Good Medicine

A couple of days ago, I heard about a young woman who was considering suicide and had made some specific plans to carry it out later in the evening, but then she decided to hang on to just one good thing for at least that day. In her case, that one good thing was Disney movies. The innocence and nostalgia were the elixir she needed.

I’m not considering suicide, but I’ve got an elixir of my own to draw on in hard times (or easy, for that matter), and in my case, it’s playing with an orchestra. We performed last night, and the experience was good medicine.

In Small Town, there is a quiet kind of guy named Bob who, with his wife, teaches piano lessons in a private studio. Eustacia took lessons from him for a couple of years when she was much younger, in fact. Bob also composes piano music, which has become beloved with students and teachers around the world. I said he was quiet—he’s also humble and unassuming, and unless someone else takes on the role of trumpet tooter on his behalf, few people around here would know about Bob the Composer. So, last night, the Philharmonic took on the role and celebrated Bob.

We hosted a piano competition for students around the state and narrowed down the selection to two winners. I was fortunate to witness the competition several weeks ago, taking photos of each competitor posing with Bob as he or she performed for judges, and I was impressed with every single one of them. One by one, these little kids walked out on stage in the big empty hall, sat down at the Steinway, and played boldly and confidently. It’s almost as if they didn’t know they should be nervous.

The judges chose two—a 10-year-old girl who stole my heart the minute she began to play, and a 15-year-old boy who I was also rooting for. At our performance last night, the kids each played a concerto composed by Bob, and the audience went nuts, clapping between movements, which they usually don’t do. We repeated the third movement of each piece just to let the kids show their stuff. Then we all honored Bob with a public declaration from the mayor, and during the intermission, he went out to the lobby to be greeted by an appreciative town. Getting people to go out in the lobby during intermission is tricky, but I peeked, and there seemed to be a crowd out there.

For the second half, we performed Shostakovich’s Piano Concert No. 2 with Donna Lee, a Steinway artist who teaches at Kent State, and she was remarkable. If those kids from the first half were paying attention, they witnessed their potential future. They saw how a musician (and composer) has the ability to take you from being hopeful with the pressing music of the first movement to being contemplative (and even deeply sad) during the second to being absolutely ebullient during the third. That's some mighty power to wield, is it not?

We began the concert with the first three movements of Haydn’s Symphony #88 and finished with the finale. I love playing Haydn (except for the horn solos that seemed to have been written as payback for a horn player Haydn might have disliked), and finishing the concert with those happy, bouncy notes was just right, the elixir I mentioned. But I wonder if the audience got it. They were so pleased with the music in the middle, and they applauded for us at the beginning and the end, but I didn’t sense an outburst of love from them.

Maybe we weren't as brilliant as I felt we were—there is a section in the Haydn finale the conductor referred to as a cat-fight (or maybe he said dog fight, whatever), and he wondered after the fact if we didn't quite pull if off, and it might have sounded more like just a bunch of notes. I don't know. Maybe that's what the audience heard, but for me, I got to play Haydn, doggoneit!

Sometimes we talk about this orchestra as a group that performs for its own enjoyment. There are moments during rehearsal, when we finish a piece, and the corporate satisfaction is such that we feel as though we can go home—audience be damned—because we have made ourselves levitate. That’s enough. So, if the audience didn’t quite float an inch or so off the ground last night, that’s OK, because they had the privilege of witnessing what we do for ourselves.

I should back up here a little bit to say that of course we adore our audience. Keep buying tickets, people, and keep coming to concerts and supporting the group with your words and deeds. My point is, each time the group makes music together, regardless of who else is listening, we do something marvelous. Something remarkably human. Something, for those of us who carry a heavy load, that is good medicine. I went home last night dosed up and feeling a little lighter. And isn’t that the point?

I have always said that musicians don't look quite photogenic while they're playing, which is why famous players don't put photos of themselves playing on their CD packaging. But I'll humble myself here by posting a photo our principle horn player took of the rest of us prepping before the second half.

Just One More Thing

Apropos of nothing, the song “What Do You Do with A Drunken Sailor” keeps popping into my head. Well, it’s not completely from nowhere—my orchestra will be performing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2 in a few weeks, and my part for the first movement has “Drunken Sailor” notated above one set of rests. If you listen closely, you can hear a hint of the tune in the music.

