying to control its outcome.  If you recall, my friend Mary-Ellis had counseled me to do something else, to think about something else.  I did.  I started reading the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ latest collection of essays, Missing Out.  One of his essays speaks to my ongoing project of reading James Joyce’s Ulysses.  The essay is called “On Not Getting It.”

All through this essay he tantalizes with the idea that we assume there is something to “get.” We may not know what “it” is but we seem to know when we are without it. Even when we have “it,” we may still not know what it is. Whatever “it” is, we want it because we don’t want to be left out.

Cliff notes and Sparks notes exist so students can all have a shot at being in the group that “gets” a piece of literature, and not incidentally the passing grade.  However canned or scripted an interpretation, we assume it is valid because someone in the group we aspire to: the ones who “get” it, said so.  Do this often enough and you, too, can be an English major.  The task becomes not so much to experience literature as to not humiliate ourselves.

I am a middle-aged woman, former English major with a blog, living in a culture where it’s commonplace to humiliate oneself on the Internet, and who wants to read Ulysses for the first time and probably write about the experience whether I “get” Joyce or not.  Along comes Phillips who wants to know what is available if the project is “to not get it.” He suggests that to “get some things. . . is to misrecognize their nature; to pre-empt the experience . . .by articulating the meaning.” We can, he says, be “oddly enlivened by the perplexity of not getting it.”

This reminds me of the anxiety I sometimes see in my voice students when they manage to try something new.  A student plays with vocal sound in a new way (and kudos to her, by the way) and I hear new dimensions to her voice, but she laughs sheepishly and says, “I know that’s crappy singing.”  In that statement she has misrecognized and preempted the experience of singing by articulating a meaning.

Phillips invites us to “consider what it would be to live a life in which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes to get.”  In adult life this can be “when we are lost in thought, absorbed in something without needing to know why we are absorbed or indeed what we are absorbed in; or when we dream.”

I can’t imagine a less threatening approach to reading Ulysses, which I never thought I could just pick up and read without taking a class.  Phillips says there is a “difference between reading something intelligible and reading something that has a powerful effect; between words as procurers of experience and words as consolidators of knowledge.”

“Words as procurers of experience” seems to be the approach I and my reading compatriots have adopted.  We all bring to this project a lifetime of our own idiosyncratic reading and there are a few English teachers among us. We’ve got a user-friendly guidebook to grab in case of existential panic.

I like the idea of having an initial experience that is all my own, but I wasn’t three lines into Ulysses before I was itching to look something up.  Buck Mulligan descends the stairs holding aloft a bowl of shaving lather crossed with a mirror and his razor. “Introibo ad altare Dei,” he intones. “I will go to the altar of God.”  Later there’s another image of him slapping down 3 plates of eggs saying, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” which I did not have to look up. Oh goodie, I thought, religious humor.  It was a good start.

It turns out that Buck Mulligan is the sophomoric, wise-cracking, comic relief character.  He’s the one with all the fart jokes, the masturbation references, and the sac-religious reenactments.  The other characters actually fart, masturbate, defecate, void, pick their noses, and do things that will send them straight to hell, but they don’t make comic productions of them. It’s interesting that I want to back away from, say, the non-comic scene where Leopold Bloom reads a magazine while defecating in the W.C. and we get a plop by plop account of it. This is something we all do every day and we all have a sort of intimacy with it.  But unless you’re in the medical profession or the mother of young children, you don’t talk about it.  It’s so intensely private, we require humor to air the subject, so to speak.

So I “get” the sophomoric humor.  Then every so often Joyce leaks out an epigrammatic expression:

*Pier. . . a disappointed bridge.

*“You have the cursed Jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way.”

*“You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.”

*“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

So much for what I “get.”  I don’t know that I have read any other writer besides Shakespeare where I have so received “words as procurers of experience.”  Some of these expressions had me putting down the book and following whatever daydream the words suggested:

*The scrotumtightening sea.

*Clammy slaver of the lather

*dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

*Ineluctable modality of the visible.  .  .  signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreeen, bluesilver, rust.

The third episode, “Proteus,” was difficult. Stephen Dedalus takes a long walk on the beach, musing about the signature of all things, the ineluctable modality of the visible and the ineluctable modality of the audible interspersed with his own mundane stream of consciousness.  His thoughts roam in fragments.  We are inside his mind only it’s not such familiar territory as inside our own minds.  Since we are not such experts on our own minds it’s amazing to me that Joyce would attempt to reproduce the activity of a mind, let alone that any reader would expect to “get” it.

Interspersed with paragraphs of “interior monologue” were descriptions of the sound of Stephen walking in the beach: damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats.  .  . unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles.  .  .”

That’s what reading Ulysses is like for me: I am lost in an experience of words and images.  Then something grounds me, something I “get”—a walk on the beach or a fart joke.

And by the way, The Just Off Broadview Music Festival was a ripping success.

Let me begin by saying I am supposed to be thinking of something else besides the subject of this post.

It all began when I made an attempt to get out of some work. When The OK Chorale finishes a quarter’s worth of rehearsals, we sing somewhere in the community.  The Christmas season has a glut of opportunities to perform, but by March people in Seattle aren’t looking for ways to rise above the gloom, we’re all just waiting out the winter.  So I thought I would save myself the minor nuisance of scheduling us to sing at a retirement home and instead organize an entire music festival.

It was easy enough to get the support of the tiny Broadview UCC church where I am the music director.  In any small church there are two rotating groups of people: 1) People who do all the work and 2) People who used to do all the work and are currently incapacitated.   Then there’s Kay who visited an earlier post in this blog. As far as I can make out Kay has been at the church for 40 years and has yet to be incapacitated.  She keeps a resignation/blackmail letter on her person, ready to sign when she’s finally had enough.  She and I went to work on the idea of a music festival.  It inhaled from an evening concert to Day of Music and exhaled into: The First Annual Just Off Broadview Music Festival, Saturday, March 16, 3:00-9:00 PM 325 N 125^th St in Seattle.

