Over the weekend I attended a piano concert performed by the same artist –Fred Kronacher–who played a Bach concert a few months back.  I attend these concerts with my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah), and her husband, Bill. I blogged about that concert (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/10/digressions-from-an-afternoon-with-bach/), taking a rather supercilious tone, compared with what I have to say about the Chopin and Liszt concert on Sunday afternoon.

I’ll start by saying that it was absolutely glorious piano music.  These two composers knew how to utilize every partial of the piano with grace and charm. Hearing Liszt’s “Au bord d’une source” was like sitting in the middle of a cold mountain stream on a hot day.  I could feel as well as hear the ripples of water.  With Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat, with any Chopin if it comes to that, I can understand why George Sand liked to lie on the floor under the piano.

Then I ruined my own experience of Valse Oublieé (Forgotten Waltz) because I thought Fred had reversed the order of the program and was playing Gnomenreigen (Dancing gnomes).  The beginning of Valse Oublieé sounded like gnomes running around.  So I leaned over to Nina and ruined her experience of it, too, by fussing about whether or not he was playing the waltz or the gnomes.  Or had I daydreamed all the way through Valse Oublieé which would be ironic, and missed it altogether.

So I was not behaving like a very sophisticated concert goer.  I wonder why that was.

Sometimes I listen on purpose like a musician:  “Hmmm, he’s modulated and there’s a sequence, here comes the cadence.”  If I have played the piece myself, I can visualize how the fingers are moving through certain passages and how I can’t imagine getting through that bit so smoothly.  Sometimes I think, “Oh, that’s how that goes!”  With some inside melodies, my reaction is “Geez, where did that note come from?  How is he getting that?”

But here’s a dirty little secret: my mind wanders.  A lot.

My mind even wanders when I am the one performing.  In the middle of singing a Schubert song, I might have this thought: “I’ll need to get milk on the way home, then I have to do laundry, my god, how long have I been thinking about this?” All this can thread through my mind in less than four counts so it’s not like getting lost in a foreign city, but it is alarming when I’ve got an audience that has come to hear me sing, not wool-gather.

Anyway after the piano concert, I compared notes with my companions about the wanders our minds took:  it boiled down to work and sex.

It got me thinking about minds and how I don’t know what goes on in other people’s minds but how often I assume that I do.  Especially in regards to feelings. Someone has a physiological response to life, expresses it in words and I say, “I understand completely” or “I know exactly how you feel,” when in fact, I have no way of knowing exactly how anything feels to anyone but me and even I am hazy about my own feelings much of the time.

Most people report that they find music evocative, but what it evokes is difficult to verbalize.  Trying to explain its magic is like trying to encapsulate spirituality or sex in words.  So after a concert, you hear people saying banal things like, “You know I thought the tempo dragged a bit during the relative minor sequence in the 2^nd movement” or “Those two composers knew how to utilize every partial of the piano with grace and charm.”

You rarely hear anyone say, “I was imagining myself in Australia having sex on a beach with two didgeridoo players,” or “I was thinking if he doesn’t call that contractor tomorrow morning, I am going to rip out bathroom sink myself” or “I just know she’s not at the library, she’s out getting another piercing.”

While I am in this confessional mode, I’ll attempt to redeem myself by saying my mind usually doesn’t wander during a Bach concert.  But I almost always fall asleep in the 3^rd act of an opera.

I just finished a book set in Yorkshire.  You don’t need to know its title because it wasn’t very good and I’ll recommend a better book later on.  The point here is that it got me thinking about Richmond, a splendid market town in North Yorkshire which I visited a few years back.   I am in possession of a family genealogy that traces my family to this particular town in the year 1000.  I visited it on the same trip to England wherein I got a look at St Margaret of Clitherow’s hand (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/10/st-margarets-hand/) so you can imagine the scale of the highlights of that trip.

I was booked to stay two nights at The King’s Head hotel in Richmond.  (What does that mean exactly?  Did they erect a hotel after a be-heading?  Kind of like apartments in the states are named after whatever got torn down to clear the land—the Willow Grove Apartments, for example, when there’s not a willow in a 5 mile radius.  There wasn’t a severed head anywhere that I could see which just illustrates my point.  And this was before I saw St Margaret’s hand.)

In any case, when I learned that Charles and Camilla were coming on the day I was leaving, I immediately booked a third night.