The question I’m really asking isn’t about drunken sailors, though. It’s about sick cats. What do you do with a sick cat? You put him down. Is that harsh? Yes, it is, but these days, I see no way around such really difficult situations but to approach them harshly, or maybe just frankly. You do what must be done even if you’d rather pass the cup to someone else.

My family has endured a series of very unfortunate events as of late, and just when I thought I had reached my load-bearing limit, I woke up Saturday morning to a sick cat. Tiger was our beloved orange tabby who we have had in our house for 13 years. He once looked like this:

When the girls were younger, around 9 and 12, we went to a Pets Smart on a Saturday because the local humane society adopts out cats and kittens there on weekends. We walked past a row of cages where the kitties were held, and as we approached one, a tiny orange paw reached out and tapped my shoulder. We asked to hold the little tabby kitten, and when I picked him up, he instantly nuzzled under my chin. We’ll take this one! The bottoms of his feet had been hurt, and he was underweight for his presumed age, but he was soon thriving and made himself at home.

We named him Tiger, and he quickly found our old gray cat, Smoky, and sat on him. Tiger has inspired other people to get orange tabbies because he was the sweetest cat ever. He would cry and cry until you picked him up, and then he would wrap his front legs around your neck and hug you like he meant it. Over the last 13 years, you could count on Tiger to welcome you home after a great success or a terrible blow with the same level of delight—if no one in the house would applaud you or comfort you, that cat would step in. He was affectionate and playful and tolerant of big, sloppy dogs who slobbered on his neck and tried to fit his whole head in their mouths. Actually, only one dog ever did that to Tiger.

I loved Tiger more than any other cat I have ever known, and my girls would say the same, I think, and we liked to think of him as immortal. But a year or two ago, Tiger developed a thyroid problem. I put him on a diet of medicated food from the vet, and he improved, but in recent weeks, he began eating less and losing weight, and I could tell he was losing his sight.

Then on Saturday morning when I woke up, I couldn’t find him. I’ve been through this before and knew it as a bad sign. After some searching, I found him hiding in a corner of the basement, and I called the vet. The woman confirmed Tiger was nearly blind at that point—she dropped cotton balls in front of him, and he didn’t track. His temperature was dropping, and his heartbeat was slowing, and she said he was shutting down. We could try medicine and blood tests, but there didn’t seem to be much hope.

I went home with an empty crate, and I have not cried so hard in years. I wasn’t just crying for the cat, of course. As I mentioned, we’ve had a string of tear-worthy events. It’s a puzzle how much a person can stand. I told the vet, through seriously blubbery sobs, that I just could not take one more thing, but I did take it, and I’m here to tell you about it. You just take it, and you figure out a way to stand up tall and hold out your arms for more. I’m hoping there isn’t any more, but that’s not how it works, is it?

Tiger was the best cat ever, and I miss him. I swear I have heard him meowing through the house the way he would when he realized everyone had gone upstairs for the night, but then I shake it off and remind myself that’s impossible. Frankly, it just is.

My Brother-in-Law Phil

Does absence really make the heart grow fonder? Well, as far as it relates to me and my blog, not so much. I almost forgot I had this spot in Blogville, and honestly, Blogville has gone from being a thriving community to a being a ghost town, as far as I can tell. It’s my own fault, really. I’m a neglectful neighbor.

Today, though, I remembered I decided to use this blog as a personal journal to look back on. And today I would like to honor my departed brother-in-law, Phil. He didn’t wake up yesterday. Died in his sleep of natural causes. Phil had a history of heart problems and was a brittle diabetic, so he might have died from a number of things.

My in-laws have been scattered across the States for as long as I have known them. In fact, when Husband and I first started dating, his parents weren’t even living in the States. They were spending six months (or maybe a year?) living in Singapore, and I met them after we had become engaged.

