Scout Moves

This photo is borrowed from a friend who was seated in the audience. You won't be able to spot me here—I'm perfectly framed by the top of the red drape but camouflaged by the base drum. I swear, that thing was so forceful at one point, my hair actually moved with the sound waves. Weird. My orchestra performed one hell of a concert last night. I was going to say "heck," but the situation calls for a full-blown cuss. We inaugurated the new performing arts center with the first concert of our season, and we did it the right way—very well. The hall seats 1,100, and all tickets sold out days before the performance. We opened with Beethoven's Consecration of the House, which the horn section transposed. It has never been made clear to me exactly why, but composers used to write horn parts in keys other than F on occasion, and now modern-day horn players have to transpose on the spot. If the note on the page is an F, for example, we actually play a lower C. If it's ...

In today's edition of Small Town Newspaper: My county's branch of Kent State University has built a beautiful new performing arts center, and my orchestra will inaugurate it this coming Saturday with our first performance of the season. We'll be playing fun little pieces with acrobats performing a trapeze act above our heads. We'll be playing a lovely concerto with a guest pianist. And we'll generally be playing our hearts out in a brand new hall as if it were built just for us. It wasn't, actually, because they've got all kinds of performances on the schedule, but it does seem to suit us very well. Here is today's column in response: The new performing arts center at Kent State Tuscarawas is about to open to an awaiting public, and I’m hanging high hopes on its success. The building is a promising jewel on so many levels, and adding it to our community is something for which we can all be proud. It isn’t just a structure on a plot of land like our other...

A couple of weeks ago while I was visiting my mother in Georgia, I took some time to see the details of her guest room where I stayed. My mother is going to be moving in with one of my sisters after Christmas, and she's thinking about what to take and what to leave behind. The plan is to rent her house out to missionaries who return to the States for a kind of temporary furlough, so she won't need to completely move out, just take the essentials and the things she can't stand to part with. As I looked around the room, these are a few things I found that I would keep. They have no real monetary value, but they hold generations of family history, and they remind me of childhood visits to my grandparents' house. Older people keep their houses as warm as an oven. It's not just toasty in there. It's a toaster. My bed was layered with blankets, and this is one of them, a quilt my mother has had for as long as I can remember: This is a braided rug my grandmother made f...

I got to do something really fun last night, even if it didn't last very long. Here's what happened: A few weeks ago, I got a letter in the mail (actually delivered to my mailbox) asking if I'd provide music for a local event. Every year, our hospital auxiliary hosts a Christmas tree festival at a wood carver's museum in Small Town. Groups decorate artificial trees and wreaths, display them at the museum and sell them as a fund raiser for the auxiliary. It's a lovely thing because the trees are all really well done—some are classic, some themed with things like toys or footballs (really) and some are just fun. The event lasts for about a week, and musicians provide background music in hour-long segments while people stroll room by room and ooh and aah over festive trees. Well, I couldn't imagine sitting in the corner and playing my horn all by myself, so I called a couple of friends and asked if they'd like to revive our trio we used to form. They would, th...

This is in today's edition of Small Town Newspaper : Today is America Recycles Day, set aside to encourage us to recycle more than we already do and to make a point of buying more products made from recycled material. If there’s one thing we’re all good at, it’s buying more products. Even in a recession, or something that feels like one at least, we are known as a nation of consumers, and our voracious appetite has left us with a glut of trash. Recycling household trash has become increasingly efficient and economical, but it will take more to change our disposable culture into one that values all of its resources. Fortunately, some innovative people have figured out ways to reuse our trash, and while their craftiness is just a drop in the landfill, it does show we’re beginning to rethink our throw-it-out ways. People turn old bottles into decorative lamps, spent wine barrels into planters and nubby T-shirts into reusable shopping bags. Candy wrappers become purses, old tires becom...

It seems inappropriate to precede Veteran's Day with a word like "Happy," like it's your birthday or something, so I thought it would be best just to point out the day is today. Veteran's Day. Armistice Day. Remembrance Day. The end of World War I. I was sent on assignment yesterday for a Small Town Newspaper article, and I found myself in a Catholic school cafeteria full of veterans all eat spaghetti served by students in uniform. (Sometimes I type a sentence and read it back to myself and think I could never make this stuff up. That last sentence is one of them.) The school hosts veterans for lunch every year, and then they have a program to honor them. My job was to talk to as many as I could and then sit through a presentation delivered by a historian who portrays Gen. George S. Patton, so I went looking for WWII vets who might have been under Patton's command. I found a few, and they were so gracious and willing to talk to me. My father was in North Afric...

