Now

There was a funeral today in Paris for someone I went to grad school with.  He was resident at Henry Wood House my first year in London, and I would often greet the day while listening to his early morning Verdi baritone warm-ups a few doors down.  I knew him as a nice guy with an amazing voice.  His wife was an accomplished singer as well.  At the age of 45, he also left behind three younger children.  

Learning about his passing, focuses a light on my current struggles centered around striving for the acceptance of what is now.  At a certain point, I've realized that all those dreams of a career will never come true as I had once imagined, the visions that drove me on a quest ultimately led somewhere other than where I had imagined.  At the same time, I would not change that journey for anything.  As much as I miss what was lost, what I gave away at the beginning without realizing its true value, I now cherish new things.  I have a partner, a husband whom I love dearly. I have a faithful, wonderful, loving dog, a prickly yet endearing cat.  There are many that I consider dear and treasured friends, despite the distance of oceans, borders and time zones.   I have circled back to conducting, and although I’ve discovered its nature to be other than what I thought in my younger days, I find that I do enjoy it.  Though I never would have chosen to stay in this geographical location so long, it has enabled me to watch and enjoy the musical development of many piano students.  Like watching flowers bloom, it is a slow but sometimes astonishingly beautiful process.

And I have sung.  From a distance, I look back and think that I did do some things, and many of them were fulfilling.  Where I live now, there is not much work and it has become clear that what I have to offer as a singer is not welcomed in most situations available here.  And now that I am not aiming to impress others to gain their favor for work or Career, I find that my music making is freed.  I gave a recital in August that I have always dreamed of giving.  And for once, I felt in the moment almost the entire way without my personal garbage muddying the waters.  Now I am working on French Lied (Poulenc and Debussy) and arias.  I do know what I could 'do' with this repertoire, but maybe the point for me will continue to be the process rather than the outcome.  

Election 2022

 All around me the prophets of my side are calling ‘Doom, doom to our system!”  They’ve been crying wolf for a long time now, but I fear that this time might be correct.  I look for political hope, but I see very little.  By doing all it can to kill the Left, the Center (and the Democratic Leadership Council*) has ensured the rise of the Right.  They have unbalanced the system, and now even they can see that it is on the verge of toppling.  They cry, “Democracy!  Democracy!”  But this lament is not for any true love of that system.  They see that their power is ebbing.  Now someone else will take control, and with the safety valves of Democracy broken, they see no way back to power for themselves. 

* An oxymoron at best. 

What Ifs

 Even the faint thoughts of a return to the NY metro area bring me into a great cloud of speculation, into dreams of what I feel I have lost, the prices I have paid for following the enticements of What If.  I have lived my life exploring the potential of following the great What If.  There is a price to the allegiance I have given to this creative and destructive force.  The power of the many What Ifs in my imagination have propelled me to move across the globe.  When I began my devotion to this strange god, I believed I was banishing the possibility of regret.  I did not think of the sadness generated in memories of what I had left behind, my regrets packed into so many heavy suitcases travelling with me from address to address.   

And how can I find that light and happy life, free of backward glances?  

Even my resume is a catalog of wanderlust dedicated to the priniples of What If.  Will I ever be able to lay this down and just live?   Shall I circle the world just to return to where I started and lament the loss of what was once?

2016 / 2020

 

On November 8, 2016, I was living in San Francisco.  My first cue that something might be wrong was that my friend Amanda in Ohio called me around 5:35 as I was starting the walk home from work with Paul.  I let it go to voicemail, and I later learned that she was having a panic attack.  Around 8:35 pm EST, the returns coming in were starting to show that something wasn’t going as expected and that the woman universally touted by the media as the most qualified candidate for president ever might not win. 

 

Child of a political scientist, I’d always wanted to have an election night party.  I’d reached out to a few people, but it hadn’t worked out so we were on our own.  In hindsight, this was a blessing as I am sure it would have been the worst party ever.   Since July, I’d been saving a Build Your Own White House cookie kit for the occasion.   Once home and settled in to watching the returns, I set to work on my project. 

 

When I went to vote that morning, I had filled in every other blank first leaving president for last.  Living in California, the state would go to Clinton, but I stood there for maybe 5 minutes staring at my ballot and internally wrestling with my unresolved political dilemma. Given my political convictions, I was not sure that I could live with myself voting for Clinton and thus implicitly endorsing all of the actions that I was sure she would take that would cause so much harm to those I love and the world I love.   Yet in the back of my mind was the thought that the other guy could win.  I filled in the blank for Clinton rather than Stein and turned in the ballot.   

 

That morning I wore a button from my vintage political collection that said “Nixon Now More Than Ever.”   As I was walking from the polls to work, I had a conversation with a stranger on a corner while waiting to cross the street about the election, and I didn’t need to explain a thing about my accessory.  Living in San Francisco was a politically wonderous thing. 

 

As the evening’s events progressed, my cookie model building project took on the character of the unfolding events on the television.   Around 9:30 PST it looked like we knew the result.  Only in the beginning stages of denial, I said to Paul, “Let’s walk the dog.”  Strangely, our Tenderloin apartment was about 2 ½ blocks from Hilary’s Northern California HQ.  As we walked past with Elsa bouncing along in front, they were just locking up.  There was a circle of people talking on the sidewalk in front.  One looked like he was embracing an overly large coffee pot.  A few were crying.   In this moment Paul said, “It looks like we are in for some interesting times.”  Truer words…

 

In December of 2016, we were married in a small ceremony in Muir Woods, a redwood forest just north of San Francisco.  Of our guests, if I had to wager, I would say that half either voted for the winner of that contest or abstained.  The day after the Inauguration, we loaded cat, dog, inflatable mattress and what was left of our apartment into my Prius and began our move to the Midwest.