Husband’s three sisters attended our wedding, but there were apparently three brothers living on the west coast whom Husband had not seen for five years. The following summer, the family decided to meet for a reunion, and we all gathered at the parents’ apartment in Pasadena for a week of reacquainting and fun. We went to a Cubs game (not a Dodgers game because we are Cubs fans), Disneyland, Burbank, the beach… There were so many of us that we couldn’t all stay at the apartment, large as it was, but we gathered there every day.

It was during this week that I first met the brothers and their wives and kids. I discovered Phil to be remarkably funny in such an odd way—for example, the bathrooms in this apartment were outfitted with American Standard brand toilets. I walked in one day and found a note on the back of the toilet that read “American Standard might be fine for you, but for me and my family, we’ll stick to the KJV.” No signature. No spectacle. No waiting for a laugh. He had just quietly left a note and walked away.

One evening, there was a bit of a family crisis, as there sometimes is at large family gatherings. Know what I mean? So I decided to lay low, sit quietly on the couch and wait for it to blow over. Phil came over and sat beside me to reassure me and to welcome me to the clan. I don’t believe we saw Phil and his family again until the youngest sister’s wedding a couple of years later. We all met in Illinois for the event, and I made it hanging by a thread, sick as could be with a disagreeable pregnancy, and I lingered in the shadows, hoping not to hurl on the festivities.

We all went en masse to Bob Evans one evening, and as I sat with my bowl of chicken noodle soup (why do I remember what I had ordered?), Phil put his arm around me and said, “Robyn, I love you.” It was the sweetest gesture, meant to heal me, but it threw me because I was not (am not still) accustomed to that sort of thing, so I responded so feebly with, “Thank you.” Really.

Phil was that way, always looking to buck up the one who was down, even resorting to a magic trick he happened to have in his pocket if necessary. And when my mother-in-law was in dire need of someone to live with her so she could escape to the warmth of Florida, he went with her, leaving his children and grandchildren behind in Washington. He watched over her,  made her laugh, allowed her to buy a house on her own, put up with her dog who he was no fan of, made sure she ate and had conversation and humor and company.

Yes, Phil was that way, but he didn’t wake up yesterday, and we are all a little less because of it. Do you ever wonder if you would leave a hole if you were to go away—from work, from town, from the world? If we live rightly, we definitely will leave a hole when we are gone. Phil, dear brother-in-law, your absence has left a hole. And I say quite belatedly, “I love you, too.”

By the way, I chose the photo above, one taken by Phil's daughter Jolena, because it represents Phil so perfectly. Here he sits with his grandchildren while visiting them this past January.

My Mother's Sweater

This is my mother’s sweater, or should I say WAS my mother’s sweater. We stole it.

A couple of years ago, when my sisters and I helped our mother move out of her house and into my sister Karen’s house, we had mountains of clothes to sort through. Mama had a three-bedroom house, and she had clothes in every single closet, including the double cedar-lined one in the basement; and she was moving into a bedroom with one closet. There was definite wardrobe thinning to do.

My mother is one of those Depression-Era people who never got rid of a single thing that passed through her grip. If something came into her possession, it remained in her possession, for decades. That goes for old frying pans that had lost their handles, chipped cereal bowls from a 1970s gas station promotion, old shoes from her years working in an office when every dress had matching pumps and then all of those dresses.

She made a lot of her clothes back in the day, and as a fairly good seamstress, her dresses wore very well. When she compared them to dresses she found on the racks in stores, she doubted the quality of store-bought. She doubted the dye quality of foreign-made clothes, and she flinched at newer styles. “Clothes used to be pretty,” she’d say if you took her shopping.

So, years worth of clothes all crammed into closets and on wire hangers at that. And we thinned. Once in her new digs, we helped our mother find storage space for the clothes she chose to keep (and those we chose on her behalf when she wasn't looking). Karen and I were hanging up things, and I spotted this cool open-weave sweater and admired it right away. Scavengers that we are, we decided my mother never wore it and wouldn’t miss it, but there was more of me then, and I knew the sweater would be too small for me.

Well, time has passed, and there is less of me, and as I was visiting my sister’s house again this past Christmas, she brought out The Sweater. It turned out to be true that our mother never wore it. Plus, she eventually moved into an assisted living unit with even less closet space, and she left that sweater behind. It fit Karen nicely, and she began wearing it, mostly to funerals, she said, but she wondered if I might like it now that it fits me. We live hundreds of miles apart, but now we’re sharing the sweater.