My mother will turn 85 tomorrow, so my family hosted a grand party for her this past Saturday at my sister Karen's house in Georgia. Most of my family lives near there, so it was a convenient spot. We arranged for an open house to run from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, and we thought people would come and go as they tend to do at open houses, but they all came at once and stayed the entire two hours. It was lovely, especially for my mother who enjoyed being the center of attention, surrounded by her lady friends. There were nearly 30 people there, including the hosts—Karen, my sister Myra, my niece-in-law Hannah, and me. We have another sister, Melanie who lives in Chicago, but she wasn't able to make it. This was a lovely southern ladies' event. We hired a caterer to make what we probably would have made ourselves—tea sandwiches (open-faced cucumber, pimento and cheese, chicken salad), crab dip, fruit and cheese, spanakopita, ham biscuits with black pepper and honey. We also ha...

In today's edition of Small Town Newspaper: As a volunteer at the Greater Dover-New Philadelphia Food Pantry, I have been assigned different jobs each week. One time I might hand out bags of onions and potatoes, and then another maybe some sweet peppers or apple juice. But recently, I was assigned an unexpected job—I was to ask a specific question of each person in line and have him or her write the answer on a paper plate. The exercise was part of the Ohio Paper Plate Campaign, a program sponsored by HARCATUS* and the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks. Plates loaded with personal messages from food bank recipients around the state will be gathered and sent to state legislators to impress upon them the importance of funding for food bank programs. The question I asked was this: what does food mean to you? Being in a slight hurry, a few respondents quickly stated the obvious, that food is a necessity, and it keeps their bellies full. Some recognized food as a source of co...

My mother is about to turn 85 years old. Her birthday is next Thursday, Veteran's Day, but we can't celebrate in the middle of the week, so tomorrow, my sisters and I will be hosting an open house in her honor. Most of my family lives near Atlanta, so I'll be flying down there later today, and I'll be sleeping in my mother's guest room for a few days. It's furnished with my grandmother's four-poster bed and matching dressers, lace curtains and a braided rug made by my grandmother years and years ago. She used scraps from her sewing to make rugs for every room in the house. My sister, Karen, who lives near my mother, is opening up her house for the party, and since she's invited nearly 30 women, we're doing an open house instead of a more formal sit-down affair. We're all capable of making food for this sort of thing, but we decided to give ourselves a break and have it catered, complete with a traditional coconut cake. I've got to tell you, a...

As part of my Autumn in the Kitchen festival, I looked for recipes that use pumpkin puree. I made a loaf of pumpkin chocolate chip bread that was wonderful, and then I found this recipe for pumpkin scones meant to be like Starbucks scones. I've never had these scones at Starbucks, so I can't compare, but I love these and plan on making them again. Enjoy. 2 cups all-purpose flour 7 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger 6 tablespoons cold butter 1/2 cup canned pumpkin 3 tablespoons half-and-half 1 large egg Powdered Sugar Glaze 1 cup powdered sugar 1 tablespoon powdered sugar 2 tablespoons whole milk Spiced Glaze 1 cup powdered sugar 3 tablespoons powdered sugar 2 tablespoons whole milk 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1 pinch ginger 1 pinch ground cloves Directions: Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Li...

Yes, I voted yesterday, and I'm glad I did. I spoke my piece in national politics. OK, granted I actually voted earlier by mail, but my vote counted just the same. Also, all of my candidates lost—my local representative, my senator, and my governor. I'm not really surprised by any of this, but I still couldn't bring myself to watch it play out on cable news. Last night while Husband watched the election coverage in one room, I watched Oklahoma in another, and I sang all the songs out loud because they make me so happy. Rod Steiger was a stinking, dirty, repulsive character, but he sang so beautifully in his duet with Gordon MacRae. "It's a shame that he won't keep, but it's summer, and we're running out of ice"—one of my favorite lines in the entire film. I knew what was going on throughout the evening, despite my head-in-the-sand facade, and all I could do was sigh. I sighed, and then I took a look back in history and remembered that politics in A...

or Day to Think About When You're Dead Tomorrow is Election Day, and I find it noteworthy that it is also Plan Your Epitaph Day. Writing your epitaph in advance can be an introspective exercise, having to capsulize your life into just a few words. The headstone of John Keats reads, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” but epitaphs are chiseled in stone. So, I wonder if the candidates in this year’s hyped up election would behave differently were their permanent epitaphs to be written based on the nature of their campaigns. Politics has always been a dirty business, and all we have to do is read ancient records to see how men and women have connived and plotted for top positions in government. This season’s campaigns may be no worse than others, but the bar has not been set high, and truth telling and integrity have quite often been set aside in the interest of winning. To help us sort truth from falsehood, PolitiFact.com, a website operated by the St. Petersburg Times, fac...