A few years ago I spent two inert hours sitting at the duck pond on the Whitman College campus in Walla Walla.  It was 109 degrees which is why I was inert.  The two hours produced a poem. The poem was printed in this quarter’s Whitman College alumni magazine.

Lakem Duckem gets its name from more than the ducks.  It has long been a body of water used for fraternity pranks and for consequences of the same.  When I was at Whitman College in the 70’s, I was thrown into what was then a stagnant pond of duck poop on account of having masterminded an RF (Royal Fuck).  A bunch of us dug about 300 earthworms and distributed them all over the TKE house at 3:00 in the morning.

As I write this, I think how incredibly stupid it all was.  The definition of sophomoric humor.  Worms?  It wasn’t even particularly imaginative, which is probably the harshest judgment I can make about anything.  Here’s penance:

Two Hours at Lakem Duckem

They cluster in easy silence

These sleek, green mallards

Like a bunch of uncles after Christmas dinner

With a mutter and squawk of conversation

Now and then.

One of the uncles

declares himself a Father

When I get too close to the ducklings

Tucked up under their mother,

Who is keeping an eye on me.

They are too small, too hot, too alive

To rest for long, these ducklings.

They cannonball into the warm water,

And zoom around the rocks and plants.

They raise up on tiny motorized unicycles

and speed across the pond.

The whole family goes for a lap,

Visiting ivy, ferns, moss;

the goo, the slime, the bugs.

They tank over rocks,

Slide into the water and paddle in circles.

Days later,

I can still see you:

Mother in full sail,

Your flotilla of fluffies

Following your waltz up the pond,

Making mischief behind your back,

Then finding a place in your sway.

Elena Louise Richmond, July 1, 2008

part of the Lakem Duckem stream, 2008

It was a six Xanax quarter with the OK Chorale.  They always pull it off in the end but three pieces made me wonder if this was the quarter when we would break our streak:

I didn’t know much about Abba.  My popular music education stopped in 1972. (See https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/03/piano-students-part-2-the-adolescents/ )  Then one of my students who had me in a stupor with Taylor Swift music, brought in the score of Mamma Mia.  I came out of my coma to ask Chris, the unclassifiable, except that she did surveillance on Russian spies when she was in the army, if she had any Abba in her collection.  I was attracted to the possibility of the OK Chorale singing “Take a Chance on Me.”

I decided of my own free will to arrange this repetitive piece of music.  That meant writing “take a chance, take a chance, take, * chance chance” fifteen (15) times for the tenor and bass parts.  That ostinato was the first thing to start waking me up at three in the morning.  That and the cramp in my hand.

I tarted up a little transitional bit with a classical music sequence which didn’t work as well with real people as it had in my head.  We went over and over it.  Individually the parts were not difficult but together, everyone sang like they weren’t sure what they were doing.

I said, “Look, it’s the fault of the arranger; it’s not very well written, so please just sing loud.”  Then it worked.  They made it sound well written.

Every week my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) reminded me that there were rests in “Take a Chance on Me” that when observed, made all the difference to the disco feel to the rhythm.  Every week.  Every week we carved a little more sound out of the general areas where there were rests.  Nina is still my friend.

“Why don’t we have Gail’s kindergartners make us a paper maché disco ball like they did the boar’s head?” someone asked. “Then no one will notice the rests one way or another.” (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/12/a-boars-head-in-the-hand/)

“No.” said Gail flatly.

“Juramento” is one of the hardest pieces the Chorale has ever attempted.  I fell in love with the sound of this lush and beautiful Cuban song with the grotesque translation, and told the Chorale it was worth the price of the whole quarter.  It was undoubtedly a difficult arrangement and singing in Spanish was a challenge. The score had been published in Cuba and was hard to read.

There was almost a mutiny in the tenor section.

“I can’t read this tenor part.  Why is that stem going down?”  Jean, who is usually ironic, wasn’t.

“There’s no relationship with the bass part,” Hal declared. “There’s nothing to anchor us!”   Hal only ever says funny things.  Here he was, almost rising up with a saber.  Maybe the presence of Chris who used to do surveillance on Russian spies prevented a coup, but eventually the tenors were pacified.