I was up early that third morning and went for a walk.  Someone was collecting minute bits of trash in the square and bagging it.  All the dustbins had been shrink-wrapped—no place for a bomb to hide.  I overheard the comment, “They were paintin’ the flagstones. Paint’s not even dry.  Mind you, if it takes a royal visit to get things done, we all come out right.”

The royals were not expected til noon but I was rushed out of a shop at “just gone ten.”  “Can I ring you up a card, luv, because we’re closing for the royal visit, He’s sometimes early.”   This was being promoted as the first royal visit to Richmond in 200 years so it seemed rather sweet to hope He would be early.

By “half ten” the crowd was massing in the large, oddly shaped market square.  Lines of schoolchildren in uniforms and paper crowns, waving tiny Union Jacks streamed into the square.  Women in huge flowery hats and their best shoes stood, smiling and animated. A military band started to play.  When they launched into “All Through the Night,” I started to cry, having what I call a “little containment problem.”

The news went around that They had arrived. I stationed myself behind a class of children, figuring I looked like a teacher and would get my best view over the tops of their heads.  Also it was very hot, and I didn’t think the Royals would make children wait in the heat for long.  I said as much to a woman in a flowery green hat and fine shoes who raised her eyebrows and said “Oh, they’ll make them wait.”

We all waited for an hour.  Then the royal guards appeared in their furry busby hats looking like the wicked witch’s guards in The Wizard of Oz.  The town council swept through in black robes and white wigs, carrying scepters.  And suddenly, there was Camilla.  She shook my hand.  What that means is that she came though and grabbed every out-stretched hand that she could and squeezed it slightly.  She looked like someone who never thought this would happen to her.  So she looked rather like I felt.

Charles halted for a bit of a chat with the busby standing a foot from me.  The lady in the green flowery hat and I eavesdropped shamelessly.  They chatted about the garrison outside of town and how long the young man had been in the military. Boy, he would have something to tell his mum that night!  I wanted in the worst way to take a photo but I was afraid of the Royal Disapproval should a flash go off right in His face and He were to find out I was an American on top of that.

After I returned to Seattle, I discovered a writer named Robert Barnard who sets all his very literate mysteries in Yorkshire. One of his books is called Fete Fatale in the states. In England its title is The Disposal of the Living which in this case is a clever pun since the murder involves a rector.  A rector’s right to the tithe from his church is called “a living.”

Here is his description of Hexton-on-Weir, the town in the book: “A town of stone houses, most of them very old and slightly cramped, centered around a town square which is not a square but a highly irregular form unknown to geometry.  In the centre is a church which . . .  has been turned into a museum to a famous regiments whose barracks are a few miles outside of town.”

The description goes on but I didn’t need to read more.  I shrieked, “But that’s Richmond!  It’s Richmond!”

Here is where living with only cats is dis-satisfying. They opened an eye a piece, checked their watches to see if there was the remotest chance it could be meal time, and went back to sleep.

I wanted to call up everyone in my address book and say, “Hey guess what? I started reading this book and the author says his fictitious town is really a real town and from the description, I could tell it was Richmond!  It’s Richmond!  Okay, goodbye, I have 37 other people to call!!”

The last thing I want to say about Richmond (for now) is that there’s a Richmond Castle whose Norman ruins are lovingly maintained. So there was yet another reason I didn’t want to do something so down-market as flash a photo in Prince Charles’ face. I am a Richmond, after all.  I have a certain dignity to maintain in that town.

If you ever meet my friend Nina, don’t rhyme her name with Deena because I will be hearing about it for a month.  Her name rhymes with Dinah. We went out to dinner the other night.  We talked about a dismal blog entry I was wrestling with.  By the time we had turned the topic inside out, I decided to scrap it and write about Nina instead.

I have known Nina for 30 years.  Her daughter, Jocelyn, was in my Pinkers group when I taught music at Perkins Pre-School in the early 1980’s.  I thought of her as “that cool mom.” We got to know each other better during the ten years that Jocelyn took private piano lessons from me.

We’ve been doing the restaurant circuit since the year we both committed to using as many coupons out of the Entertainment book as was reasonable.   Neither of us needed the hair implants, for instance.  Every six weeks or so, we decided it was time to go out to dinner.  We each hoped the other one would go through the Entertainment book and pick a restaurant.  We usually went through it together while on the phone.  Now that the Entertainment book is as watered down as a bad Old Fashioned, we use Groupons or the Chinook book or other middle-class mollifications.

