Category Archives: Music

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Tuned In

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NaPoWriMo Day #3

Today’s prompt invited me to look up the #1 pop song on my birthday and write a poem inspired by that song.  I could also look up another significant date and use the song associated with that date instead.  I tried my birthday, and then the day that my husband and I always celebrated as the day of our first kiss.  I have to say that the first option won out.  Poems I have written inspired by my love for my husband will have to wait.  Especially since I am posting this in advance (courtesy the techno savvy of my friend Helen) because I am taking my kids to the Museum of Science and Industry for their birthdays today…their 23rd and 25th birthdays (kids never outgrow museums!).   I want to give my husband and the poetry he inspires a bit more time.

The number one hit song on the day that I was born was…..”The Locomotion” by Little Eva. 

I had an immediate association.  Not with the song, specifically.  With a train.  Steve has taken to describing my typical M.O. as “the freight train”.  It has to do with a very focused, linear way of acting.  I get into a task-oriented mode when I’m trying to get something accomplished.  I do not like to get side-tracked when I am operating like that.  I like to streamline and simplify and do one thing after another until the whole bloody thing is finished.  God help you if you get in my way.  That’s what cow catchers are for.  It can be an effective way of doing things.  Steve, however, likes to be “light on his feet”, like a river, like a school of fish, shaped by movement and fluidity.  There are advantages to that, too.  Anyway, it’s one of our points of reference when discussing our differences and trying to achieve compromise.

That’s the back story.  Here’s the poem:

 

Was I born to do this straight-track motion

Or was I just trained?

Was chugging along my very first notion?

Was it always ingrained?

It’s not much of a dance.

It’s not fluid with grace.

There’s not much of a chance

Of a partner to face

When we’re all in a line

Going forward full speed.

Someone’s always behind;

Someone’s always the lead.

So “ev’rybody’s doing it”,

And that may be true.

But, c’mon baby, are you sure it’s for you?

I think this is my moment to jump off the track.

And, no, I’m not asking for my money back.

Was that Scilla that just blew by?!

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Groovin’ on a Sunday Afternoon

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*update from yesterday’s post*  She Speaks commented:

“I found an online petition from the site “Democrats 2012″ titled “Where are the women?”  This petition reads:

‘At a House Oversight Committee hearing, House Republicans convened a panel on denying access to birth control coverage with five men and no women. As Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney asked, “Where are the women?”  Join Leader Pelosi in our call to Speaker Boehner, Eric Cantor, Chairman Issa and all House Republicans to demand that women be allowed at the table when discussing women’s health issues. Help us gather 250,000 signatures.’

Here is the link to sign the petition: http://dccc.org/pages/wherearethewomen

I’ve signed. Please help share this information and encourage everyone you know to sign.”

I’ve signed as well.  Please forward to any US citizens you think would like to add their names. *thank you*

 

Okay, on to All About Me.

So, Steve wakes up this morning singing “Tiny Bubbles” (yes, we do this to each other, sharing whatever our brains mumble out first thing upon waking)  …Don Ho…Hawaii…and I go back to being 10 years old, which was my age when I actually traveled to Hawaii.  My 10-year old self got excited about many things in Hawaii.  I thrilled at the choice of coconut or pineapple syrup on my pancakes because I hate maple syrup.  I spent a good 30 minutes at a picnic stop trying to open a coconut by stomping on it with my sneakers.  I had a camera of my own and could take my own pictures, a Brownie Starmite which yielded snapshots that the drugstore processed with a “bonus snap” of about half the size of the original included on the print and separated by a perforated line.  I eagerly tried to pronounce any Hawaiian word just for the fun of letting the syllables bubble out one after another like waves on the beach.  “King Kamehameha”  “Queen Liliuokalani” “Mele Kalikimaka” “hukilau” “elepani”.  I felt daring and adventurous sliding down a lava tube into a lagoon while my mother hyperventilated on the banks.  And I got to go swimming every day!  One other memory that will always stand out about my trip to Hawaii:  I was often mistaken for a boy.

