Scout Moves

My kind Uncle Clifton has died just shy of his 91st birthday. “Kind” is the word that comes to mind when we all think of Uncle Clifton. He was just a nice man, patient and long-suffering. I didn’t know him well and only saw him once a year, but this is the impression I have of him. Although my family unit lived in Northwest Indiana, the rest of the larger family lived in Alabama, and we visited them every summer, usually for one week in June. We would drive down in our Ford Galaxy 500 and stay with our grandparents, Memaw and Granddaddy. Their house was home base, and the relatives would stop by for visits. We’d share big meals all the women would prepare, with dill pickles, cornbread, fried chicken, coleslaw and sweet tea. After some pecan pie, adults would sit at the kitchen table and play Rook, or they’d sit out under the backyard trees and smoke and whittle and swop stories, and the cousins would play games. I was the youngest of the cousins, considerably younger, so I didn’t a...

When I spend time with my dog, Baxter, we often hang out in the side yard that gives the big puppy plenty of running room. It’s like a small field that points down the hill toward two neighboring houses. When I’m not chasing Baxter or throwing one toy or another for him to fetch, I’m sitting in a chair and reading or playing Draw Something with my daughter in Cleveland. And I'm staring blankly at the two houses—they’re empty, one because the occupant died in June, and the other because the slob who lived there vacated when the bank took over. I say “vacated” because he didn’t move out the way you or I think of moving, you know, how you box up all of your belongings, pack them in a truck and drive away. This guy threw some things into a van and vacated, leaving the rest of his crap behind. He returned a few times to pull some things out of the house, but he basically just walked away. It was interesting to see what he chose to take during his occasional visits—a lamp, a dirt bik...

The Philharmonic and Jinjoo Cho rehearsal "Autumn" Finish what you started. That’s one of those rules we were taught as kids, or I was at least. You couldn’t start a project and leave the pieces in the middle of the floor when the thing exceeded your attention span. If you decided to do a puzzle, you either finished the puzzle or you scooped up the pieces and dumped them back in the box. If you thought it would be a good idea to bake cookies, you baked them to the last ounce of dough and cleaned up after yourself. That sort of thing. This weekend, during my orchestra’s first concert of the season, amid all of the activity and the music, one phrase came to mind—finish what you started. That may seem like an odd thing to think about in the setting of a symphony performance, but I can explain. The process of putting together a Philharmonic concert is a long, detailed one, and for more than ten years, I was completely unaware. At the beginning of each season, I would rec...

The official plug for our program goes like this—it “…spans the range and hits so many points in between - Beethoven’s fierce drama, Vivaldi’s elegant whimsy and the utter tranquility of Vaughan Williams’ lyric pastorale with Jinjoo Cho, soloist. The magnificent Fifth Symphony of Jean Sibelius continues the journey, which never ends, but certainly comes to a resounding arrival!” This is all true, but here’s what it really feels like: Beethoven’s fierce drama, "Egmont Overture," pounds like a pulse. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to town parades, and as the marching band rounded the corner, and the bass drums emphasized each foot fall, I could actually feel it in my heart. The Overture does that. Vivaldi’s whimsy, "Autumn Concerto" from The Four Seasons , is elegant, but it’s also so earthy you feel like an 18th-century harvester fresh from the fields with donkey-pulled carts piled high with the season’s crops. You’ve still got dirt under your nails, ...

Well, three weeks into being a horn teacher for middle school kids and I absolutely love what I get to do. I sit in a room for three class periods and play through exercises and little melodies with people who seems to want to learn. My tiny lesson room. I talk to them about the difference between tonguing staccato and legato, and I can see them processing and playing with where their tongues land—sometimes against the back of their lower teeth, and sometimes on the roof of their mouths. We work on expanding their ranges, and I watch them struggle to play the next lower note, but they keep trying. We work on playing with dynamics, and I listen to them trying to play as softly as possible and then building up to a loud horn call without sounding like goats. It wasn't too long ago, seven or eight years, when my own teacher worked with me to improve my range, and I fought over bass clef notes I was sure I could never hit, and now I hum on them and play an octave below notes I ...

I don't have much to say today, so in response to Dive's WTF Monday post of this morning, I give you this: I can't believe it's been five years since our last trip to London—it was then that we met Dive and Mum, and we also toured the Tower of London. After the tour, we looked over the railing toward the Thames at low tide, and instead of marveling at the Tower Bridge,  we watched a pigeon drag a drowned rat into the mud and then proceed to eat its entrails right there in full sight. Sometimes, it's better not to know what lies beneath.

What images come to mind when you think of music lessons? Do you envision something like this? Or is it more like this, the scene from Mr. Holland’s Opus when Mr. Holland has to hit the kid in the head with a bass drum mallet because he can’t keep the beat steady otherwise?   I have experienced both as a student, let me tell you, but last week when my band-teacher friend, Joan, asked if I’d like to teach some of her younger French horn students, I jumped at the chance and hoped for the more refined idea of music lessons. What I got was somewhere in the middle—delightful but unrefined—and that’s A-okay. Once a week, I’ll be going to the middle school to be a Community Friend. I think that’s a euphemism for free labor, and I’m hoping the people I know who are trained and licensed to teach music to kids never find out, because what I’m basically doing is scab work. For three class periods, I take students into a little room adjacent to the bandroom, and I help them learn...

Small County and Surroundings participates in One Book, One Community, the program that has communities reading one book together and exploring its themes. I have not participated until this year when the chosen book was Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 . I read the book in high school but forgot most of it and was glad to read it again. As part of the event, the local writers' guild sponsored a short story contest—in 2,000 words or less, write a story about a world where the written word has been made illegal. I entered the contest and quickly discovered that it's pretty easy to burn through 2,000 words, and the restriction had me revising and revising and honing, making the most of each word I used. That's a really good exercise. My story earned third prize, I learned the other day. As I thought about a world without books, I couldn't imagine a world without stories. We are storytellers by nature, and there are even discussions on why storytelling has evolutionary va...