Don, baritone, found a web site where the arrangement was parsed out in midi-files so everyone could listen to their own part in that boopy-doopy midi sound.  Evidently we weren’t the first choir to need the help.  Everyone loved the midi-files.

No one raved so much about how helpful I was.   When I get busy trying to play all the parts and the accompaniment at the same time, I make all kinds of mistakes.  I wonder if everyone realizes this and is too polite to say so.  No, that doesn’t sound like the Chorale.  They probably suffer from some variant of Stockholm syndrome.

The Spanish complicated things.  We learned it on “la” and “ooh.”   I told them to start adding a few of the Spanish words and let them accrue a little at a time as we rehearsed.  I figured some people would get them all and some wouldn’t get any and the rest would fall in a continuum.  This has always been my policy when we sing in Latin and I think it’s a fine one for relieving pressure.

Eileen, tenor, who is fluent in Spanish, told me fifteen times if she told me once that the title was pronounced “Hooramento” not “Yooramento.”  Driving home from the last rehearsal, I finally heard her.  “Oh,” I thought. “I keep calling it Yooramento and she keeps putting her face six inches from mine, saying slowly and patiently, ‘It’s Hoo, Hoo, Hooramento.’”

My shirt was sticking to my back earlier and earlier in rehearsals.  “Hooramento” was supposed to be the only hard song this quarter.  But in addition to it and “Take a Chance on Me,” there was “The Birth of the Blues.” I have done this arrangement with a compliant group of women who knew how to count.  They bore little resemblance to the Chorale.

The rhythm in “The Birth of the Blues” is difficult if you want it to rock, even pebble, in the slightest.  Nearly every entrance is off the beat.  But instead of everyone coming in cleanly on the off beat, we got an echo chamber: st st st st start  fofof  buh buh blues.

We went over and over the entrances.  We counted, we clapped.  I beat my head on the piano.

Finally I said “Just get this one entrance.  This is all I am asking of you.”  I picked out my favorite phrase. The rest were on their own.

Rehearsals were disrupted by the snow that never came.  Noaa had predicted four inches of snow on a rehearsal evening.  When it finally started snowing at 5:00, I learned that four people weren’t coming to rehearsal on the grounds that they didn’t want to risk walking out at 8:30 with two inches of snow on the ground.  At the last minute, I cancelled an OK Chorale rehearsal for the first time in 18 years.  The snow didn’t stick.

The next rehearsal was abysmal.  It was like no one had even seen the music.

The week after the abysmal rehearsal, we were displaced from the church because of an Ash Wednesday service.  Shelley, alto, opened her large house with the grand piano and the cat named Zack.   That rehearsal went so splendidly that I decided I would invite people to the performance.

“Well, you’ve made music out of a molehill once again” Jean said.  Once again she was not being ironic.

The performance last Saturday night was splendid.  The Chorale always pulls it off.  They observed the rests.  They sang loud where directed.  They sang in Spanish.  They rocked.

This is a curmudgeonly blog so if you don’t want to hear me whine, have a look at the new photo on the teaching page of this web site.  Doesn’t that look cozy and delightful?  My nose is not that big.

Ok, here it comes:  I hate daylight savings time.  I have always hated it but I hate it even more since it started a full month earlier than it used to.  Ok, well, I just fact-checked this and it’s actually only two weeks early.  But the hate-chill factor makes it feel a month early.

We used to spring forward in early April but about 4 years ago, Congress decided to change the date.  Congress. It takes several administrations to pass anything of value but they can agree on this.  Most likely it was some upstart freshman who wanted more light for his golf game after twiddling away the day on the floor who pushed it through.  Little twerp.

I could cry discrimination.  This is, after all, the country of freedom to cry discrimination and to scream obscenities.  This earlier daylight savings time date discriminates against those of us who get up early, love the morning light, and who don’t golf.

Four years ago I did scream obscenities when I got up at my usual 5:30, knowing that the sun would have risen by the time I was settled in with my book, breakfast, and tea; and found instead that it was still the dead of night.  I stood at the window and actually wrung my hands, wondering how this had happened.

In the past few years, I have spent the first part of March watching the early morning light, and saying to myself, “Don’t get used to it.  Don’t look outside.  Ignore it.  It’s going to be snatched away from you in a week.  In 5 days.  Tomorrow!”

Yes, I do have better things to do, thanks for asking, but I’d rather do this.