We’ve been to Rock Salt, McCormick and Schmidt, The Rickshaw (yes, we have), 125^th St Grill, Berkshire Grill, The Library Café, The Rusty Pelican, Thai Siam, Ivars, Palimino, Rositas.   Nina is from Montana.  She grew up on a cattle ranch and  likes her steak.  I’m a Pacific Northwest native so I usually get fish. We were more adventurous before I started having digestion issues.

Food, however, is not why we go.  We go to get our money’s worth.

We want to maximize the value of the coupon on principle.  If the coupon is for the 2^nd entrée free up to $20, then we aren’t allowed to waste it on an entrée of fish and chips for $15.  We try to approximate two entrees for at least $20 each.  One of us usually says magnanimously, “You know what?  You get whatever you want.” But we don’t mean it.

When we first sit down, I always ask the waitperson to turn down the music.  Then I want a glass of water with no ice.  Nina smiles and stares ahead of her while I get my quirks out of the way.  Then she orders an Old Fashioned.  Nina used to instruct the bartenders while I looked out the window or pretended to read the menu.  Now that this classic drink is back in fashion, mixologists know how to make it properly, but this wasn’t the case ten years ago.  Even today Nina specifies still water and enough whiskey.

“An Old Fashioned is not a drink to be watered down with goddamn fizzy water,” she says sotto voce.

Dessert is a continual problem which we have not yet resolved.  Here comes the waitperson with an evil grin and the dessert menu.  We look at each other.

“Do you want to split one?”

“I am just the right amount of full and dessert will spoil that.”

“They never are as good as they sound.”

“We should go out for just dessert sometime.”

We are like actors in a long running play, saying the same lines.  For years we said our lines and ordered dessert anyway.   Lately we have gotten better at not ordering it in the first place.  I bring a couple of pieces of hard candy or chocolate for our Afters.

“Just a little something to let your mouth know the meal is over,” Nina says.

Nina contributed to the dessert one weekend when I was with her at her Montana ranch.  She collected the mail, and bought a gallon of milk and a huge tub of Wilcoxson’s vanilla ice cream at the Melville store.  “Downtown” Melville consists of a post office/ store/lunch counter.  And a public telephone booth that was used by Robert Redford in a scene from The Horse Whisperer.  Actually I think the phone booth was just a prop.

On the way back to the ranch house at the far end of Home Valley, we stopped at the home of Dave and Laurie who live on the ranch.  We were coming back later that evening for dinner with ice cream to supplement gooseberry pie.  I sat in the air-conditioned car while Nina ran in with the mail and the milk.

When she climbed back into the car, I asked, “Why didn’t you leave the ice cream?  Is it because they don’t have a big enough freezer?”

“No,” she said, “It’s because it’s my ice cream.”

If the ice cream were to spend the afternoon at Laurie and Dave’s, it would subtly, in those few hours, become their ice cream and then we couldn’t take the leftovers home.  I got it.

There’s this thing about ownership and fairness that comes up when we pay the restaurant bill.  The discount complicates things. Neither of us wants to pay more than our fair share of the bill.  To be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t mind paying slightly less.  At the end of the meal, out comes the tip chart, the calculator, pens and scraps of paper, our cash and credit cards.  We each do our own calculations and work out something amenable.

When I made out my will, I named Nina my executor. “We can never travel together,” I told her. “Because we have to remain friends.”

I haven’t died yet.  The friendship and the dinners are working out just fine.

Monday: Gwen, my neighbor who knows a little bit about just about everything, calls to say she has finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, it’s good and would I like to borrow it?

Half a dozen people have already asked me if I have read it.  Half of them have told me it’s too violent and I wouldn’t like it. The other half have raved about it.  I don’t want to list the number of popular books I have not read or movies I have not seen.  That information is classified because I get tired of explaining the concept of free will.

I remember how Gwen could not stop enthusing about Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander series which did not interest me no matter how literate the writing and exciting the story.  I say what I wish I had said then, “Sure, I’ll come get it.”

Tuesday: I go across the street and get The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  I listen to Gwen’s enthusiasm about the story and how the translation is not all that good.  Yeah, yeah.  I wasn’t planning to read it anyway.  But when I finish my current book, Pomfret Towers by Angela Thirkell, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is within reaching distance and I have 35 pounds of cat on my lap, so I start it.  In half a page I am hooked.  Church choir rehearsals haven’t started yet so I have the evening free.  I read for four hours.

