Scout Moves

I've gone quiet here on my corner of Blogville. Turned the lights out, shut the curtains and turned out the cat, literally. The newspapers have begun to pile up on the front porch, and the weeds are as high as an elephant's eye. But I'm thinking about cleaning the place up and moving back in. In a previous post, I mentioned my family had endured some crises. We had a death in the family ( my brother-in-law ) that had Husband spending time between Florida and Illinois taking care of his mother and of her house that needed to be sold. And we had an illness in the family that had me moving to a suburb of Cleveland for a couple of months to act as caregiver. These two things happened simultaneously so we each had to deal with our designated situations on our own. I remember during that first week up north, when the in-laws were having a memorial service for my brother-in-law in Illinois. I had just begun staying in Beachwood, Ohio and couldn't attend. It was live-stream...

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, ...

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 on...

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 we...

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 w...

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 re...

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...

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...

I have such an appreciation for Inauguration Day. We Americans like to fight, we lean toward violence, we entertain all kinds of opinions in the public square, we make a mess of things and then pick ourselves up and move on. But on this day, we manage to come together and swear in a president. True, he has to ride in a bullet-proof car and stand behind bullet-proof glass in case some jack-ass tries to shoot him, but we get through it. Today happens to fall on Martin Luther King Day as well (along with my father's birthday—he would have been 93), so we mark two great days at once. Just in case MLK doesn't get fair coverage today, I am resurrecting my newspaper column from a few years ago. I think it's generally bad form to quote one's self, but I'm willing to commit bad form in order to make my point one more time. Here goes: Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My deceased father’s birthday is this week, as well, and on some years, it coincides with the day comm...

The other day, I drove into a cloud. I’m not talking about a little fog or some high elevation mist, and I’m not talking about this mystical place where we all store our photos and music—what is that, anyway? I mean, I drove into the kind of cloud that strikes fear into the hearts of men, that rattles airplanes in descent, that carries rain and wind and unknown weather drama. I was driving Emily back to school at the end of her winter break, and we were on I-77 North headed toward Cleveland. Our next move was to turn onto 480 West, and as we approached the ramp, I noted that the large cloud to the left looked like a mountain. Have you seen those? If you live in flat land as we do, the sight of a large cloud that is low enough to the ground that you can see the top edge of it, but maybe not the bottom edge, puts you in mind of a mountain range. Emily remarked that she wished we lived near an actual mountain range so that we could actually be driving near the Rockies and not near clou...

I read quite a lot of books in 2012—I would finish one book and then start the next with rarely more than a day's break in between to process one before I started digesting another. I credit (or blame) my Kindle for that because the damned thing is so handy and compact. I got it last January right before a beach vacation and haven't been able to put it down. I used to say that about actual books, just one individual book made of paper that was so compelling "I couldn't put it down," so isn't it interesting that I would now use that phrase about a device that allows me to read many books, one after another? I got an iPad Mini as a Christmas gift from Husband, which has replaced the Kindle because I can read and check email and check Facebook and play Drawsomething and then read again in quick succession, and let me tell you, this thing, this little iPad—I can't put it down. And I keep reading. Over Christmas, I finished Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wi...

I think it’s Thursday, but I’m not certain. We’ve been traveling a bit over the holidays, and when I’m away from home, I don’t pay attention to the time or the date or the day of the week. The Scout family likes to spend New Year’s together, and Husband and I have always been amazed that our kids seem to prefer to be with us for the event than with their friends. Good kids. The other day, we tried to review our New Year’s experiences—a resort in Pennsylvania, Disney World, a Caribbean cruise, Maui, our lake house. A couple of years ago, we split up, and while Emily was in Romania shooting off fireworks in garbage cans, the rest of us were having dinner in Napa. This time around, we flew to Austin, Texas where Katie is now a grad student (you can follow her at Knitosaurus ). Nicholas in his airline carrier. We stayed at a hotel downtown, just a few blocks from 6th Street where all the bars and clubs are lined up, and Katie stayed at her apartment because we delivered her cat, ...

