Scout Moves

The Big Fat Summer Band is back, and boy is it ever big—105 members this year, which makes it the largest edition of this band in its 95-year history. The park where we play most of our concerts has a medium-sized stage, so we aren’t sure if we’ll fit for our Monday performance without spilling out over the edges. And boy, is it ever summer—the temperature hovered around 90˚ during our first concert of the season last night, and it's going to be even hotter for the second one tomorrow night. We broke in this big band at a street festival, and the seating wasn't too cramped because we were able to spread out over the east and west lanes and the turning lane in between. You know, when you play on the street, your sound goes straight up into thin air, and you can’t hear what you’re playing. It’s an odd sensation, like you’re playing into a silent mute, and you can only guess if you’re on pitch or not. And it wasn’t just me who had that problem—even our principles played sil...

Early this morning, No. 1 (whose real name is Katie) and I walked out of our hotel and said “good bye” right there on the sidewalk. Her car was parked in the garage across the street, and my BART entrance was just to the right. Katie had given me her last BART ticket with enough money on it to get me to SFO. I only had to wait about ten minutes before the train arrived, and because this was rush hour on a work day, I squeezed into the car and settled in for the one-hour ride. “Settled” isn’t quite the right word for it, though, as I was standing shoulder to shoulder with humanity, coffee cup in one hand and passenger strap in the other. A mother had somehow managed to set up a makeshift work station in order to put ponytails in her little girl’s hair; and a young man said to all of us, “May I have your attention, please? Heaven and Hell are very real,” And he proceeded to explain why he believes this to be true and what affect this has, or should have, on our lives. These were my t...

Today was our last real day in the condo because tomorrow the moving company arrives, bright and early. After they pack up, with me following behind them with a broom and a dustpan, which they'll toss into the truck before shutting the door, No. 1 and I will be left in the empty rooms with only last-minute things to tend do. Then we'll spend a night in a hotel and evacuate on Wednesday. I'll head for the airport, and the girl will head for a 12-day road trip that will eventually land her in Ohio. We'll be headed home, at least I will be, but for a few moments tomorrow, I believe we're going to feel a little homeless. On this last day, No. 1 has been excusing herself now and then to spend time with friends for the last time while I stayed behind and taped up boxes and drifted aimlessly in the hammock chair. That hour or so when I sat outside with the birds and the noises of the city was actually very pleasant, but I didn't enjoy the prospect of spending the eve...

This has been one productive day for No. 1 and I. We have packed, cleaned and organized, and now most of her space looks like this: This morning, faced with a day of work, we decided to ease into the task by not doing it. Instead, we drove up steep, narrow roads to Tilden Park, a vast reserve with great views of the bay like this one—we sat on huge fallen logs, spilled our coffee and watched little lizards dart back and forth, and we took pictures: Then we meandered back down into town and to a park within walking distance of our house to explore the Himalayan Festival. I don't know the name of this park, but it's in the middle of a residential area and it's nothing but tall trees and bridges and a winding creek so that you forget you're Berkeley and think instead that you're in a woodsman's retreat. The festival stalls were placed in around these trees and bridges, and you wind your way around paths to find tables of jewelry and bags and shawls. There...

This tired old blog used to be quite musical. I would entertain you all with piano tunes, recorder melodies and the occasional vocal piece as a song from my younger years came to mind. You seemed to like it, or at least the long-lost residents of Blogville did, so I kept it up and accumulated my little recordings at My Humble Recital (see sidebar). Well, I have recently learned that the website that hosted many of those recordings with free storage and blog-suitable recording graphics is shutting down, and I will either have to import my mp3 files into a different site or let them go the way of all that fades to dust. In the case of some of the older recordings, they are gone all together never to be seen nor heard from again. For the sake of posterity, I have re-recorded one of my favorites, an old English tune I learned while in high school. I would visit my sister Melanie, who lives in Chicago and she would grant me weekend reprieves from our unsettling mother and then send me b...

I just earned actual cash from a graphic design project, and it got me thinking about money. There are days when I think we'd all be better off if we didn't exchange money, if we exchanged goods and services instead. Bartering is the way to go, I think, sometimes. I was out of the design business for a year or so, and my recent re-entry has been on a strictly volunteer basis with the exception of a job I completed just today. I'm OK with that because of the nature of the projects—a community orchestra and public school music groups. I've done some signs and business cards for a profitable music store, but I earned valve oil and a discount on an alto recorder for those jobs. When I branched out from Husband's business and started finding work of my own accord, I earned cash designing business cards ( here are some examples , although most of these were pro-bono, come to think of it), and I designed some T-shirts and a plane logo back in the day ( you can see th...

I often write about my orchestra, and I refer to it as mine because I am a performing member, so I can claim a certain level of ownership. This isn’t someone else’s orchestra, a philharmonic that serves someone else’s community. It’s mine, and it serves the community where I live. Last fall, the board of directors saw fit to invite me to join them because it would be good to have a performing member at the table, so now I claim double ownership. Not only do I get the privilege of sitting in my seat on stage and making music with talented musicians, which is benefit enough, but I now get to be officially involved in the planning of things, the promotion of things and the nitty gritty of things. Good thing, too, because months before I joined the board, the conductor and I began having private meetings with people around town—newspaper editors and people from other arts organizations, for example—looking for new ways to promote our non-profit group that relies on benevolent financial...