Wednesday: I read most of the day.  The work I need to do actually breeds.  When I turn my head, extended families of work have crept out of my file cabinet and off my desk and are mounting on the floor. The OK Chorale hasn’t begun its quarter yet so I have all evening free and I read until I am falling asleep.  I still have a hundred pages to go but I don’t want to rush the ending so I go to bed.

Thursday: I get up early and finish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first of a trilogy.

Here’s where the sub-plot becomes more complicated.  I know that Gwen, who is a voracious reader, is just as eager as I am to read the rest of the story.  But neither of us want to actually buy the books.  In my case, I don’t mind buying a book I am dying to read but I will get a used copy before I’ll buy a new one.  (I may change my attitude about this when my own book is published.) Gwen, whose psyche is calibrated for coming up with everything she needs in the world using bits and pieces from her kitchen drawer, runs into her own limits when what’s needed is a book written by someone else.

Even with all the intrigue surrounding the death of Stieg Larsson, he is not to be found in Gwen’s kitchen drawer, so she has kindled the next book, The Girl Who Played With Fire — pun unintentional.  I go to Couth Buzzard Used Books in Greenwood to see if they have a used copy.  They do but it’s $15 unless I have an account which I don’t.  To get an account, I have to bring in some books to trade.

I check Balderdash Books and Art, another used book store in Greenwood. They don’t have the The Girl Who Played With Fire but they have a UK edition of the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  Coup! This is a bonus: it’s going to have cool, exotic words in it like Sellotape and lorry.

I take it across the street and pound excitedly on Gwen’s back door.

“Look what I’ve got!”

I magnanimously present it to Gwen and say that she’ll be needing it first.

Friday:  I am in the Couth Buzzard Used Books three minutes after it opens with two boxes of books, get my account, buy The Girl Who Played With Fire for $7 and am home reading by a little after 10:00AM.

Saturday: I finish The Girl Who Played with Fire at 10:24, 24 hours after I start it.

I call Gwen to discuss sharing custody of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  She is only 125 pages into it but technically, it’s my book, which she concedes.  But I now have several generation’s worth of work to do and my body feels tight from the week’s reading frenzy.  We decide we will pass the book back and forth as our schedules allow.

Gwen reveals that she can stream the movie of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo through Netflix and we can watch it on her flat screen. In the evening, I go over in my jammies with a bottle of sherry and we watch the movie of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  It’s excellent and very fun to watch so soon after reading the book.  Halfway into it, Gwen murmurs that the other two books have also been made into movies.

“Get out!”

We make a tentative date to watch the next movie and decide we will calm down about the third book.  We want to enjoy it at our leisure.

But I think we might go out and get tattoos before all this is over.

I’ve been trying for five days to write something about the shooting of the Arizona congresswoman on Saturday.  I gather from I’ve been hearing and reading that I am not the only person who put their face in their hands and sobbed when they heard the news.  Then I braced myself for the onslaught of self-righteous blaming that I knew would wash over the shock.

I wanted to write about the sport of self-righteous blaming.  Actually I did write about that.  I came up with about 800 words about all the self-righteous blaming that goes on in our social discourse but no matter how I tried to couch it, I ended up sounding self-righteous and blaming.  So that was frustrating.

My friend, Nancy, who teaches college-level English and can point out every time I have deconstructed a thought, might say that my preaching about people who are self-righteous is a deconstruction of the concept of self-righteousness.  I think. Nancy told me she was afraid that one day she would show up in my blog as my friend who doesn’t take adequate cash to yard sales because she forgets she can’t use her credit card.  She can stop worrying.  She’s Nancy, the friend who can point out every time I have deconstructed a thought.

I deleted the preachy blog.  Then I twiddled my thumbs and played free-cell solitaire.  Not at the same time.

I wished my cats would do something outrageous or one of my students would say something funny or vice versa.  I wished I would run into another loud phone talker so I could pick a fight and write about that.

The only thing that has disturbed the cats recently was the fact of there being snow outside both doors of the house, but I commented on that last time it snowed and I don’t want to repeat myself on top of sounding self-righteous and blaming.

My students are pre-occupied with upcoming finals so they aren’t saying interesting things; they just come in looking stunned.

The only loud phone talker I’ve encountered recently was walking in the neighborhood and was shortly out of ear-shot so it might have been mistaken for harassment for me to follow her down the street complaining that I didn’t want to hear about her hemorrhoids.

I watched that internet video of the cats playing pat-a-cake 23 times while I wrestled with how to not sound preachy and grandiose.