I had a growing out shag haircut in the spring of 1973.  My mother had made me get my shoulder-length blonde hair cut VERY short for our trip “Out West” the summer before.   She was probably thinking of the convenience and the hot weather.  She also insisted that we wear bathing caps whenever we went swimming.  I got the idea that the prime consideration in hairstyles was not attractiveness, and at the time, I didn’t care.  Much.  I do remember the excruciating moment when I debuted the pixie cut at school for the first time.  I was at before-school choir practice on the verge of tears because I felt so self-conscious.  I was wearing a dress with a Peter Pan collar, my vulnerable neck exposed.  I felt whispers behind me.  Then the girl behind me leaned forward to say something, and I imagined she was about to make a comment on my haircut.  I froze, trembling, with blurry eyes.  Turns out she just wanted to ask what page we were on, but the contact ripped me wide open, and I began to cry.  After that, I got used to it and so did others.  Folks in Colorado couldn’t tell if I were a boy or a girl as I scrambled up rocky mountains with my cousin, Christopher, and it didn’t matter to me.  In Hawaii, my hair was a bit longer, but since it was the 70s, boys were also wearing their hair longer.   My family went to a luau one night.  Each of us was greeted by a hostess with an armful of flowers.  My father got a coconut palm hat placed on his head.  My mother and my three older sisters received a beautiful lei of fragrant orchids.  I couldn’t wait to receive my own exquisite necklace.  But what’s this?  Hey!  Why did you give me just a stupid, green headband!  I’m a GIRL, dammit!  Same thing happened on a boat trip a few days later.  The guide/entertainer picked me out as a model to receive something he was fashioning behind me out of palm leaves.  He probably picked me to keep me from getting bored, to amuse my sisters, or just because I was cute and charismatic…in a unisex kind of way.  He placed a headband with a palm “feather” sticking up in the back on my head.  My sisters howled.

So, before puberty, I didn’t care about being a girl very much.  I played with the boy two doors down every day.  When I was alone, I crossed the street into the forest preserve and played in the bushes.  I enjoyed being physical, roller-skating and jump-roping especially, and I enjoyed “helping” my father at the workbench in the basement.  I was not a complete tom-boy, nor was I a girlie-girl.  I was just me, and I was fine.  Then I hit high school at 14 in a brand new state, California.  My mother decided we all should have a lesson on wearing make-up, so we had a Mary Kay consultant visit the house.  I began putting on make-up and styling my hair every day before school.  I also began flirting and listening to “funky” music.  I began to find my groove.

Jim & Me gettin' our groove on for a 60s themed birthday party

As an adult, I think it would be a revelation to have a conversation with two people from my past especially.  One would be the boy I played with every day in grade school, the other would be my first high school boyfriend of more than 2 months.  Both of these boys are now homosexual adults, I’ve since learned.  I would love to ask them what growing up felt like for them, what our relationship taught them about themselves, but sadly, we lost touch long ago.

Finding my groove in high school led me to two of my greatest expressions of freedom and physicality: dance and jazz.  I love to dance.  I have taken dance lessons, and I find that I am way too much “in my head” when I’m trying to learn steps and choreography.  What I really love is just to free-style to anything with a back beat.  Blues, tango, rumba, pop school dances, jazz.  I auditioned and got into our high school jazz choir and loved the freedom of improvisation and the soulful feel of the slower pieces we did.  From high school, I went on to get a degree in Vocal Performance at a women’s college.  I didn’t do any jazz or dancing in those years.  I was trying to be more *ahem*, serious about music.

Steve has a very serious music collection, but on Friday, he picked up something from Goodwill’s CD collection with me in mind.  It’s “The Fabric of Life” by The Nylons.  They’re usually about 4-part a capella vocal jazz, but this CD has percussion and instrumentals as well.  He put it on at breakfast, and I had to get out of my chair and dance!  It felt great!!  My heart rate climbing, my hips swiveling, my shoulders shimmying, my waist stretching and slimming and twisting…I felt alive, physical, ME!  Maybe I’m getting closer to understanding how to live in my own skin after all.

I think many women have a long journey to being themselves.  It’s easier when you’re 10, I think.  It gets pretty complicated through puberty and socialization.  Maybe now as I get closer to hitting 50, I can grow into my own groove, be funky and fine and all me.   I wish I knew more of my gay friends’ journeys as well.  I want to be compassionate to every human and their story of growth.

