The Banjo

There’s a fellow in the laundry room just waiting for the dryers and playing his banjo. He’s not striving, he’s not driven, he doesn’t seem concerned about posture. But he’s making music, and that’s making him happy.

In another mood, that would thrill me. But today it makes me jealous and discontent. Where did I step from the road I was on and start berating myself for what I don’t do and hating what I do…do…? This banjo player is reminding me that I too, once loved playing the violin. Why do I now sigh patiently over it as if it were a querulous lover? Maybe we need counselling. Maybe I need to practice more. Maybe ‘practice’ is the last thing I need, and I should learn to play some bluegrass. Maybe I’ll go out there and ask this banjo-er…banjo-ist… banjo man, if he’s up for a jam with a heart sick violinist.

And maybe I’ll stop making all ya’ll listen to me whine. But this is the Egotist’s Club, after all, and if an egotist can’t whinge a bit about mooning around and missing a sense of purpose, what can an egotist do? I suppose I could discuss my dreams…but…that’s too far… After all, no one can relate to nocturnal wanderings, but in mentioning this particular sorrowful circumstance, perhaps you can see yourself. And perhaps, recognizing that all love (of people and things) takes care and thought and work, we can drag each other up by the bootstraps and try again tomorrow.

Pedagogical Tattoos

You know, if I stay a violin teacher very much longer, I am most assuredly going to have some accidental tattoos. I’m just looking at my hands from teaching today. I have two girls (Same age, same name, same issues… very hard to tell them apart) that I see on Sundays. We’re working on making it so very easy to hold the violin/bow that they forget it’s not part of them.

I have a very magical x on the outside of my left index finger at the point where it meets my palm.

Correspondingly, a mystic dot on the interior side of my left thumb. There is a smiley face on the  tip of that thumb.

On my right hand, there is a dot on my thumb,the outside of my index finger, the inside second knuckles of my middle and ring finger and the tip of my pinky. Match them up to the bow, and things work better. It’s a constellation of pedagogic genius.

Unless they don’t wash off this time.

Chocolate-Covered Bacon Roses Redux

Round about this time last year, I reacted to all the Valentine’s Day marketing and an empty apartment by chucking bacon in a pan, attempting to shape it into a rose once cooked, winding it about a piece of asparagus, and covering the lot with melted chocolate.  This proved to be an entertaining, if messy, decision, and kept me from writing mediocre and lachrymose poetry for, let’s see…a whopping 9 days, according to the archives.

So it stands to reason that I could prevent myself from writing any woebegone verses all through the coming week by making them again.

Not only so, but given the magic of WordPress statistics on readers’ search terms, it has become clear to me of late that a passel of people are interested in the reality of a chocolate-covered bacon rose; some, in fact, desire that the thing be delivered to them, or their respective beloveds.

So.  Rest assured, readers, there are plots and schemes in motion to see if this might be made reality next year.  At present, however, there is too much going on in the coming fortnight for me to be of much use to you, except as your virtual Virgil.  If you wish for your favorite person to have chocolate-bacon roses (whether or not your favorite person is yourself), well, do this labor of love for him.  Or her.

Gather your bacon, your broiler pan, your huddled flower petals yearning to breathe free…

…and have your chocolate, your floral wire, a new paintbrush for chocolate detail, and a really rather tall vase on hand.

Last year’s efforts, and this website, taught me that making the bacon into a rose shape before cooking it is far more stable than coaxing cooked bacon into a flowery form; the bacon that bakes together stays together.  I am all about stability in my foodstuffs, so I rolled thick and thin strips into a variety of rosebuds (go here for a good idea of how to make a more rose-looking bud) and set them on my broiler pan.

This allows the grease to drain off and allows for better cooking (the mini muffin tin isn’t necessary unless you need guidelines to keep your blooms on the small side).  They stayed in the 375 degree oven for 30 or 35 minutes (more wouldn’t have hurt, but the hissing of the bacon grease made me nervous).

There were faux flower stems on hand this year, though I found that some of my bacon blossoms were a bit too ponderous for them; they bent under the weight of the rosebud in an unbecoming fashion.  Be that as it may, I carried on, reinforcing the stems with floral wire before topping them with the roses and painting chocolate on the petals.  This made for a less-chocolatey flower, overall, but that also made them easier to eat, so hey.  You win some, you lose some.

Best of all, there were more roses than last year!  So I could share them with my brother and my boss, who was intrigued by such foodcraft.

Feast of Saint Valentine, I urge you once again: Bring it.

When Doings are Undoings

In storytelling—that most misused of arts—horses absolutely must not go in front of carts. A ballad starts where a ballad starts and this is the start of Prudencia Hart’s.