Then I started reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and couldn’t put it down.  That was a huge distraction.

I still want to say something about the incident in Arizona but it’s been hard to think about.  Every time I put down The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it was there, gnawing at me. So for what they are worth, here are some thoughts that had a bit of traction before they hit dead-ends, strayed into frustration, or disintegrated into self-righteous blaming:

I keep hearing the phrase “senseless crime.” When someone says a crime is senseless, that seems to excuse their throwing up their hands as though to say, “This one isn’t “normal” so I don’t have to think about it.  The next one that’s not so egregious–or that doesn’t involve a “mentally imbalanced” person– that one I’ll think about.”   Just because meaning is obscure or complex doesn’t make something senseless.

I might add here that I think it’s insulting to mentally ill people to treat this shooting as though it’s no more than we expect from them.  There are hundreds of thousands of mentally ill in this country who don’t shoot people.  Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Issac Newton, Robert Schumann, and John Keats were all “mentally ill.”

After an incident such as the one last weekend, someone always whines, “Where are the Role Models?”  Leaving aside how limited I think this concept is, isn’t it interesting that whenever people decry the absence of good role models, they always seem to be suggesting that it is people other than themselves that aren’t setting the good example.

Though it’s a pretty low threshold for Role Model, most of us don’t shoot other people.   But my self-righteousness today has temporary amnesia about how badly I behaved yesterday.  We all do ugly things and we all declare ourselves to be somehow superior to people who do the same ugly things on the days we don’t.  Even though most of us don’t shoot people, we all contribute something to the aggregate of love or fear in the world by our own generosity of spirit or lack of it.

Tragedy and our reactions to it are not senseless.  There’s a kind of logic that ushers us around and around the hall of mirrors that is our humanity.   We can never know for sure which is another body and which a reflection of our own thoughts.

I invite you to read the 99 Girdles page of this web site.  It’s all new stuff!

For the past 4 months I have been working with a free-lance editor in town, Tom Orton.  With his excellent suggestions, I have found a *narrative arc,* re-organized the entire book and re-written much of it, including the beginning.  I will be re-submitting– with crossed fingers–to St Martin’s Press sometime this month.  I would love to hear your comments.

Remember back before Christmas when some of us were counting the days and longing for The Light like medieval villagers?  Then there was the onslaught of Christmas and New Year.  By now we are well on our way towards it being light earlier in the morning until Congress robs us of even that when in March daylight savings time plunges us morning people into another month of darkness.

The sun entered Capricorn at the Winter Solstice, Dec 21.  In astrology, Capricorn is associated with the Greek Titan Cronus who had a makeover in Italy and became the god Saturn.  Here’s a little terrifying mythology for you:

When Cronus and his brothers and sisters were born, their father, Uranus (sky god), was so unprepared to have children that he depressed them deep into their mother, Gaia (earth goddess).  Gaia got tired of her children being forced back inside of her so she colluded with Cronus at his birth to emasculate his own father and free his brothers and sisters.

Cronus became the Big Daddy.  When he and his wife Rhea began to have children, Cronus was fearful that what he had done to his own father would be done to him.  Evidently Rhea had a bit of the women’s liberation about her because there would be no stuffing children back into her.  Instead, Cronus ate them.  Rhea conspired with her youngest, Zeus, who overthrew and exiled his father.

Know any families like this?

Like anything else, astrology is deadly in the hands of fundamentalists, but it can be a wonderful language for playing with ideas and thinking about life.  I prefer to think of the astrological signs as symbolizing different kinds of human energies.

We all have Capricorn energies.  Our personalities all have rooms that accommodate the moodiness we sometimes associate with this month and with the fearful pessimism of Saturn.  When we enter those rooms we cope with fears of being usurped or oppressed by grabbing for control and by trying to be vigilant in a world so unsafe that fathers eat their own children.   When we get too invested in this self-protection we sometimes can’t afford to see all the ways the world is safe, and the ways that earth supports her own creations.  In an effort to keep things congruent, we end up eating our own creative children, sabotaging ourselves, if only to prove that our pessimistic view of life is correct.

The Saturnine Heathcliff in WutheringHeights is almost comical:

“What’s to do now, my lad?”

“Naught, naught.”

January is just one month and gloomy pessimism is just one of many feeling states.  After the mania of Christmas, our modern day Saturnalia, January sometimes seems empty and stark.  Yet outside, the still and muted world feels pregnant. There’s a gestation going on.  Out of the quiet, dark dis-satisfactions comes something new, something organic.  It’s a matter of trusting our own unconscious processes instead of trying to control what we’re conscious of.  This can get lost in the silliness of New Year’s resolutions.