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The Cycle is Complete

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I have just returned from spending 6 hours at a modern multiplex movie theater.  Hate the glitz, the ads and especially the totally incongruous pre-show music.  I was there to see the HD simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and last installment of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  If you’ve never learned anything about opera or Wagner before, I must encourage you to at least read up on it.  This was my first time getting the whole story and the whole score into my head.  I’d heard from my parents about how looooong the operas are.  I’d heard snatches of the music, even parodied by Elmer Fudd (“I shot the wabbit…”).  I’d heard about Wagnerian sopranos and sniggered at breastplates and horned helmets (hasn’t everyone?).   I was not expecting to be emotionally gripped and wrung out on an epic and divine scale, though.  The psychology is deeply moving.  The music supports it as cinematically and sumptuously as may be humanly possible.  The live action, singing and acting, is absolutely intense.  Seeing it with close up camera shots accentuates the intimacy, but it may take away from some of the total experience.  For this production, the set was designed by Robert Lepage of Cirque du Soliel.  It features a monstrous hydrolic machine which often distracts during the quieter instrumental passages as it whirrs and chunks into new positions.  Nevertheless, I was spellbound.  Particularly, I think, because I found myself identifying with Brünnhilde so painfully, on so many levels.   I’ve  been left sobbing at the ending of each of the four operas. 

Yes, I’m a bit of a drama queen.  I was a Voice Performance major in college and spent the last 7 years working for a theater company.  I can really get into live performances.  I put myself into the skin of the lead soprano every time.  But that’s just surface kinship.  Like Brünnhilde, my father was a god (in my eyes, at least, for a very long time), and I did everything I could to please him and do the right thing.  I ended up disappointed, my sister ended up banished, and the betrayal felt very real.  I left my father’s protection and fell in complete and holy love with a hero, a demi-god to many people.  He was duped and taken from me by a fatal disease.  I felt the anger, the confusion, the crushing grief and vowed to put the pieces together and learn the truth.  It took all my strength to face the facts, give up the ring of power, and stand for love.  I want to believe that in the end, greed, envy and the renunciation of love will sink down to the bottom of the river and that true friendship and faithful love will rise up.   So when our heroine mounts her trusty steed and rides into the funeral pyre with the ring on her finger and all of Valhalla (the gods’ palace) burns up and is engulfed in the flood of the Rhine and the ring finally returns to the river maidens, I experience an emotional catharsis that draws from a deep well of tears. 

Brava, Debra Voigt!!!

Drove home in below freezing temperatures, dove under the blankets in my bedroom and looked out the frosty window at this sunset:

It’s like Valhalla is still burning.  Will we ever learn?  At the end of the world, will love win?  The shamans of the Romantic era are telling us it’s possible.  Dare I believe?

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Happy Chinese New Year, Happy Magic Flute, Happy Ethiopian restaurant

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I just got back from my visit to Chicago to see my youngest child, take her to the Lyric Opera, eat dinner and sleep over.  Had a grand time, and stashed my camera in my purse so that I could share the event on this post.  So, here are the characters:

Scillagrace, actually wearing make-up and a new scarf from the Fair Trade store

 

...and Mema, who is always too fabulous for words

 

And here is the Lyric Opera House in Chicago….

Grand staircase with gold banisters and red carpet

Iconic fire-proof curtain screen

Theatrical gold chandeliers

Patrons people-watching over the balcony

The matinee performance of Die Zauberflote (imagine 2 dots over that ‘o’) attracts a younger audience and satisfies the anticipation of spectacle by including plenty of flashy pyro effects, disappearances through the trap door, animal costumes, flying and gliding set pieces with people on them, and all that good fun.  The hyper-vengeful Queen of the Night was a tad disappointing.  Her famous raging aria was not always on pitch (actually sharp on a high D!) or facile in the fast passages.  She’s a younger singer, not as seasoned.  Pamina was exquisite, however, showing superb control in her dolce pianissimo.  Mema felt the chills!  And Papageno was an expert clown as well as a spot-on baritone who had the audience eating out of his hand.  Bravi tutti!  On to dinner…

A little Ethiopian restaurant with only 8 people in it besides us.  I’ve never eaten authentic Ethiopian food before.  It is served without utensils.  You break off pieces of the spongy, sour flat bread (injera) and grab the spiced food with that.  I ordered a lamb stew; Mema had a vegetarian platter which took up half the table!  Five different spiced vegetable dishes on one huge round of injera: squash, green beans, mushrooms, chick peas, and salad.