Because I had the flu last week, I cancelled the Tuesday night church choir rehearsal, and told the choir to be at the church at 9:30 Sunday morning to run through the anthem. This is a lot to expect of people who have lost an hour on Saturday night in the middle of March.

On Sunday at 9:30, one soprano who sings the melody, and another who sings whatever notes she wants to sing were there, as well as the pastor who holds down the entire bass section.  We sang through the anthem.

At 9:40, two altos and a tenor who had left his reading glasses at home arrived.  The tenor was offered three pairs of reading glasses before he found a pair he could use.  We sang through the anthem again.

At 9:45, Mary, the soloist, arrived, hoping to get some warm up time.  Then Chris who still had the jagged ends of a bad cold, arrived.  Chris, the basically unclassifiable, but who is a great tenor.  I played the tenor part with Chris and the other tenor who had spent much of the second sing- through adjusting his borrowed reading glasses.

At 9:55, Mary asked if she could warm up before singing the prelude.

“What, you want to do scales? Now?”

“No,” she said putting her gum on the edge of the piano. “Can I just ooh through it once before I start the words?”

“OK.” I said.  I looked at the little green gob on my music rack.  “If you forget that, I’ll put it in the offering plate.”

Mary and I got through the prelude.  The service was ten minutes late getting started because of the people who having lost an hour during the night were ten minutes late to church.  I kept vamping the prelude even after Mary stopped singing.

I played the anthem introduction as the choir trooped up to the platform.  I played it again while looking into the narthex where Chris, the unclassifiable, loitered.  I repeated the last two lines of the introduction. Chris didn’t look like she was planning to join us any time soon, so we sang without her.

After the service, I ran her to ground.  “Thank you for showing up at all,” I said.

“Didn’t you hear me coughing out there?”

“No.”

“Well, I was.  Every time I try to sing, I start coughing.”

You know what?  Here are my sentiments for everyone for the rest of this dark, wet month: Thank you for showing up at all.

Oh yeah, and have fun out there on the golf course in this rain.

Robert didn’t want to take piano lessons.   His brother had been with me for three years and it took Robert a month to decide the mystique was off.  Two years and eleven months to go.  The boys’ mother had decreed that her sons would each have three years of piano lessons as part of their education.  Alan had survived; now it was Robert’s turn.

I don’t normally agree to teach anyone on the steam of a parent’s desire, but I knew the family and I said I would give it a try.  I told Robert as much.

“What can we do to make this fun for both of us?”

“I’ll let you know.”

I bribed him with maraschino cherry ice cubes.  In fact, I joined Costco just to keep that boy in maraschino cherry ice cubes.  During the warm weather months, we started every lesson with one.  Or four.

We got past beginner material, spent several months on the overtures to the Barber of Seville and William Tell—not my choice, mind you.  I think he knew them from cartoons or video games.

Then he told me he wanted to play “Brain Damage.”

“Come again?”

“Haven’t you heard of “Brain Damage?”

This was an opening I wouldn’t exploit in a young person.   “No. What is it?”

“It’s Pink Floyd.”

“OK.”

“Let’s go over to your neighbor’s and borrow a CD so you can hear it.”

“How do you know my neighbor has the CD?”

“Your neighbor has thousands of CDs.  He has to have it.  Everyone has it but you.”

Robert was correct on all counts.  I borrowed “Dark Side of the Moon,” listened to the song, found the music and Robert learned it.  It was his crowning achievement.

Being the younger of the two brothers, he wore his mother down until she sprung him from piano lessons if he promised to do a year of bagpipes instead.   I believe he managed nine months.  After he passed the three year mark for music lessons, he popped in to visit me and finish off the maraschino cherry ice cubes.

Elizabeth introduced me to another song I didn’t know.  It was circa 1998.  I stopped paying attention to popular music when I left high school in 1972.  I found Elizabeth a book of popular songs arranged for level four piano.

“Oh, look, the Y.M.C.A. song!  I want to play that.” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, ok.  What’s that?”

“You don’t know the Y.M.C.A. song?”

“No.”
“But.  .  . but.  .  . do you know how popular it is?”

“Obviously not.”

“But you have to know it.  Aren’t you like an old hippie?”

“Who told you that?”