In astrology, Capricorn is symbolized by the goat.  The cornucopia, the horn of plenty, is a goat’s horn.  Within emptiness is its own polarity, fullness.  The goat climbs slowly up the mountain, making sure the foot is secure before moving on.  Within cautiousness is its own polarity, trust.

January named after Janus, the two-faced head, is another image of polarity.  January is like a door that swings both ways.  We may be in a new year, but I think “closure” is a meaningless notion.  We can’t help but look back at the same time we look forward.  We continually return to the full experience of being alive.

Okay, we’re back.

I use the third person royally because I actually live alone, not counting the three cats to whom I pay rent.  However I am more introverted than not and I feel like I almost died of people this past week.  I ate lunches, dinners, and high teas such as I don’t believe ever existed in England until Americans discovered petit fours, called them British, and began making money by putting them on a plate.

The first time I was in England, in the 1970’s, a cup a tea was called for after a walk, a bath, a stint in the garden, after having gone up the road to the village shop to pick up the load of bread one had ordered the day before, or after two hours had gone by, whatever came first.  One could go out for a cream tea which was tea with scones, clotted cream, butter and jam; or tea and cake.  One can always get a decent piece of cake in England as long as there is a cake to cut.  Or one had tea, the meal, which was essentially what Americans might call a light supper.

Let me drop the royal third person and the literary second person and cut to America of the present day where persons of both sexes and all ages are democratically addressed as “you guys.”

This past week, I drank a lot of tea.

Anna and Julia and I went out for our 11^th annual Christmas tea.  Anna and Julia are sisters who took piano lessons from me for years while they were growing up.  One winter, I ran a contest: I would take out for hot chocolate whoever learned the most carols in their Christmas books by the 20^th of December.  Anna and Julia outstripped every other student by at least half a dozen carols.  I took them to Starbucks on Phinney Ridge.

They won the contest the following year.  I took them to what was then the Library Café in Crown Hill for high tea.

I discontinued the contest but the three of us continued our holiday tradition.  For the next two years we went to the Queen Mary teas rooms in the University District. Year five, I took them to Snohomish for high tea at Piccadilly Circus.  Year six, we visited the British Pantry in Redmond for what was probably the most bona fide of high teas because it was more of a light supper.

We were running out of new places to go when we found our home.  For the past 5 years, we have settled into the sofas around the fireplace at the Sorrento Hotel’s Hunts Club and luxuriated in the elegant surroundings while consuming the same menu (egg, chicken, and cuke sandwiches;  scones, tarts, chocolates, eclairs, a single blueberry and one strawberry ) and catching up on the year’s news.

This past fall, Anna was doing a semester abroad in Chile and Julia was in her first year at M.I.T.   I had thought we might be skyping our tea this year but we all made it.  None of us are currently eating meat, and Anna and I are off sugar so we didn’t get the usual outlay for three but the company was delicious as always.

The day after the Sorrento Hotel tea, Anna (Western/Fairhaven) was back at my house with four other young (liberal arts) college women: Neah (Gonzaga), Katie (Whitman), Lucy (Macalester) and Riley(Linfield).  These young women all took piano lessons from me at about the same time.  We have been getting together once or twice a year for tea and sugar since their last years in high school.  I served tea, orange bread, cranberry bread, fudge and other chocolates, nuts in shells, and veggies and dip which Anna brought.  Also they ate the last of the Tiddly Reindeers from my cousins in England.

When I am with these women, I love to sit back and listen to the gossip which I (uncharacteristically) keep to myself.  I would never do anything that might dry up my sources so I am not going to repeat anything juicy.

I hosted one other tea this year.   My friends, Chris and Dee, came on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.  Chris is a tenor in both my choirs, and a fabulous cook.  She was a Russian translator while in the army and is a CERT trainer now.  We were trying to think of a tagline for her since this is now the second blog of mine in which she has appeared, but I have decided she’s basically unclassifiable.

Her partner, Dee, has a magnet on the refrigerator which says:  I missed church because I was off practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.  That’s an apt tagline for Dee.  I only wish I could claim authorship.  But truly, both of them are unclassifiable.