The injera is sort of like a damp rag...but tastier

Delicious, and new!  Toddled off to Mema’s apartment to get into comfy clothes, cuddle the cat, watch a video of my late husband (her dad) singing a recital, have a few drinks and a good, cathartic cry before going to bed in the king-sized cushy bed that used to be mine….

I love my daughter, as a person as well as a family member.  I love that we can talk honestly about everything, share on the deepest level, feel genuine affection for each other, and play together!

One thing I noted, however; nighttime in the city is noisy!   The elevated train rumbles by, rattling the brick building; the floors sag and creak when anyone walks through the apartment; the cat purrs loudly next to my ear.   So, now that I am back home, I’m going to take a nap!  Toodles….

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Stressed for Success?

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My very astute sister once pointed out to me that all stress is not created equal.  There’s daily stress, the normal result of a body functioning without rest for 16 hours or so, which is alleviated after 8 hours of sleep.  There’s distress, which gives us the feeling of being overwhelmed or upset by the amount of stress we experience, and then there’s eustress, which according to Wikipedia is “a term coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye which is defined…as stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feeling. Eustress is a process of exploring potential gains.”  Examples of eustress could include climbing a mountain, running a marathon or sky-diving.  Or surviving a nautical disaster.

I was intrigued by a comment I read from one of the survivors of the cruise ship, Costa Concordia, that sank in the Mediterranean this past week.   ABC News reported:

‘Australian miner Rob Elcombe and his wife, Tracey Gunn, told Melbourne’s Herald Sun Newspaper they booked a spot on the Concordia as a last ditch effort to save their marriage.  Instead, the couple found themselves trying to save their lives when they boarded the very last lifeboat to leave the ship with survivors. “This has made our bond much, much stronger,” Elcombe told the paper. “Who needs couples counseling, when you survive a Titanic experience?” ‘

An adventure.   Stress worked into a feeling of gain.  Is it possible to turn your distress into eustress?

Peace like a river

Another news story I ran across came under this headline: Wife Slips Into Madness As Husband Dies of Brain Tumor. (ABC News)  Catherine Graves wrote a book called Checking Out: An In Depth Look At Losing Your Mind describing the distress of caring for her husband.  The headline rather sensationalizes an experience of overwhelming stress that is shared by a lot of people who find themselves in the role of caregiver.  I can relate.  I went through depression and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome during my husband’s illness and after his death.  Like Mrs. Graves, I was widowed at 45.  But did I lose my mind?  Not irretrievably, I don’t think.  Maybe what I’m doing now, being unemployed, slowing down, is my way of turning that distress into eustress.

There’s an old hymn that I’ve affectionately heard referred to as “The Playtex Hymn” (after the girdle).  The first line is “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in His excellent Word”.   It was written by John Keith in 1787.  My favorite verse goes like this:

“When through the deep waters I cause thee to go,
The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;
For I will be with thee thy trouble to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.”

For some reason, singing that verse always causes me to choke up with emotion.  I know how it is to feel like I’m drowning.  I have a gasp reflex that reminds me of this almost daily.  It shows up lightning fast in moments when my reptilian brain senses danger.  It first became noticeable when I was trying to teach my kids to drive.  I would gasp and grab the handle above the passenger side door at the slightest correction of the steering wheel or touch of the brake.  It happened to me again just this morning.  I was stacking packages on the table and the tower toppled over.  I gasped.  “I must be drowning!” I laughed.  It’s probably a rather annoying habit for those who live with me.   I appreciate their patience.

There’s another hymn that follows this theme.  “It Is Well With My Soul” was written by Horatio Spafford in 1873.  The story behind it is quite amazing.  In brief, according to Wikipedia:

“This hymn was written after several traumatic events in Spafford’s life. The first was the death of his only son in 1871 at the age of four, shortly followed by the Great Chicago Fire which ruined him financially (he had been a successful lawyer). Then in 1873, he had planned to travel to Europe with his family on the SS Ville du Havre, but sent the family ahead while he was delayed on business concerning zoning problems following the Great Chicago Fire. While crossing the Atlantic, the ship sank rapidly after a collision with a sailing ship, and all four of Spafford’s daughters died. His wife Anna survived and sent him the now famous telegram, “Saved alone . . .”. Shortly afterwards, as Spafford traveled to meet his grieving wife, he was inspired to write these words as his ship passed near where his daughters had died.”