(borrowed from a Facebook friend) Last night, my community orchestra performed one heck of a concert to a nearly full and very appreciative house, and I’m telling you, the sound we produced could part hair. Literally. I have been seated in front of timpani on occasion, or a very enthusiastic bass drum, and I could actually feel my hair move with each beat. It’s an odd, ghostly sensation, and I’m imagining that’s how the entire audience felt as we blasted them with our finest and most bombastic notage. The orchestra is in the midst of a May Festival, a promotion we’re sponsoring that helps call attention to all the fine arts events in our county in the month of May. We’ve got all sorts of things on the schedule—high school performances, community band concerts, private dance studio recitals, a Broadway show…—and our performance last night was meant to punctuate this thing with a demonstration of what community arts is about—all ages, all walks, all interests doing what they love f...

I haven't had time to keep up with my blog. It isn't that I haven't had ten minutes here and there to write, it's that I haven't had ten minutes to think of something to say of any value. I could ramble on about my list of activities, and I've done that here before, but what's the point? So, I'm letting a little dust settle here in my tiny corner of Blogville. If you happen to stop by before I come back in with a feather duster and sweep out the cobwebs, go visit my offspring, No. 1. She writes her own blog here at Ancora Imparo , and she's very wise. One reason I think she's wise is that she wasn't born knowing the things she writes or asking the questions she asks. She learns these things as she goes. She didn't just arrive at adulthood and stop learning because the bell rang, as many of us can do. She keeps learning. Ancora Imparo. The Italian phrase means "Yet I still learn" or "Still I learn." Plenty of people...

As nice as the weather is here in Central Ohio today, I am stuck in the house. Landscapers are working in every corner of the property—pulling weeds in the front, laying down weed blocker and planting bushes in the back, spreading mulch in the beds just outside my office window, cutting the grass all around. I let the dog out for a little exercise but he wouldn't play because worker guys were taking a lunch break on the front porch, and he was more interested in their discarded orange peel than in the stick I was throwing. I'd like to take the dog to the park because we could both use a good walk, and because it would be nice to escape the constant sound of buzzing tools at every door and window, or so it seems. But the big mulch truck is blocking the driveway. So, here I sit with a restless dog and unpleasant noise and a lovely day going to waste. I'm typesetting indoors while a pleasant atmosphere has formed outdoors, and I want to bust out—this is what I remember the...

I helped save a sad horse and two adorable dogs. And all I had to do was gripe on Facebook. It’s an amazing world that way. My house sits on the edge of an allotment, and just across the street is a house that sits outside of it. It used to be a farmhouse when this area was an undeveloped farm, although the land was mostly wooded, and some of it was mined back in the day. The allotment has some restrictions, like no outbuildings or clothes lines or crap piled up in the yard, but across the street, it’s anything goes, apparently. The man who has lived in this house for several years is the grandson of the farmer who built it, and it was passed down three generations to the degenerate who has let the thing go to hell. OK, to be fair, his mother wasn’t much better. When she owned the house, she would decorate the lawn for the seasons and then leave everything up all year—Christmas lights, a plywood cutout of Santa riding a rocket, a hay bale with pumpkins in various stages of decay...

My big floppy dog, my big stupid smelly dirty obstinate dog, seems to have developed an aversion to the screen door, the one that is his gateway to his potty area and the fenced in patio. I don’t know why and when that happened, but last night at midnight, he was adamant. I will not come inside through that door, and there is nothing you can do about it, woman. This is what he said to me as I was whispering “Puppy, come!!” I couldn’t actually shout at him because of the late hour, and the neighbor’s bedroom window is very close to my back door. I also couldn’t stomp outside and force him in because he reacts to aggression with aggression—barking and bucking and running crazy laps around the pool and on top of the pool cover, splashing as he goes. So I was left to beg powerlessly, at the mercy of the dog. Let me backtrack a little bit and say that we were outside at midnight because Big Puppy has diarrhea and needed to make an emergency run. Once he did his business, he was in explo...

Lately, the word "check' has become one of the most important words in my personal lexicon. I am task oriented—I can spend time dreaming big or small, and I can think abstractly as long as there aren't too many visual distractions to turn my head, but where I really shine is when I am faced with a list of tasks to complete. I have taken to writing actual lists because I'm afraid the mental lists will be adulterated, what with all the visual distractions and the insidious ravages of aging. And I've been keeping these lists on the Stickies features of my Mactop. The application creates what looks like Post-it Notes, and you can assign different colors and fonts and font sizes to different notes as you organize them by importance. Right now, the sticky note that is front and center is blue, large and filled with big, bold type. These are the things I need to do in the immediate feature, as opposed to the other notes that are just for occasional reference—the cost ...