Musical folks with connections to the church leaped at it:  The Weavils, a bluegrass group had the paramount claim to the festival’s finale by virtue of the fact that people sometimes pay money to hear them.  I made The OK Chorale second to the last because, as the organizer, I could.  Off the Hook, a garage band of dads with a preference for the Rolling Stones would open.

Then I got Bill, local singer-songwriter, and Terry, a golden-voiced folk-singer. Kai who busks at the Ballard Farmer’s Market was featured in the Ballard News Tribune last summer.  The paper misspelled his name and got a fair amount of information wrong, but Kay tracked him down and he was game to play his clarinet, guitar, sax, ukulele or mandolin.

Members of the OK Chorale surged into the mix. Jessi, who sings in Gilbert and Sullivan productions, wanted to sing one song.  Tim wanted to sing an Irish song in honor of his Irish grandfather. Susan, who corralled her family into making a CD several years ago, asked me if Susan and the Family Band could have 15 minutes.  The pastor of the Congolese church who shares our facilities agreed to his little congregation singing traditional African call and response folk music.

“With microphones?” he asked me.

“Do you have to use mikes?” As immigrants, I think they are trying to fit into American culture by distorting their lovely sound with horrible electronics.

“No, we can sing Congolese songs like we do at home.”

I clutched his arm.  “Yes, YES, that’s what I want!”  I said

“Do you want us to wear our African clothes?

“Oh, would you?” This was a coup!

I immediately bumped the Chorale to an earlier time so the Congolese church could be next to last.  It was partly a political move, and partly a gesture of delight at the thought of their music which is jaw-droppingly beautiful.  It was also in anticipation of the potential scheduling nightmare that the African concept of time might visit upon me.  If the Congolese were next to last, and didn’t quite make it on time, it minimized the chances of the whole show getting thrown off.  And I knew The Weavils would play all night if we let them.

I got all the participants on a mailing list so we could communicate via e-mail.  We needed a flyer and a publicity plan.  Chris the unclassifiable and tenor in the OK Chorale, who manages to do the job of three people at her work plus put out fires at her home, and gossip via e-mail with me, calmly helped with the flyer and publicity, and with her most valued advice: “It’s all good.”

I finalized the schedule. Susan asked if she could have more time. I tweaked the schedule. Kai was immersed in his college semester and didn’t confirm until I put his mother onto him.  Jessi wanted me to accompany her solo “Hymn à l’amour.”  OK, find me the music.  Tim decided he wouldn’t sing after all but he did some work on the publicity flyer. The Weavils patiently reminded me several times to correct my spelling of Weevils and tactfully blamed it on Spell-Check. Susan worried there wouldn’t be enough time for the Family Band to set up and she needed another ten minutes.  I tweaked again. Terry had a family emergency and had to pull out.  There was a flurry of suggestions before we found John who plays mandolin and banjo.  I slid him into Terry’s time.  Meantime Kay was nailing down what we decided to call concessions: corned beef sandwiches, Irish soda bread, PB&J sandwiches, cookies, pop and water.

The show got more complicated.  We share the church facilities with other congregations and we were spilling out of the church sanctuary.  We needed a green room for the performers.  We needed the wheelchair accessible rest rooms.  We needed the food to be removed from the performance area.  Over my dead body was this going to turn into an evening at Zoo Tunes where I want to walk around and say to every single picnicking, card-playing family whose children are shrieking while Joan Baez is 30 feet away, “Why did you even bother to come?  Go home!” In short we needed the whole church.

I don’t know who paid off who but we got the whole church.  That freed up the wheel-chair accessible bathrooms and a venue for the concessions. Then I started looking at the bare walls of the foyer like I used to look at my mother’s house except that with my mother’s house, it was the clutter.  But I thought the same thing: I’m embarrassed to have people see this. We’ve got to tart this place up.  Fortunately we have a flamboyant window dresser-artist in the church who works with a full spectrum.

I woke up one night: signs, SIGNS! Someone has to make signs to direct people to the church and once inside the church we need signs to the wheelchair accessible rest rooms, and the green room.  I had some sandwich boards already primed with white paint.  But if I had to make signs, by god I would do it with so much resentment that I would never organize one of these events again.  Ever.

I asked four different people if they would take on the signs.  I waited.  I reached a new level of freak-out-dom.  When I didn’t get a response within an hour, I was on the phone.  I contacted spouses and asked them to relay messages to the dilatory.  I became a stalker. I e-mailed Chris to find out if it was still “all good.” I took Xanax.

I became one of those self-important people who think everything depends on her.  It got to where people would see me coming and instead of saying hello, they said things like, “I haven’t had a chance to update the Facebook page yet.”  Am I a monster? I’d think.  It made me want to grab them by their procrastinating lapels and breathe hot and sour into their faces, “What do you think I am? Some kind of monster?”

In these final two weeks before the festival, the non-monsters are responding.

“We’ll do the signs. Take that off your list.” (“Take that off your list.”  What a lovely thing to say to an organizer.)

“Yes I am planning to bake the bread in the church kitchen that day so there’ll be an aroma.”

“Bup bup bup, who do you think you’re talking to?  I’ve already been to the Dollar Store and bought everything that’s green.”

I e-mailed my friend Mary-Ellis who organizes much bigger events than ours all the time.

“Do you have any advice for me in this final week before the festival?” I asked.

“I advise you to think about something else,” she said.

And that was when I started writing this post.