“I’m gonna tell my mom to call you and tell you how popular that song is.  They sing it at football games and do the motions.”

Well, there was the problem.  I don’t do sports either.  On a tour of upstate New York, I went to the Baseball Hall of Fame museum shop in Cooperstown and bought ten postcards which I sent to ten of my students telling them I had seen the Baseball Hall of Fame museum shop.

Max was one of those students.  He had no end of patience with me.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said one summer day.  “We got caught in the game traffic.”

“Oh, is there a football game today?”

Max smiled kindly. Piteously, really.  “Yeah,” he said. “Only it’s baseball.”

I’m like my mother who called every kind of stemware a wine glass and every kind of alcohol wine.  Football, baseball, soccer, it’s all the same thing to me: a conspiracy to prevent any new generations from learning music.

Here comes my all-time favorite story.  It’s re-told in my friend Sandi Meggert’s book called Creating Humor in the Workplace:

Christian, 14, came one day when I was tired and had a headache.  We were ten minutes into a lesson that wasn’t going very well when he asked,

“Are you mad at me?”

“Oh, no,” I said.  “I’m just tired and a little out of it today.”

Behind the concerned expression, his eyes were grinning, “Is it that time of month?” he inquired.

It took me ten seconds to think how to respond.

“No,” I finally said.  “But thanks for asking.”

I taught pre-school for four years when I was in my 20’s and had the energy. I love those ages, but it’s been a while since I worked with a child under the age of five in private lessons.

Luciana is 4.  At her first lesson, she exploded into the house at the end of Michiko’s lesson. Michiko was wailing away on level 3 “Down By the Bay.” Luciana went shy. She watch with awe as Michiko packed up her music books and put on her coat.

Luciana and I sat down together. “Your grandpa calls you ‘Lu-chi.’ Is that what you want me to call you?” I asked

“I want you to call me Lu-see-ana, Lucy and Luce,” she informed me.

I made a note.

“I want to play big like that girl who was here first.” Luciana demonstrated with fingers flying above the keys culminating in a crash.

“How are you going to do that?” I asked

If I had asked a ten year old this question, she would have rolled her eyes and said resignedly, “By practicing.”

But Luci said, “I’ll need a book like she had.”

“Let’s start with you picking out an assignment book,” I said.  I have one of those long armed staplers just to make these little books in different colors.

Luci picked out a hot pink book and wrote her name on it. Watching her write her name gave me a chance to watch her small motor skills and to make a guess at where she was with understanding symbols.  It gave us a chance to talk about right and left hands.

I always make sure my student knows my name.  Parents don’t always think to inform them.  I write my name on the first page of the assignment book and my phone number next to it.  I tell my students they can always call me if they forget what to do or forget how to do it or decide they don’t want to do it or hate the music, or any reason at all.

(I had a student once who took that literally.  Amy called one afternoon and said,

“My mother’s not home, my sister’s talking to her boyfriend and I’m trying to do my homework.  What’s 7 times 6?”)

At Luciana’s next lesson, she told me her name was Sparkle.  She refused to answer to anything else.  The following week, she was Flower.

She came in with a handful of ratty looking tissues.  I put out a box of Kleenex.

“Do you want some fresh ones?”

“That’s okay,” she said.  “I need these because I have lots of boogers.”

I remember when Michiko was a tiny little girl.  Now that she is eleven, she’s the big girl.  She has developed something of a mystique in Luci’s eyes.  I think I will ask Michiko to tell Luci how she learned piano. That’s a conversation I look forward to listening in on.

One of my favorite stories from teaching stars a little guy named Reid.  He was a tiny kindergartener who walked into his lesson one day and handed me the check his mother had written for that month’s lessons.

“What is that?” he asked me.

“It’s a check,” I said.  “Your mother pays me to teach you to play the piano.”

Reid looked at me for a long time while he reflected on this new idea.  Then he smiled his charming smile and said, “Well that’s a pretty good deal for you.”

With the imaginative, funny and talented students I have had in nearly thirty years of teaching piano, it has been a pretty good deal for me.

Perry Mason. It was the Law and Order of its day.  It ran from 1957 to 1966 with a dramatic theme song by Fred Steiner.