And here’s the lyric:

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

I am trying to re-train my brain to believe that my deepest distress can be sanctified.  I don’t think this is an exclusively Christian perspective at all.  The Noble Truths of Buddhism are all about addressing the suffering (distress) of this world and how we think about it.   I hope that as I “explore potential gains”, my drowning will become floating, and all will be well with my soul.

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Friday the 13th – Rats!

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My daughter added a tidbit of info to my post a few days ago, stating that rats giggle and tickle each other.  I had to check that out and share it with you.  I found that the video at the bottom of that article didn’t work for me, so here’s a youtube clip of Dr. Jaak Panksepp playing with rats.  This is quite a happy little video of some well-behaved rates having a frolic in a nice, clean glass cage lined with AstroTurf.  I had quite a different picture of rats in my head this week.  I grabbed a book to bring to the laundromat on Monday; it happened to be a volume of selected short fiction by Charles Dickens.  I flipped to an entry called “Nurse’s Stories”.  These are not hospital accounts or memorials to field workers bringing medical aid, as I had imagined.  These are the nightmare-inducing tales that young Charles’ nanny told him!  He writes:

“The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember–as a sort of introductory overture–by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it, and indeed commanded the awful chalice to my lips as the only preservative known to science against ‘The Black Cat’–a weird and glaring-eyed supernatural Tom, who was reputed to prowl about the world by night, sucking the breath of infancy, and who was endowed with a special thirst (as I was given to understand) for mine.

This female bard–may she have been repaid my debt of obligation to her in the matter of nightmares and perspirations!–reappears in my memory as the daughter of a shipwright. Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”

He then relates the tale of a family of shipwrights, all named Chips, who sold their souls to the Devil “for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak”.   This speaking rat, and a cohort of his friends, bedevils poor Chips, at last sinking the ship he crews.  In the end,

“And what the rats–being water-rats– left of Chips, at last floated to shore, and sitting on him was an immense overgrown rat, laughing, that dived when the corpse touched the beach and never came up. And there was a deal of seaweed on the remains. And if you get thirteen bits of seaweed, and dry them and burn them in the fire, they will go off like in these thirteen words as plain as plain can be:

‘A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I‘ve got Chips!’

So that’s what I was thinking of when I heard about giggling rats.  And then Steve played a selection from a Schubert CD that’s made my blood run cold since I first heard it in college: Der Erlkönig.  The combination of narrative song and piano accompaniment is genius, as you’d expect with Schubert (who is Steve’s absolute favorite composer).  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is a master at putting this German ghost story across.  You’ve gotta see this.

So, if you’re not creeped out by now and looking over your shoulder for rats and elves, then enjoy the rest of your Friday the 13th in blissful peace!

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Give Us This Day

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The temperature is finally dropping and the snow is falling.  I’m rather in the mood to be snowed in; it’s been a long time coming.  The anticipation of winter without the actual characteristics is a little unsettling.  What would you think if your region just “skipped” a season?  What do the animals think?  “Do we fly north now, or not?”  “Is it time to wake up?”  Migratory animals get confused by light pollution.  I’m sure a host of species are getting confused about climate change.  But then again, they probably don’t worry like us humans.  They adapt.  Or they don’t.  They take it one day at a time, looking for warmth and shelter and food just like every day.

Daily living, daily choices, daily bread.  What do you learn from now?

In the eclectic jumble of my brain, a song is emerging.  “For Now” from the musical, Avenue Q (Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx).

PRINCETON: Why does everything have to be so hard?
GARY COLEMAN: Maybe you’ll never find your purpose.
CHRISTMAS EVE: Lots of people don’t.
PRINCETON: But then- I don’t know why I’m even alive!
KATE MONSTER: Well, who does, really? Everyone’s a little bit unsatisfied.
BRIAN: Everyone goes ’round a little empty inside.
GARY COLEMAN: Take a breath, Look around,
BRIAN: Swallow your pride,
KATE MONSTER: For now…
NICKY: Nothing lasts,
ROD: Life goes on,
NICKY: Full of surprises.
ROD: You’ll be faced with problems of all shapes and sizes.
CHRISTMAS EVE: You’re going to have to make a few compromises…For now…
LUCY: For now we’re healthy.
BRIAN: For now we’re employed.
BAD IDEA BEARS: For now we’re happy…
KATE MONSTER: If not overjoyed.
PRINCETON: And we’ll accept the things we cannot avoid, for now…
ALL: But only for now! (For now)…
Only for now! (For now there’s life!)
Only for now! (For now there’s love!)
Only for now! (For now there’s work!)
For now there’s happiness! But only for now!
(For now discomfort!) Only for now!
(For now there’s friendship!) Only for now!