As is our family tradition, we spent Christmas in the Atlanta suburbs with my sisters and mother—we’ve been doing this for years, with everyone making an effort to spend at least two days together over Christmas Eve and Christmas day, and most years it’s the only time all four of the Wells Girls are together. This year, Melanie from Chicago, the other Yankee, was absent, but we still had a great time. We kept a wary eye on the weather forecast for Ohio, though, because a big storm was predicted with lots of snow and wind, and this storm was due to hit on the day we were scheduled to fly home. On Tuesday evening, we decided to reschedule our flight for Thursday morning to avoid spending hours in the airport, and it turned out to be a good call. Our original flight was canceled, and the Thursday flight took off and landed like clockwork. So, what to do with the extra day, we asked ourselves, with the presents exchanged and the food eaten and the movie seen—as my mother’s gift to us al...

Low-carb be damned—I just had one of the last pieces of a yule log, or Bûche de Noël. It’s a French dessert that’s basically a roll cake made to look like a log for the Christmas fire. I started making these for my family for Christmas several years ago, but I haven’t had an occasion in recent years. Then I remembered the orchestra board’s December meeting is a Christmas party with food, so I got to work making food art. You start by baking a large, thin sponge cake. After it cools, you cover it with an espresso cream filling and roll it up. You cut off one end at a diagonal for a stubby branch and decorate it all with chocolate frosting. You can apply the frosting roughly to look like bark, or you can apply it smoothly and use a knife or fork to carve in wood grain. In past years, I have melted chocolate, chilled it, and broken it into bark shavings to layer on top of the frosting for added effect. This year, I followed the part of the recipe I have always ignored and made the...

Christmas time is here. Happiness and cheer. Time for all that children call… I could go on. I know people who firmly believe Christmas is just one day or that Christmas is a series of days following a strict Christian tradition of festival observances that have been made up and modified over the centuries. But to me, it’s Christmas Time. It lasts for weeks, and it begins and ends when I feel like it. I’ve been feeling like it for a couple of weeks, with a tree and cookies and Charles Shultz characters swirling on ice and singing “Snowflakes in the air. Carols everywhere. Olden times and ancient rhymes of love and dreams to share.” With all of this nostalgic tradition I have collected, though, I must say the highlight so far has been last night’s orchestra concert, our annual Christmas concert we call “Yuletide Celebration.” We have created our own tradition for this thing—a community children’s chorus and the Tom Paxton song, “The Marvelous Toy.” Last night, we also performed some...

It’s early morning, and I’m sitting in the quiet of my living room with a restful puppy (read 68-pound dog) at my feet, and I’m gazing wistfully at my Christmas tree. When I was a kid, my sisters and I called this Tree Time. It’s like meditation but with no spiritual significance or even Zen benefit. It’s just a matter of admiring the lights, the drape of the garland, the shadows reflected on the ceiling, the placement of favorite ornaments and rolling all of that into a sense of peace and calm. Well, I guess there is a little Zen to it after all. As kids, we would turn off all the lights but the tree lights, lie on the floor and concentrate on the shadows, fixing our gaze so that the tree would be blurred, and the shapes it reflected on the walls and ceiling would be in focus. Or we would look through the tree from the ground up and let our imaginations soar with the world we could dream up—what miniature realities go on in those branches when we aren’t looking, we’d wonder. I ...

Everybody loves a parade. Right? Isn’t that what they say? They say that because they haven’t been in the one I was in this past weekend. If they had been, they’d say something else, like “Everybody loves to be out of the rain,” or “Everybody loves things to work according to plan.” Everybody loves not being bombarded with a series of unfortunate events. Small Town and the like have these lovely Christmas parades, with lighted floats and the town squares full of happy people, hot chocolate, tree lighting ceremonies. You get the idea. Last year, I thought it would be great if the orchestra were to participate in these parades. We’re always talking about how to get the attention of the community, so I say get involved in the community outside of the hall. Make yourself be seen in a way that doesn’t necessarily mean people have to buy tickets to see you, and then maybe that will translate into people actually buying tickets to see you. I suspect they forget we’re here because we only p...