It’s a world of pre-furnished apartments and twin beds.  Everyone has a little drinks cart or bar in their front room.  Everyone drinks martinis or highballs. Men and women meet in public ballrooms.  There is no need for lessons half an hour before the band plays because everyone knows how to ballroom dance.

It’s a world of hats, gloves, pearls, and clothing with asymmetrical collars, imaginative yoke fronts, funky buttons.  Women use compacts to powder their noses and refresh their lipstick.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, including how to take apart and put together a vintage car, speaks more intelligently than I can about the cars.  I told her I thought the convertibles were Cadillacs and the two- toned bodies with the wing-tipped designs were Chevys.  Gwen said, “If somebody knows it’s a fin, not a wing, you’re screwed.”  She sounded like someone right out of Perry Mason.

The attorney Perry Mason is squeaky clean and has enough moral integrity to fill the entire Brent Building in Los Angeles where he practices law.

“C’mon Mason make this deal and we can get out of this rat race,” says a scummy attorney skilled in the art of the double-cross.

Perry looks grave and stern. “It’s only a rat race if you Run. With.  .  .  . Rats.”

Almost every episode features some trampy glamor-puss named Inez in a tight, low-cut cocktail dress, diamond earrings dripping from her ears to her shoulders, and a mink stole.  If she is a secretary to some slick high-flyer, she shows up for work dressed that way.  Otherwise, she drapes herself around her apartment with nothing to do but her nails.   We know her type by the silky saxophone that introduces her scenes and by the amount of cleavage she reveals.

A fugitive heiress named Vera trails silk dressing gowns around her secret apartment and glamour smokes from a long cigarette holder.  A waster named Johnny who sneers things like “Hey wait a minute, I’m not gonna take that rap!” is hiding out in her bedroom.  He’ll exit down the fire escape after establishing his alibi which Vera isn’t anxious to corroborate because she doesn’t want her step- father to find out where she is.

The attorney Perry Mason communicates with his side-kick, detective Paul Drake, through big black phones usually dialed by Della Street, Perry’s lovely confidential secretary.  Paul hangs out in hotel lobbies and bribes switchboard operators to cut off the phone line of the gentlemen in 308 in order to flush him downstairs so Paul can see the number he dials from the public pay phone booth.

It’s almost always the same plot. The second half of the show is the courtroom scene.  Perry either wrings a surprise confession out of Johnny or Inez or else someone named Doris jumps up in the middle of proceedings and screams, “I can’t take it anymore!  I did it! I killed him because.  .  . because I loved him!”

Perry Mason must be the inspiration for the Gary Larson cartoon where a cow jumps up in the middle of the gallery and blurts, “All right!  All right! I confess!  I did it! Yes! That’s right! The cow! Ha ha ha!  And I feel great!”

I was three years old when Perry Mason started its TV run.  My parents loved the show.  When I was older, the whole family watched it.  It was the only thing we could do together without fighting.  My mother was completely pre-occupied with the cleavages, tight pants and what she called Bedroom Eyes.

My father pointed out what he called the Significant Looks that went on in the courtroom.  “Now watch Burger and Tragg give each other a Significant Look,” he would say.

Burger is Hamilton Burger, the prosecuting attorney who only won one case against Perry Mason in nine years.  Apparently fans just howled when Perry lost a case so it never happened again.  Lt Tragg, is the aging homicide detective who always seemed to be chewing his own teeth.

When Lt. Tragg examined People’s Exhibit A on the witness stand, my father would pipe up, “It has your mark on it” seconds before Lt. Tragg would say, “Yes, it has my mark on it.”  I would look at my father who would snap his emery board against his hand and continue his nail filing with a small smile on his face.

Twenty-five years ago, Perry Mason was in syndication about six hours a day on several different channels. More recently he is out on DVD.  I am neither proud nor ashamed to say I can quote from episodes.  These are brain wrinkles I can’t iron out.

My friend Jenni, a student who single-handedly improved my sight-reading abilities by 75% by showing up with new music every week, recently accomplished something admirable: She went without words for a week.  Part of an Artist’s Way class, she called it her Reading Deprivation week.  She went without books, television and computer, explaining in part why my Facebook news feed was so meager.  My friend Nancy, who teaches college-level English and can point out every time I have deconstructed a thought, was so busy with module four of her online course, that she, too, was absent from Facebook.  I didn’t realize how much fun that news feed was until some of its big contributors weren’t there.