I like shopping at Ace Hardware. The term "shopping" may not seem to match what goes on in a hardware store—men don't say, "I'm going shopping," when they run out for a box of nails or a light switch. But I go shopping at Ace Hardware. When I walk in to this very male environment, often the only female in the place, some nice older gentleman always greets me at the door and says something like, "Well hello, young lady. What can I help you find today?" And I love him instantly. I always tell him what it is I need, but honestly I'd rather roam the aisles and find it myself. I find a certain sense of accomplishment when I walk around the maze of things I have no name for and manage to find that one bolt that is just the right length or that one paint brush I need for a project. I make my way through the store and proudly think to myself, "I am my father's daughter." And then I think, "Look at all this great stuff, whatever it ...

Eustacia and No. 1 I was wide-awake at 3:00 this morning because that’s just how it goes sometimes. I never get up and snack or watch TV when that happens. I just try to will myself back to sleep. Sometimes it takes an hour or two of conscious willing to get there, but again, that’s just how it goes sometimes. Very early this morning, all my discipline wasn’t working, so I picked up my cell phone and checked Facebook to discover the top two posts on my newsfeed were put there by my daughters. No. 1, a tutor who teaches Arab immigrants, started a blog nearly two years ago but let it go dormant until just recently (check out the Knitosaurus in the sidebar), and she linked to her latest post about dialectics and the usefulness of metaphors. Eustacia, winding down another year of college, complained about a blinking cursor and how she thought it might at least change colors or something. She’s an artist and doesn’t care much for writing papers, and she must have been sitting there ...

Of course you can't review a concert before it's happened, but I feel compelled to write about the concert the orchestra is about to give, instead of reviewing it after the fact as I typically do. This evening, the Tuscarawas Philharmonic will perform Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Dvorak's Cello Concerto . If people in the audience pay attention even for a few minutes, they'll ride an emotional coaster of exhilaration and exhaustion, fear and courage, sorrow and happiness. All you have to do is listen to feel the full spectrum of the human condition, and I'm not exaggerating here. Think of the words that represent emotions—beleaguered, rejected, disillusioned, empty, hostile, jubilant, hopeful, quenched, soothed, happy,—at some point this evening, everyone in that concert hall will feel these things. Here, take a look at this, with Yo-Ya Ma performing the first movement of the concerto (if you have time, click through to listen to the whole thing, and ...

Last night, I slept all night long—no waking up at 3:30 and staring out into the dark space, no looking at the clock thinking 30 minutes has gone by since the last time I checked when it’s been only 5, no tossing and turning wishing I had a better pillow (I always wish I had a better pillow). I think my restful night is a result of learning the difference between humility and humiliation. I went to an orchestra rehearsal last night, our first in preparation for performing Scheherazade and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto . The horn is not a big feature in this program. With a few exceptions in the principle part, we aren't the solo instrument in the concerto, and we don’t represent a hostile sultan or a sultry storyteller. But every part has a role to play, and I felt sorely unprepared. Not that I hadn’t practiced or listened to the music beforehand, but I was too easily thrown, and there are some passages I physically cannot play, practice or no. It didn’t help that I had basically e...

Lesson 1—don't set things on fire. I discovered these parchment baking bags at the grocery store not long ago and threw them in the cart right away. I have cooked in paper on occasion and have had to form bags with sheets of parchment paper. Having them ready made is a great idea. What I usually do is lay in an assortment of sliced veggies—mushrooms, onions, celery, red peppers, zucchini...—then lay something like salmon or tilapia on top, toss in some seasoning and a splash of white wine, roll up the bags and bake at 400˚ for 10 minutes or so. Dinner. I did this the other night, and while the bag was roasting, I made a pot of rice and some lemon cream sauce, and I timed it all just right so that everything would be ready at the same time. But when I tore into the bag, I discovered the larger piece of fish needed a few more minutes. I set the rice and sauce on low and popped the baking sheet back into the oven, set the time at three minutes and walked away. Three minutes lat...

Photo by Daniel German. I bought a new book yesterday, a new old book, actually. For all of $1, I picked up Ain't I A Woman; Classic Poetry by Women from Around the World , edited by Illona Linthwaite. I got it because of the title taken from a speech given by Sojourner Truth at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851. Sojourner Truth was a force of nature, as natural as they come and as forthright, so how could I pass this up? I am delighted to discover this book is full of poetry from all eras written by many forces of nature, and I intend to read from it every day—or at least regularly, because you know how these things go. You set out to do something every day, and then things come up and you skip a day and then two and then a week; but I've got more than 200 pages of poetry here, and I'll read it all eventually. Today's poem is "Warning," by Jenny Joseph. If you aren't familiar with it based on the title, you know it by its first two l...

We walked at the park today. We pass the playground, circle the pond, up the hill, down the road to the school where the seventh-grade band plays. Their march tune leaks through the door seams. At midday, joggers tracing their routes, fishermen casting for catch and release, boisterous boys chasing mothers on short legs. The train whistle we hear is the sound of commerce passing through without stopping. And the small-engine-putter we hear is the sound of regular maintenance— an earnest woman rides a tractor to cut the grass. She rounds the ball diamonds and turns on a dime. Sniff the tree trunks, sniff the tall grass, sniff the dirt clumps left by muddy tires. We follow the creek and aim for the car.