I’d like to say it reminds me of my mother, but I don’t believe I ever saw her wearing it. And I don’t recall she and I ever liking the same styles. In fact, it was when I would point to something interesting in a store that she would say, “Clothes used to be pretty.” If she knew I was wearing something she had once liked—and owned—she’d either doubt the loveliness of the sweater or suggest my tastes have improved. And I'll add, if she knew I often wear her sweater with jeans, she'd be appalled. A strong distaste for all things denim is another side-effect of growing up during the Depression. Mama lived on a farm, and in the 30s and 40s, when she wasn't dressed for school, she was dressed for farm work and had to wear denim overalls to pick cotton or to feed the chickens. Since then, she has hated jeans and never understood why anyone would choose to wear them.

Well, I’m enjoying my turn with The Sweater. I'll eventually give it back to Karen, and someday one of us will give it to Good Will. We aren't from the Depression Era, and to us, clothes—and old pans and broken dishes and tired shoes—have a limited life span.

What does that say about us, I wonder? Hmmm, nothing, I think, except that we don't put too much stock in every single possession because we have plenty. Maybe we have too much, or maybe such a judgment is relative, and as long as we can add a treat like The Sweater to the mix now and then, we might have just enough.

So Many Books!

There are just so many books to read! I’m not thinking in terms of the phrase “so many books and so little time.” I’ve got all the time in the world because I’m not in a race to read books as quickly as possible. I’m content to take them one at a time without a deadline.

I’m thinking in terms of which one will be the next one with full recognition this is a First World dilemma. I’ve got a To-Read shelf in Good Reads, and I’ve got a wish list at Amazon, and there are even other books I’ve heard about but haven’t digitally documented. When I finish reading one book, I look at this shelf and this list and these random titles and debate which to choose, and it seems having these handy tools to help sort through my many choices does not make the choosing any easier.

I’m reading on my iPad mini through a Kindle ap, and as much as I love paper books, the ap is undeniably handy, and it allows me to keep a “stack” of books all in one place. Just by looking at the archive screen, I’ve realized how many books I’ve read in the last year: Swamplandia! By Karen Russell, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, Night Circus, Wyrd Sissters, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Imagine, Jesus Interrupted, The Invention of Air, Fahrenheit 451, Hello Goodbye Hello, The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The Swerve, Dodger, Care of Wooden Floors, Moby Duck, The Woman in White, Bossy Pants.

I had finished reading The Swerve, about the rediscovery of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things and how it affected the coming out of the Dark Ages, and I wondered aloud (and by that, I mean, I posted on Facebook) which book to read next. I listed a few options and then chose one I hadn’t named, Terry Pratchett’s Dodger. Good choice. Dodger is pure delight, fiction but with nods to non-fictional characters from history I found myself reading about on the side. I finished the book quickly and then had another choice to make.

I have been interested in The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, but one mediocre review led me to choose Roosevelt’s You Learn by Living instead. It’s a collection of the first lady’s essays on general life subjects. At first, I was gung ho on the book and highlighted sentence after sentence as I went. Here are a few examples of Roosevelt’s advice that I found helpful:

“Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply to be what is generally called ‘a success.’”

“Unhappiness is an inward, not an outward, thing. It is as independent of circumstances as is happiness. Consider the truly happy people you know. I think it is unlikely that you will find that circumstances have made them happy. They have made themselves happy in spite of circumstances.” 

“If you fail the first time then you’ll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there is no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.” 

“Just stop thinking about yourself.” Wise woman, that Eleanor. But somewhere about half-way through these essays, she lost my interest. Some of her advice came from a dated setting, and she began to repeat herself so much that my mind wandered back to my wish list and what other book I might enjoy more.

You know, having access to digital books is like having a remote control that allows you to immediately change channels. So, I have given up on You Learn by Living for now and switched channels to George Saunders’ Tenth of December, and so far I am not disappointed or distracted or thinking back on the wish list or that Good Reads shelf with tasty looking books to dip into.