Oh dear, I hope this isn’t going to be one of those dreary pieces about stress, over-stimulation, and the pace of life.  But you know, these blogs just pour out of me.  I have no control over them.  It’s the Artist’s Way.

When I realized that Jenni had gone a week without reading, I thought it was nothing I wanted to do –like anyone suggested I should.  It was my fundamentalist upbringing talking: If someone has found a way to deprive herself of life, then it must have some Biblical basis and we should all take it up.

“Did John the Baptist read novels?”

“Not with his head on a platter he didn’t.”

“Somebody, pass the sackcloth.”

I love the things Jenni did with her week:  she sang, she sat at the piano bench and swung her feet; she cleaned out a closet, did yoga, gazed at the moon, and admired a hummingbird; she and her husband ate dinner at the table.

Jenni didn’t actually go a week without words.  She went a week without written words. It’s an interesting distinction.  Written words can be taken back.  They can be revoked, edited, censored, changed, and enhanced.  You can write “fuck you” all over a hurtful letter, and then tear it up.  It helps, trust me. Reading written words can be escapism.  Not that there’s anything wrong with escapism. Not that that is what I am doing when I read formulaic mysteries with short sentences.

But spoken words are carriers of energy.  That’s why reading aloud can be so powerful.  (Can be.  It can also be boring.  I don’t want to go all fundamentalist here.) Do you remember that stupid thing the adults taught us to say when we were in grade school: “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.”

I see a lot of adults in my studio who were hurt by words.

“You shouldn’t try to draw. You have no talent.”

“Mouth the words.  You aren’t a singer.”

Words scare the artist out of us.  We focus on the irrelevant question of whether or not we are a singer or writer or painter rather than wallow in the experience of singing, writing, and painting.  The magic shows up when we show up and then lose ourselves.

When I was first learning to write, back when I needed a pen in my hand in order to think, I found myself stopping and thinking, “Can I really say that?”  I learned to answer myself, “Of course you can, just write it down.”  Soon I stopped asking the question.  I just wrote.  The more I wrote, the more it flowed.  I could always go back and tweak.  Editing is a different part of the creative process.

My singing students try to edit themselves prematurely.  They have their own version of “Can I really say that?”  Students often want to know, “What good is that?”  “Is that singing?”  I say, “Try it and see what happens.”  It’s on the other side of the experience that we understand what the experience was about.

What I love about watercolor painting is that the paint is hard to control.  I love to wet the paper (Arches 130 lb cold pressed), wait a few minutes, then drop in some rose madder genuine, aureolin yellow and cobalt blue and watch a sky materialize. The paint will paint itself if I stay out of the way. Just like the words will flow and the voice will sing.

It’s the artist’s way.

I was browsing at the library when I heard a distinctive voice I hadn’t heard in 35 years.  It sounded exactly like someone I had known at college.  I followed the sound and sure enough it was Pat.  Then I ducked my head.  I didn’t have a thing against her.  I had liked her well enough.  I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone, let alone someone I hadn’t seen since college, with all the attendant expectations of appearing interested in what she’d been doing.

I got to thinking about other times I have skulked down a side aisle to avoid having to talk to someone:  I was in a hurry.  I felt grungy.  My hair needed washing.  I was wearing clothes I had told myself I could not wear in public.

I have avoided whole sections of the city out of fear of running into people I didn’t want to see.    Once I moved in with a friend and moved out three months later, estranged.  I was uncomfortable being on Queen Anne Hill until other acquaintances made it a friendly place again.

I had a voice teacher who I didn’t realize was harassing me until the Thomas-Hill hearings educated us all.  After I quit my lessons I didn’t drive by Cornish Institute for 25 years because I was uncomfortable at the thought of even seeing him on the street.  I found out recently that he died in 1990.  All this time I could have taken that back road up Capitol Hill.

Does anyone else behave this way?  Shall we just pretend otherwise so I can finish my blog?

I am not always so retiring. There are the people for whom I would strut naked in front of their house if I thought it would annoy them.

And there are people I run into habitually who I enjoy seeing.  We smile, catch up briefly and say “Til next time!”  It’s like a quickie lunch date without the calories or the tip.