Chris and Dee’s love for their three Chinook dogs (Starfire, Indigo, and Willow) cannot be quantified.   I shamelessly suck up to the dogs.  Starfire was my first important conquest and now I am oiling my way into Willow’s heart.  Indigo needs no oiling; more often than not, she needs to be fended off.

Last summer I did a painting of my friends’ Chinooks.  I was so excited with how it turned out, I told them about it in July.

“I have your Christmas present already!  So we have to stay friends until Christmas,” I said.

Chris flipped through her calendar, “So when can we cross you off?” she asked.

On the afternoon of the 24^th, Chris and Dee looked at the painting for a long time.

Chris looked up.  “We’re giving you an extension,” she said.

May we all receive extensions in the new year!

The Bffs

When I got to church last Sunday, the sanctuary was swarming with children in their bathrobes with beards made from toilet tank covers.  There was a six month old baby rolling around the floor in front of the altar.  The pastor’s study, doubling as the green room, was cluttered with props.  An eight year old angel in t-shirt and corduroy pants, flew importantly about, fussing with her wings and halo.

The Christmas pageant, what else?  I direct the choir at Broadview UCC church and play the piano twice a month.  I was on deck for the pageant.  My car had broken down the day before and I was in that calm but ignorant state of not yet knowing how much the repair job was going to cost.  In the meantime people were chauffeuring me.  I had hitched a ride with the prelude soloist who is also my voice student and an artist –Mary Oakland Designs—in several media.

I stepped over the baby and went to the piano.  The choir was to rehearse their small part in the service, an advent round sung from the four corners of the sanctuary, but the choir was nowhere to be seen.  Mary and I ran through “Ave Maria.”  By then it was twenty minutes until show time.  The choir gradually, sleepily appeared.

“Can I get the choir in their corners?  Let’s run through the round.”

The Access van arrived with Mary Ann and she was wheeled to the front where Jane, who has a relentless supply of energy, appeared with the angel costume that Mary Ann always enjoys wearing in the pageant. Chris, a tenor, materialized behind me to light the altar candles.

“Get back in your corner,” I yelled.

She laughed.  She laughed.  Chris was in the army once.  She’s been through boot camp so I guess I am small potatoes.  On the other hand, she told me once that she made it through boot camp by thinking of it as a joke.  I expect that’s how she manages me.

The choir eventually got itself organized, evidently not appreciating how critical to the entire 2010 Christmas season our 30 second round was.

“I want everyone to sing the first two lines together, then group one can continue on but group two goes back and starts over.  Then we’ll sing it as a round twice,” I said.

“Are you going to play it on the piano”

“I was in a different corner at the rehearsal.”

“Do you mean twice as a round after we go back to the beginning or twice altogether?”

“Just watch me, okay?  I will either cut you off or burst into tears, either way you stop singing.”

Five minutes to go.  Ave Maria takes longer.  People were still milling around, talking.

I would have liked to yell, “Sit down and shut up.  Mary has been working on this friggin’ Schubert for over a year and I want you to listen to her.”  But I only talk that way to the choir because they don’t take me seriously.

Mary did a beautiful job.  Towards the end, people listened.

Then Jane got up to give announcements. She mis-read something and effectively canceled my last choir rehearsal before Christmas Eve. Because I was lost in my fantasies that there was nothing expensive wrong with my car, it didn’t sink in until the choir was in the middle of its advent round.

I thought, “Oh crap, now I have to call everyone before Tuesday.”

When I thought we had sung the round roughly two times, I waved my arms to cut us off.  Chris blithely continued for a few ironic beats, soloing on the words, “watching, waiting.”

Of Chris I will say no more because I don’t want to jeopardize my invitation for crab cakes at her house on Boxing Day.

The pageant commenced.

Jane, the ubiquitous, appeared with a blue shawl over her shoulders looking 9 ½ months pregnant.  I stood up to get a better look.  “Wow,” I thought. “Nice pillow work.”

Mary and Joseph had their tussle with the innkeepers. I played the entr’acte music while the scene changed.

Jane re-appeared, flat as a super-model, holding the baby that had been rolling around in front of the altar when I first got to church.

A shepherd said his line, “And do you hear the music?”

Dead silence.  I scanned my script.  I saw the shepherd’s line but no instruction to play any music.

The next entrance was for the angel Gabriel who did not materialize.

I tried to think what song might match whatever the shepherds were supposed to hear.  All I could think of was “Drive My Car” because it was something I hoped to be doing the next day.

So the answer to the shepherd’s question was No.  No one heard the music.

The director hissed, “ANGEL!”