It really is a First World problem to fret over which book to read next, knowing you have access to all the world's libraries at a single click—that's how easy it is to book shop impulsively at Amazon or iTunes. Most of the world's population doesn't have it so easy, so I feel a little silly devoting an entire post to this issue. Eleanor Roosevelt would be disappointed, I suspect.

As penance, I'll share this and encourage you to watch the documentary at PBS—it seems reading books is as essential as food, air, and water:

Why I Play

I haven’t written here in my online journal for a couple of weeks because I haven’t had much to say. I don’t keep a paper journal, but if I did, my guess is I wouldn’t crack the spine on it for weeks at a time as well. I’ve begun to look at this blog as a journal, a place to keep a record of life as it happens, and sometimes life happens more slowly than at other times.

Last night, life happened at break-neck speed, and I have something to say about it. The Tuscarawas Philharmonic performed what we called Celtic Cavalcade. The official definition of “cavalcade” is “a procession of vehicles or ships” or “a dramatic sequence or procession.” For this concert, we’ll go with the procession, and we’ll even call it dramatic.

For a few weeks, we’ve been referring to this event as a circus because we included so many guests—a fiddler, a mandolin player, a hammered dulcimer virtuoso, a tenor to break your heart, a pipe and drum band and a team of Irish dancers. Oh, and a full orchestra.

We performed pieces with just the traditional orchestra—the third and fourth movements from Stanford’s Irish Symphony and Malcolm Arnold’s Four Scottish Dances, but most of what we presented included a guest or two…or twenty. About half-way through Davies’ Orkney Wedding, a solo bagpiper was raised from the depths through the stage floor, and he joined us to finish the piece.

A little bit later, an entire pipe and drum band began playing from the lobby, heard just faintly in the hall so that one of the audience members wondered if someone’s cell phone had gone off, but then we began a piece called Marches and Airs composed by our conductor, Eric Benjamin. As we played, the pipers and drummers marched into the hall and met us on stage for a grand presentation that actually made people cry, it was so powerful. The horns were seated in the back row of the orchestra as usual, and I would occasionally look over the heads of the other musicians (and beyond the conductor who I should have been following) to watch the drummers twirl and to admire the full regalia of the pipers. They performed two numbers on their own, and we performed a quick reprise to get them off the stage, and I was choked up by the display.

And all of that was just the first half. The second half included Mark O’Connor’s insightful Strings and Threads performed by our guest fiddler; Liz Langford, a duet by Liz and Jon Estes on mandolin; a piece by Tina Bergmann who is one of the best hammered dulcimer players around; and something by all three. Then they performed one more number upstaged by a pack of Irish dancers with masses of bouncy curls that could put your eye out.

The orchestra came back with the most delicate and innovative arrangement of Danny Boy I have ever heard, and we had the honor of premiering it and acknowledging our conductor as the arranger. Eric went to the trouble because we have discovered a tenor who sings like an angel, Kyle Kelvingston. Kyle began off stage and then slowly walked forward to join us and the fiddle et al, and again, people cried.

And we capped it all off with another of Eric’s pieces, Jigs and Reels. Lining the front of the stage were the dancers again, including a world champion.

Throughout the entire evening, which ran longer than our usual performances, we could count on enthusiastic applause and shouts of “bravo.” And we were honored with an entire house packed with people (that’s over 1,000 souls on board) standing on their feet and cheering at the end. That kind of reception parts your hair, so to speak, but it also reminds you why you practice and fret and lose a finger nail or two and show up for rehearsals and appear on stage in your best black, instrument at the ready.

Okay, in all honesty, playing for audience approval is just one reason we play in the orchestra, and despite how great it feels to receive such approval, it might be the least of the reasons. I’ll speak personally—I play because they let me. Beyond that, I play because working to match the skills required by the music on the page is one of my greatest joys and challenges. Don’t the two often go hand in hand when you match the challenges with hard work? I don’t always reach the bar, but the attempt builds me up in ways that have affected every aspect of my life.