(Sex!) Is only for now!

(Your hair!) Is only for now!

(George Bush!) Is only for now!
Don’t stress, Relax,
Let life roll off your backs
Except for death and paying taxes,
Everything in life is only for now!
NICKY: Each time you smile…
ALL:…Only for now
KATE MONSTER: It’ll only last a while.
ALL:…Only for now
PRINCETON: Life may be scary…
ALL:…Only for now. But it’s only temporary
PRINCETON: Everything in life is only for now.

I saw Buddhists discoursing in a documentary by Werner Herzog once.  Periodically, they would clap their hands together like crashing cymbals.  I was told that was a symbolic gesture aimed at bringing the speaker and listener into the present moment, no matter where the conversation was going.  For NOW!…..and NOW!

This breath…is only for now.  These words…are only for now.  I appreciate now, right now.

 

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The Rose

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I think I have a pretty active dream life.  I usually remember something of my sleeping hours upon awakening.  Perhaps that indicates the level of my anxieties and neuroses; I’m not sure.  Steve says he hardly ever dreams, and he thinks it’s because he is so aware of his conscious mind while he’s awake.  Well, fine for you, then.  I blink my eyes open and forget where I am.  I need decompression time every morning.  My dreams almost always include my late husband, who has been dead almost 4 years.  It gives me a rather fluid sense of reality.  Jim is real and Steve is real, they’re just never real at the same time, in the same place.  Is that weird?  Oh, probably.  I’m getting used to it.

The other thing I do in dreamland is sing.  I wake up singing a song, or with a song stuck in my head.  This morning, it was “The Rose”, a song Bette Midler recorded some years back.  I think I learned it from one of my kid’s elementary school music programs. The line I was stuck on went like this: “Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed.  Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.  Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need.  I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed.”

Now why in the world would something like that be dominating my waking transition?  I thought about that for a while.  Then I began to cry.  This is how I know when I’ve hit on some repressed emotion, some way that I think about myself that I don’t like to admit.  For some reason, I was associating with that tender reed, drowned in a river of love.  I was 15 when I met my husband, 21 when we married, 45 when I was widowed.  My youth was engulfed in loving him.  I don’t feel a great resonance with the bleeding soul bit.  Ah, but the hunger, the aching need; yeah, that gets to me, too.  I feel that for my kids as well.  I call it “yearning”.  I yearn for my kids all the time, no matter where they are.  It’s a visceral thing.  I once learned in a Bible study that there is a Hebrew word for God’s loving-kindness that translates to a verb form of the same word that’s used for a mother’s womb.  Womb-love.  God “wombs” us.  I “womb” my kids.  I also “womb” my dead husband.

Now the last line of that first verse, I will take exception to.  “You, its only seed” just sounds too exclusive and attached.  It doesn’t fit the scope of the rest of the song, either, in my opinion.  Second verse: “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; and it’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.  It’s the one who won’t be broken, who cannot learn to give; and the soul afraid of dying who never learns to live.”  Okay, you could probably guess that verse gets to me all over (see yesterday’s post).  Although, in my case, it’s the heart that once danced, the dream that once dared, the one who gave everything already who is afraid to live again and invest all that…again.  So, here’s the key change and the big finish: “When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring becomes the rose.”   At this point, I want to give credit to Amanda McBroom who wrote these lyrics.  Good job.  I love the idea of seeds beneath the snow.  It appeals to the naturalist in me, even though we STILL don’t have any snow this winter in Wisconsin.  I love the idea of hope and new life.  And this is where I get to re-write that last line in the first verse.  The seed of love isn’t a person.  It’s LIFE, life itself.