Do you get animal visitations?  Every so often I’ll see raccoons for five days running and then not again for six months.  My Native American spiritualist friends would get out the medicine cards and read up on the meaning and message of raccoon.  It rarely has anything to do with my having left loose the yard waste lid.

On the other hand, there could be a whole story behind why the yard waste lid was loose.  That story could contain the secret of life.  Something about compost.  Death and transformation.  See this is what psycho-analysis does to one.

I do think there are missed connections everywhere because I think there are connections everywhere.  I can get into a twit sometimes imagining that I’ve missed a once in a lifetime chance for something.  It’s the tug and regret of the “if onlys.”

If only I had said it differently.

If only I hadn’t said it at all.

If only I had felt like talking.

If only I had queued at the other cash register.

Tommie Eckert, one of earth’s treasures and the only music teacher in my life I haven’t been afraid of, said this to me when I was bemoaning a missed opportunity:

“There are hundreds of missed opportunities every day.”

So there are.  Missed is not the same as wasted. I don’t believe anything is wasted.  (I am back to the compost.)  There is so much out there and the inter-connections are beyond our control.  Every moment holds more than we could possibly take in.

T.S. Eliot who says so many things well, says in “Burnt Norton:”

“What might have been and what has been

Point to one end which is always present.”

I like that.

It’s Pajama Week at the Local Dilettante studio.  When I get up in the morning, I exchange my sleeping pajamas for my bright red pajamas with the Scotty dogs. This is my teaching attire for the week.  My students come to their lessons in their pajamas.  I have hot cocoa, and marshmallows for roasting in the wood stove.  Sometimes I get out the brandy for the adults.  Eventually we get to the music.

My adult students and elementary age girls are the most vocal about enjoying Pajama Week.   But middle school age boys have been known to bluster in, toughened from a day of school, and go into the bathroom to change into their pajamas before their lessons.   And this year I am –per her request–doing a Pajama Week reprise next week just for Genevieve, whose singing voice is of unearthly beauty, because she is missing this week.

I originally instituted the week to help me cope with the time change in November.  But after many years I decided I needed it more in January than I did in November. By the middle of October, there are enough holidays going and coming to distract from the encroaching darkness.   Pajama Week is late this year because it took me all of January to recover from Christmas.

The first Pajama Week of my career was exhausting.  First there was the nuisance of having to change back into my clothes when I had errands to run between students.  Then I had to supervise the making of the cocoa for twenty-five children, give or take a child, who of course had to be allowed to manipulate the lever on the old fashioned church potluck coffee maker that I rescued from my parent’s basement in Olympia.  It’s astonishing where I found smears of chocolate at the end of each day.  More important than the cocoa making was the supervision of  the roasting of the marshmallow in a wood stove that was hot enough to bake Hansel and Gretel, not that I am a witch, at least not a wicked one.

Which association of the gingerbread house with candy trimmings brings me to another of my institutions: Treats Week, which happens four times a year to coincide roughly with Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Easter.   Some years I push a cart down the aisle at Bartells or Ballard Market and load up with bags of candy canes, Fortune cookies, chocolates, conversation hearts, Cadbury crème eggs—whatever looks fun, and increasingly, whatever I, myself, won’t be too tempted to deplete before the week itself.

Other years I find things at Archee McPhees or through the Oriental Trading Company which, unlikely as it seems, is in Omaha, Nebraska.  They are especially good at Halloween: candy witches warts and skeleton bones, Dracula balls (bubble gum balls with a thick red fluid inside), wax lips, candy blood bags, ear wax gummy candy.  Classic stuff.

The week before Treats Week, I lay everything out in an assembly line and make up 30-50 little packages from the endless supply of wrapping paper and ribbon rescued from my parent’s attic. My longtime students can set their watches by Treats Week.  They come in and immediately case the front room to find the basket, bowl, or display of packages.

One child surveyed her holiday package and informed me that it wasn’t very big.  Another told me he didn’t like the sugary things and could he please get all chocolate.  With another child it was the other way around.  Almost every child pokes and prods and weighs the packages and asks me if they are all the same.

I don’t have 50 students now.  I did once and it was too many.  It seemed like they were all breaking off little bits of me when they left the house.  But I often still unload 50 packages because I make extra ones for friends and siblings of students, and for alumni who stay in touch.