I play because being in the midst of great music, not just as an observer but as a participant, gives me a dopamine fix like nothing else can. Being a part of beauty is the apex of living, I have come to believe. And I play because if I didn’t, I would have such a hole to fill, and I cannot imagine anything that could fill it. I look back on life before playing as lacking some color. If you’re a graphics person and familiar with Photoshop, imagine working with a vibrant, full color image and adjusting the saturation slider a little to the left, just enough to realize something essential is missing. You make the necessary adjustments to make the image complete, and you never want to slide back to the left again.

As I thought about what I might say in this post, I rifled through the mistakes I made, the momentary fears I felt on stage and my regrets—the horns had quite a few rips in this music, screaming up to high notes second horn parts rarely call for, and I only hit about half of them even though I am quite capable of playing them correctly. But none of that matters today. None of it mattered last night either, come to think of it, because what we created on that stage was about the ensemble and the pride we feel when we finish a piece, when the baton is still lingering after a cut off, and we’ve yet to lower our instruments, and we seem to be corporately holding our breath. That single moment of awe, silent after great noise, is the most important moment I can point to. It’s why we—it’s why I—play.

Well, after the concert, we gathered for Guinness and ale at the lobby bar to toast our success. Here is evidence, Conductor Eric in his kilt and I knowing we had just done magic:

Drug Testing the Poor—It's A Puzzle

Just last week, I got a note from someone asking how it is I don’t completely implode from the vitriol and ignorance and hatefulness that gets spewed on Facebook—she assumes I don’t implode—and I told her that I block those posts, or those posters, from my newsfeed. There is more to a person than politics, so by putting a wall between their offensive views and my sensitive disposition, I can still like the person for their other qualities without seeing them with warts and fangs. Besides, sometimes someone can have a differing opinion that isn’t based on ignorance. It’s just different.

But still, I know what she means. There are people who are just unpleasant and negative and arrogant, and they assume everyone else wants to know about their politics because they, of course, are right and point straight to the truth. Those people I don’t mind seeing as is, warts and all.

Otherwise—I’ve noticed lately that some of my friends “like” a post about requiring welfare recipients to be drug tested, and then that action appears on my newsfeed. Now I know which of my friends thinks that way, that poor people should be tested, I assume to prove they are deserving of food and shelter at public expense.

Instead of commenting on Facebook, I’ve decided to respond here. That way my opinions won’t automatically appear in front of people—people will have to actively choose to come here and read what I think.

So, here it is, what I think.

I think that drug testing is a form of searching, as in searching someone’s trunk during a traffic violation stop because you suspect they might have suspicious contraband locked up in there, or as in searching someone’s home because a judge has given you a warrant to look for something that might prove their guilt. We have laws governing how we can be searched so that law enforcement can’t just barge in or pull us over or strip us down for no reason.

What is it that poor people have done to suggest they are guilty of some crime, to justify our needing to search them? What is criminal about being in need and asking for public assistance?

I have known some very responsible, dignified and innocent people who have found themselves in need of public assistance. They are hardworking businessmen or women, church personnel, artists, people of all walks who have been downsized or aged out or just plain fired. So when they suddenly ask for public assistance, I do not understand why it is now acceptable for us to ask them to pee in a cup and to prove they don’t take drugs. We didn’t subject them to this indignity when they were financially self-sufficient.

And what of the welfare recipients who are mentally or physically disabled to the extent they can’t support themselves financially? Being born with a disability or being injured to great extent isn’t enough proof they are deserving of help? And then there are those with severe illnesses who couldn’t afford health insurance, and they have lost everything to cover their medical expenses. That’s just criminal, is it not?

If the issue here is that we are so tight with our public funds, then why don’t we campaign to test everyone who is paid from the general pool? Why aren’t my Facebook friends clamoring to test the governor or the kindergarten teachers or the guy who drives the big street sweeper?

If the issue is something else, if it’s that we generally don’t trust each other, and we especially don’t trust anyone who is weaker than the average, then we have a gaping, festering problem at our core, and it has nothing to do with drugs. It has everything to do with selfishness, vanity and greed.

My post here is full of questions because, honestly, this is a puzzle to me. This is especially a puzzle because so many of the people I know who support drug testing the poor are Christians. So here is another question—how does being suspicious of the poor and requiring them to prove their innocence simply because they are poor fit into the Gospel code of behavior?