Steve and I were talking about this yesterday as we drove out to hike the Ice Age trail.  He was urging me, again, to talk about what I want in life, how I want to live, why I want the things I might want.  “Why do you want to have land and grow food?”  I want to nurture living things; I loved raising kids.  I loved because they lived.  I want to live life loving.  Whatever I do.  It’s a cyclical thing, the flower that comes from a seed and begets more seeds that become more flowers.  Life begets love which nourishes life…and so on.  Okay, maybe this is sounding like drivel to you.  There is something going on here, though, and it’s about a flow of energy passing from living thing to living thing, and some of us call it love.  I don’t like the idea of that energy being confined to one “beloved”.  That’s where I think I’m getting stuck.  I say love, it is a flower and all of life can be its seed.

There.  Sorry Amanda, but I have re-worked your song so that it fits my dreaming and waking life a little better.  Hope you don’t mind.

Unknown's avatar

I’ve Got Music

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How to unwrap this truly spectacular gift?  It pulsates and glows and pulls you in, as your heart resonates and your soul throbs.  Music received and believed regenerates like faith.  I cannot think that it is merely a human construct, yet I cannot prove the music of the heavenly spheres.  Is it invented?  Is it natural?  Is it free?  Perhaps it is everything.

All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!  ~Thomas Carlyle

Without music life would be a mistake.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.  ~Edward Elgar

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.  ~Victor Hugo

Is there a culture on earth without music?  Rhythm: sound and silence are as basic as biology.  Heartbeat, breath.  Melody is anything with a voice.  Do animals make music?  Do plants?  Does the earth itself sing?  Sound waves flood space.  Is that music?

Does music have an important part in your life, in your living?

Steve has a mental invention: “the sound pack”.  He imagines carrying around a device that would provide a soundtrack to your life as you live it, matching music to your moods and experiences.  It differs from an iPod in that it is all original music.  Of course, he hasn’t actually built a prototype. I have never gotten into the habit of wearing ear buds and listening to music constantly.  My arachnoid cyst would probably explode if I did.  It’s more comfortable for me to take my music in without other distractions, especially as the white noise in my head increases.  Imagine that you lived 200 years ago, before recorded sound.  What place would music have in your life then?

Chicago Master Singers publicity photo - Jim at upper left

I sing to myself when I drive, making up lines and verses as I go along, like the Spirituals of the south, especially if I’m anxious.  Driving up to Steve’s house from Illinois, I’d get off the Interstate at Swan Blvd and hum, “Here I am on a street like a long-necked bird…”, the murmur of a bluesy minor key calming my nerves.  I would sing to my little brother on the drive home from the beach when he was a boy.  He’d be asleep by the time we reached the driveway, damp head on my shoulder.   I loved singing to him.  When he was an infant, I would reach into his crib and lift his sleeping body so that I could take him to the rocking chair and sing him back to sleep again. 

Of course, I sang to my own children.  And they sang back.  Harmony is an amazing satisfaction.  I am looking forward to my kids visiting me on Christmas Eve.  I’m hoping we can take a stroll around the neighborhood and trot out some of our favorite carols….and maybe some Beetles.   Have you ever heard people singing in the streets?  Do you look up in delight?  Wonder why they seem so happy?  I do. 

One morning, I awoke to the sound of my sweetheart singing beneath my window.  “Michelle, ma belle, Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble….”  Instead of the melody, though, it was the baritone part of a barbershop arrangement.  Didn’t matter.  It was in French and warmed by a May breeze.  I opened my window and drank it in. 

I have not experienced oneness with an instrument except my own voice.  I am truly impoverished by that fact, I think.  I did buy a harmonica this year with high hopes, but I am just too impatient.   My mother-in-law was a concert pianist.  My mother is an accomplished accompanist as well.  I wish that I had been more disciplined and practiced the piano more.  I wish that I had spent more time with the guitar, too.  I suppose having a good voice tempts you to be lazy in that way.  If Jascha Heifetz could sing, would he have been the violinist that he was?

What if we required our politicians to be experienced ensemble musicians?  Would they come to office with a better understanding of unity, of teamwork, of collaborative leadership?  Imagine a string quartet of President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Majority Leader practicing long hours together on an Adagio by Schubert.  Perhaps the entire country would be in better shape.

 

Unknown's avatar

Do You Hear What I Hear?

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“A song, a song, high above the trees with a voice as big as the sea, with a voice as big as the sea.”

As a little girl in chorus, I loved that Christmas piece.  There was something majestic and homey about the conversation passing from the night wind to the mighty king.  I liked the imagery of the sky and the little lamb and the star with a tail as big as a kite.  I sang it with all the passion I could muster at the age of 9.