The angel finally stumbled out of the pastor’s study and bellowed, “Do not be afraid!”

The three wise people approached.  They were the heart of this wonderfully conceived pageant (written and directed by Marc Hoffman.)  The three wise people, Sally, Tom, and Charles, are the oldest members of the church.  Their memories of childhood Christmases had been transcribed and were read aloud earlier by the children –stories of Christmas trees with lit candles on them, the gift of a pink coat with a muff, 32 below zero weather for Christmas.   They sat in state with gold crowns on their heads and golden mantles around their shoulders until their cue to come forward.

Listening to the eldests’ memories being read by the youngest, I forgot about my car.  I felt securely present, linked between past and future.   This is the holiday of the winter solstice: a reminder that in the scheme of things our lives are a 30 second advent round.  We are all precious and we all go by so quickly.

Have a wonderful week, everyone! This is probably the last you will hear from me before the holiday.  Unless I need a ride somewhere.

I’ve had a pig at my table for two weeks.Actually a boar, not a pig.And only the head.A boar’s head.OK, it’s paper maché.I wanted one so the OK Chorale could process singing “The Boar’s Head Carol.”One of our altos, Gail, who teaches kindergarten at North Beach Elementary, volunteered her class to create a boar’s head.

I don’t know how she got it by the curriculum sheriff but it was processed (emphasis on first syllable) in time for our tech rehearsal: paper maché around a balloon with added snout, and covered in a mosaic of fabric with attached googly eyes. The paper maché boar’s head constituted our only piece of “tech” but it was useful to see how well it stood up to being processed (emphasis on second syllable).Because it kept rolling off its platter, the procession acolytes held it by its nose, making the fabric peel, one of the nostrils fall off and Gail fit to be tied, or trussed as the case may be.

The boar’s head came wee, wee, wee all the way home with me so I could get it ready for the dress rehearsal.I made a paper maché collar and attached it to its own platter.I re-wrapped the snout and re-attached the nostril.By then I was so fond of it, I gave it some cookies and left it on my table where I could enjoy it until its big night.

Its big night was last Friday when the Chorale outdid itself in a concert at the UCC church where we rehearse. I have great confidence that the Chorale can pull off a good concert but I wasn’t as certain they could walk down the aisle and sing at the same time.And I wasn’t certain I could organize it because part of what makes the Chorale so much fun is the fifth grade energy that emerges in rehearsals. Except that fifth graders spit and pull hair.Adults (usually) don’t:

“Where do you want the sopranos?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“How fast should we walk?”

“Slow.”

“What if we get to the front before we finish singing?”

“I don’t know.Just stand there and finish singing.”

“Won’t that look weird?”

“In what way?”

“Should we all just walk down the center?”

“Meaning what?”

“We could come down both sides and cross in the front.”

“Excuse me while I get a Tums.”

“It’s such a short program, do we need the procession? I don’t think the audience would be bored if we just sang.”

“Not the point.”

In case you have no idea what I am going on about, Queens College, Oxford has a tradition where they march a boar’s head into the dining room singing this 15^th century carol.It’s great fun to sing.The Chorale did it beautifully. Everyone in their Christmas finery, reindeer antlers, and elf feet, holding aloft a paper maché boar’s head with googly eyes and sunk in a pile of cookies, singing a venerable old English carol whose significance means nothing to us. After the concert we processed it to the social hall where there must have been 5000 cookies to frost, decorate and exchange. It was a fine evening.

I have become so fond of the boar’s head, I’ve been taking it in the car with me.I took is to my Second Sunday Poetry group and my Tuesday Morning Irregulars painting group, heaped with cookies from the exchange.I took it to my voice lesson.

It was with me when I saw my analyst.  That was interesting:  all those professionals and their clients trying to not look, and once having looked, trying to not re-act.  On the other hand, it wasn’t so unexpected.  Therapists have a lot of practice dispassionately observing odd behavior and clients in waiting rooms rarely look at anything except magazines and their own feet.

I took it with me, laden with treats when I went to meet its creators, Gail’s kindergarten class at North Beach Elementary.  Gail and I marched it around the classroom and sang the carol.  After seeing teacher and class, I understand where this paper maché boar’s head with the googly eyes gets its preternatural energy.

There’s still time. I wish I could volunteer the OK Chorale to process for you but we’ve knocked off for the season.  However I am willing to rent the boar’s head out for Christmas parties.  You may have to take a number.

Relaxing at home

Making friends