My favorite Treats Week story, as related to me by her mother, concerns Neah who at the time was the younger sister of a student.  I knew her because she sometimes came to Michael’s lesson and sat shyly and noticed everything. When Michael entered middle school, there was a discussion around their family table about his dis-continuing his lessons.

Neah burst into tears. “I don’t want him to quit piano lessons!”

Heads turned in astonishment.  “Why on earth would it matter to you?” her mother asked.

“Because I want to get the treats!” she sobbed.

Neah resolved her dilemma by starting lessons with me herself.  She is now in college and is one of the regular alumni I see several times a year:  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/12/tales-of-the-high-teas/

This year has felt a little off.  The old coffee urn is up with the tea bags and the cocoa packets.  But Pajama Week is late and I ran out of wood by the end of January so we aren’t doing the marshmallows.  The treats are little boxes of chocolates and Jolly Rancher lollipops, of which the pink lemonade ones were gone before the week even started.  Yes, that’s right, I picked every last pink lemonade flavored lollipop out of the bag.  It’s both a hazard of the tradition and a privilege of the premier dilettante.

The Temperance Union of Prentiss Hall

When I was at Whitman College in Walla Walla (not Spokane, that’s Whitworth) I was part of a recurring act called the Temperance Union.  Four of us donned the frumpiest outfits we could put together and performed “Away with Rum” to whoever would listen:

We’re coming, we’re coming, our brave little band,

On the right side of temperance we do take our stand.

We don’t chew tobacco because we do think

That the people who use it are likely to drink.

One of the quartet was Debi.  After college she married a townie and got to live happily ever after in Walla Walla, one of the loveliest towns in America. Debi is an attorney now but when I knew her, we called her Putzer.  I thought it might be nice to add that information to her firm’s Facebook page but she says not.

Anyway Putzer is the shortest one in the Temperance Union line-up, her face obscured by her arm: the future attorney already cognizant of liability issues.  Mary-Ellis who I’ve written about:  www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/11/doin-our-stuff/  is the one on the end playing the ukulele. I am the one who looks the most like my mother.

Putzer, who for liability reasons shall now be called Debi, and I were out of touch for nearly 30 years.  We saw each other at a few re-unions, but there wasn’t even the odd Christmas card between us until I started using Facebook as part of my shameless self-promotion of my writing.  That’s how we got re-connected and how I found out that I bicycled by her house every time I visited Walla Walla.  I found out that because her son lives in Seattle, she probably knows downtown and the bus system better than I do.

Debi spent a night with me this week.  She is definitely on my short list of people to be marooned on an island with.  There was never a lull, always something to talk about and lots of laughter.  I’d forgotten how quick and wry her humor is and how much it meshes with mine.

It’s disorienting when someone remembers something I’d forgotten, especially because I pride myself on my memory.  I do not remember catching my ring on a hayride wagon (a hayride?) and ending up in the emergency room with a swollen finger.  But it also reminds me how interconnected we are, even when it’s been 30 years.

I hear the word “connection” a lot when people talk about friends and family. That covers a lot of images.  There’s the spark of recognition, or compatibility; or the frisson of sexual attraction.  The connection I felt this week was of past to present and (I hope) reaching ahead to the future.

Debi was an implant from a world I used to know into the world in which I now live.  When she walked into my house she brought some kind of integration.  I am the still the person I was as well as being the person I am.  When a long-time student walked in and Debi and I were in the middle of a rendition of “It’s cheese that makes the mice go round,” he didn’t bat an eye.

Psychoanalysis has taught me that the mind is not discrete, and it’s not static. There is really no such thing as a “type.”  In the final analysis (no pun intended), we are all “that type;” we are all human.  And we are influenced by each other whether we care to admit that or not. We have many more feeling states than we sometimes allow are there.  We all have backrooms in our minds, memories and experiences.   When the doors swing open, we can be caught by a rancid odor or by delight.

In “Discrepancies,” the poet, Stephen Dunn, says:

“.  .  .  I’ve tried

to become someone else for a while,

only to discover that he, too, was me.”

If I ever thought I had become someone else, Debi’s re-entry into my life reminded me that I am still all the persons I have always been.  That’s both comforting and humbling.

And now I need to put the rum bottles in the re-cycling.