Today’s gift on the parade of days in December is hearing.  Sound.  What are your favorite sound memories?  What’s the first thing you enjoy hearing in the morning?  How do sounds change your mood?

Today I woke up to the sound of chickadees outside my window.  The sun was shining through the frost making rainbow diamonds of pink and green.  I tried to take a picture of it, but the colors didn’t come out.  I realized that even when I put my glasses on, the prism effect disappeared.  I Googled “frost” images, and none of them have the colors that I can see with my naked eye.  I wonder if the lens thing destroys the refraction?  Okay, that’s a sight digression.  Sight was yesterday.  Today, I want to concentrate on sound.

It’s funny how you can be totally familiar with a sound and not even know that it’s in your repertoire.  For instance, I can sit upstairs in bed while Steve goes down to the kitchen to make a snack, and I can figure out exactly what he’s fixing, just by listening.  My kids used to hate this skill.  “How did you know that I was doing that?”  Sneaking snacks, tiptoeing out the front door, playing music on your headphones when you should be sleeping, they all have a particular set of sounds.  Even silence.  Silence to a mother with toddlers communicates alarm louder than a French siren.

Favorite sounds from childhood: the ice cream truck (why do they always play The Entertainer by Scott Joplin?) is a cliche.  I’ve got one: the sound of my mother calling us in for dinner with an alto yodel at a major third interval.  I was the most embarrassed kid on the block.  Couldn’t we have had a bell or a triangle or something that wasn’t her voice?  Okay, in all fairness, the sound of her singing Brahms lullaby to me at night made up for that.  “Lullaby and goodnight, with roses bedight (archaic form of ‘bedecked’, I suppose), with lilies o’er spread is baby’s wee bed.  Lay thee down now and sleep, may thy slumber be deep; lay thee down now and rest, may thy slumber be blessed.”  Or her other standard: “Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening steal across the sky.  Jesus gives the weary calm and sweet repose, with his tend’rest blessings may thine eyelids close.”  “Night-night, d’good girl”, she would always say, kiss me on the forehead and tuck me in before tiptoeing out of the room.

Music; have I had music in my life!  I am a walking encyclopedia of silly camp songs that crop up at the most mundane cue.  I am still learning to be as familiar with “serious music”.  Even after attaining a BA in music, I have to say that I feel I know very little about classical instrumental music.  This is where Steve is educating me.  He began collecting albums as a teenager and can cite off the top of his head how many symphonies, concertos, operas and other works were composed by a plethora of artists.  As a voice performance major, I know more about songs.  I even make orchestral works into songs, mnemonic devises to help me remember the composer.  “Sergei Prokofiev could barely read the treble clef until he was past 47” sung to Peter’s theme from Peter & the Wolf, for instance.   (I got that from a book, actually.  I didn’t make it up.  But you get the idea.)

White noise.  There’s a scene in Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris” where they tape strips of paper over the air vents of their space station to simulate the sound of rustling leaves.  Noise that makes you feel at home.  The elevated train down the block.  Sirens.  Owls.  Coyotes.  The dishwasher.  I have my own white noise going constantly in my head.  I’ve had it since 2005.  It’s called an arachnoid cyst.  So I am a bit hard of hearing, but not so’s you’d notice, really.  Except when Steve mumbles something in his low register.  “Did I fake a rainbow trout? No?  Oh, ‘did I take the garbage out’!”  I can live with it.

My favorite sounds, off the top of my head:  Susan’s voice saying, “Hiiii, Maamaa!” on the other end of the phone.  The whistle of a cardinal.  A barbershop quartet.  “Unforgettable” crooned by Emily.  Josh and Becca laughing.  The pop of a cork from a bottle.  Coyotes and hoot owls and wind.  Red-winged blackbirds.  The loon at Woodbury Lake.  My mother’s voice.  Church bells.  The bell of mindfulness.  Frogs: spring peepers to be exact.  I hear them every year.  They’re deafening, practically, but I can never SEE one!  It’s a taunt.  One day, I’ll get lucky.

What is music to your ears?  Tomorrow, we’re off to the Lyric again for Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos”.  That’ll be some music.  Then we’re having dinner with Emily at an Algerian crepe restaurant.  Can you guess what the gift will be for that day?