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This Summer, we were able to get out of town and visit my uncle in Northern Wisconsin.  It was the week of the Republican Convention, and for as many Biden signs as there now are in our little blue dot of Kansas City, we felt surrounded by Trump flags and expressions of outright hatred towards non-Trump supporters.  (Even while kayaking, we saw lake side Trump flags proclaiming “Make Liberals Cry Again”.)  Watching the Republican Convention and spending time with my increasingly right-wing uncle, I had the long overdue crystallization of the realization that supporters of the two camps are living in opposite perceptions of reality.  What I saw on FOX or in that convention bore no resemblance to the reality of life I live or the lives of those I see around me.  To be fair, when MSNBC or other center-left mouthpieces report on “Trump supporters,” those pictures don’t match those that I love on the other side. 

 

So, I have no wager on what will happen this time.  Both sides are talking as if they have it sewn up, and this is probably because they only associate with those who hold similar views to themselves.  I have so many thoughts, but I will save them for another time when they are more formed.  Even this is just a series of experiences, bits of memory in a life of straddling seemingly different worlds.

 

Love each other.  Try to be kind.  Try to take time.  Work for what is right and resist the urge to give in to hate.  None of us know what the hell will happen from day to day, and right now we are just a bit more aware of that than we used to be.  My friend Amanda died in July of 2019.  When I think of election night almost four years ago, my first thought is that I wish I’d picked up the phone rather than letting it go to voicemail.

August 15, 2020

Staring out the kitchen door at my monster potted cucumber plant, I realized that I want different things now than I wanted when I was younger.  It seems so obvious, but maybe some of my struggles are related to not realizing this.  Perhaps it is ok to want different things.  All of that work and striving as I was growing up, perhaps that was meant to serve a purpose, and perhaps it is ok that I have let some of that go.

I had just come home from mailing a late birthday package to nephew #1, and on my way out of the Post Office, I’m pretty sure I passed Gia.  (It can be harder to tell with everyone wearing masks.)  Gia was our dog groomer for the late Elsa.  I was thinking, again, of how much her care and gentleness with a sick Elsa meant to us.  I was thinking of how I used to think doing something uncommon and special with one’s life was important.  It was the idea that you have to be someone, to be special, to excel!  And articulated in my thoughts at that moment was not that you need to do something special, but that doing a normal thing with excellence, with care and love, is what is most important in this world. 

 

84

My father would have been 84 today. 

As I look for his traces in the world, I stop and the mirror shows him to me.  My current choice of reading material, Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Inc., is a book I would have loved to discuss with him.  It is a book I can hear him quoting.  How I would have loved to hear his thoughts on our current political dystopia.  When his intellect was intact, he was always ahead of the curve. 

Last week I spent many hours, many rocks and 800 lbs. of top soil extending a rock wall on the south side of our screened in porch.  I even enjoyed this process.  I am now planning to get a covering layer of mulch and set up a foundation for my compost pile behind the garage.  What could be more Dennis-like than this? 

I look at my dog, once only Paul’s dog but now our dog.  My dad loved Elsa and remembered her name much longer than Paul’s.  Elsa is now a spry at-least-fifteen years old.  The last picture I have of him was taken while he was asleep in the back seat of the car with Elsa on the way home from Wisconsin. 

Later today I will go running.  Like my father, I am slow but persistent.  I love the scenery more than the exercise.

Grief is a funny thing.  I don’t really know where it comes from or why.  I was never sentimental about my father, but sometimes I feel so sad that he has gone on.  It was never an easy relationship.  My father was an awkward man, and I am acutely aware of my own awkwardness on a daily basis.  Almost six years later I still don’t have the words. 

As I grow older I seem to grow more into who he was.  I see the wisdom in his madness; his compost pile and vegetable garden, his bicycling to work on the burnt orange Schwinn with the baby seat never removed, his love of politics, his reuse of every possible every day item, his desire to darn his socks rather than getting new ones, his happiness in the simple things of life, of trees and loons, of building a retaining wall or just sitting and looking out at the lake. 

(published a little after the actual date)

The Era of Pretense is over - short thoughts on today's confirmation

In September of 2000, a first cousin of my father's said to me that our country wasn't a democracy.  And he didn't mean in the we-are-technically-a-republic sense, he meant it in the sense that we are many of us now beginning to feel.

At the time, I thought he was so radical!  This was a only a few months before Bush v. Gore when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to Bush.  This was not quite a year before the disaster in lower Manhattan.

The night Trump was elected was a strange night, but this is also one, and frankly, it is scarier to me.  What happened with Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court scares me more than all of the other afore mentioned events.  It is the fact that the rulers of our country no longer see any reason to pretend that they do not wield absolute power.  They see no reason to even try to present a face of fairness to the country.

Those in power could have easily withdrawn a man who perjured himself on television in front of the world, who showed him self to be belligerent and aggressive towards women in this same testimony(Senator Klobuchar), who showed a lack of judicial temperament and a wealth of partisan fervor (the Clintons are out to get me) and who very possibly could be guilty of sexual assault.  Those in power could have simply nominated another right wing partisan who would have gutted or overturned Roe v. Wade, who would have affirmed that 'corporations are people, my friend,' and that big business can do whatever they want and damn the people and the environment.

They chose not to do this.  They chose the shove this particular nominee down our throats.  They chose to elevate him because they could.  And they chose to do it to show that we could not stop it.

What will be next?