Shamefully, this is my first post of the year, when I have so many things to tell you and keep letting the words tangle up inside me.  There’s always a temptation to keep them in until they’re perfectly sorted, or closer to it, but the result of doing so is that I hoard tangle upon tangle, snagged into a trichobezoar of thoughts and feelings.

So though I have not sorted through all the significance, the implications, the ramifications of the play I saw the other night, I want to share it anyway.

My eldest brother invited me to join him in watching The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, a curiously-named production by the National Theater of Scotland.  Indeed, it was curious in a lot of ways: five Scottish actors playing about 12 roles, singing and playing instruments besides, in a pub (the Corner Brewery).  Weaving amongst the patrons, the cast grabbed us with their absorption in their characters, with rollicking rhymed couplets, and with well-deployed props: a violin bow playing a windshield wiper, flashlights serving for headlights, a rug for the rending of space and time, and most memorably, napkins the audience tears up and hurls into the air for snow.  I took care to cover my huge mug of beer and the three shared half-pints of cider from this precipitation, and felt very clever about it.

Feeling very clever is something of an important point in Prudencia’s undoing.  Prudencia Hart is the academic that most of us would recognize and, I think, sympathize with.  Having finished her thesis on the Scottish Border Ballads, she does not pass up speaking at a conference about them, despite her contempt for the others on the panel; the grad student’s pursuit of a free lunch may factor into her attendance.  She’s aghast at Colin Syme’s testosterone-and-meme-driven commentary (and his Kylie Minogue ringtone), Siolagha (a fancy way of saying Sheila, Prudencia fumes) Smith’s post-post structuralism, and Professor Macintosh’s theory of negative reading (whatever that is).

The blizzard from which I protected my potables, it turns out, keeps Prudencia from returning to Edinburgh when the conference ends.  She is stuck an hour’s drive away in Kelso, fending off Colin’s offer of a drink et cetera and keeping to herself amid a bacchanalian sort of karaoke scene.  Ignoring the warning from a fellow pubgoer – namely, that it is solstice night and at midnight begins the Devil’s cèilidh, when “a chink between the mighty walls of time” opens – she sets out into the snow to find a B&B.

Left, and left, and left again: she believes she’s come to a bed and breakfast with an unexpectedly huge library (look at these first editions – it’s like heaven!), but the door locks and there she is, caught in hell.  Four millennia she spends there (cleverly compressed for our convenience) before a fling with the Devil enables her to escape.  Colin becomes a sort of knight in half-clothed glory, pulling her out and keeping her from tumbling back into Hell.

The pub again demands that she sing.  The Devil appears.  Her eyes on him, she ends the evening with Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.”

Here’s the thing: that feels like a lot of plot rehashing, though it’s more of a plot skeleton.  It doesn’t depict how captivated we all were.  It cannot contain Prudencia’s face as she regards the ballads, her colleagues, the perfect library, the devil she’s fallen in love with, or her confusion about the reality of what she has just escaped.  It most certainly doesn’t make sense of this strange sympathy for the Devil.  There’s none of the rhyming lines, witty and sparkling.

Really, I’m afraid there isn’t much sense of it that I can give you.  But there is a cracking good play and a good night at the pub.  My brother and I laughed so heartily the producer thanked us for leading the more reticent to react.  We came away having shoved aside the veil of the karaoke culture and glimpsed the ballad’s Hart.

Mouth Music

While we are on the subject of a capella music, I would like to point out that saying “making music with your mouth” is fairly redundant.

A few coworkers and I recently went to see the movie “Pitch Perfect”. Or “Perfect Pitch” . . .  I can never get that name straight. And throughout the movie, the peppy girls kept running around describing their a capella group by saying, “We make music . . . with our mouths!”

It drove me bonkers!

Um, all types of singing are making music with your mouths. Also, about a third of  types  of the instruments in existence require the use of mouths to make music.

What they really mean, is that the parts of the music usually performed the instruments is done with the voice.

Which actually is pretty cool.

So, I would like to share some of my favorite Mouth Music with you. Where not only has the performer played all the parts of the intstruments, but has also fitted words to the music!

 

 

And, of course, The Doctor Who version.

 

 

And of course

The Once and Future Carpenter

The title is not my own.

Letter to My Friends

 

 

Dear Friend,

You are precious, priceless, and deeply loved.

You have a heart more vast and luminous than the Grand Canyon, and nothing can alter that.

Unfortunately, having such an awe-inspiring heart makes it easier for people to kick cans or drop litter into it. A heart, by its very nature, will always be a target.

But that is because the people who do that are stupid and refuse to see, and so those people are to be pitied the more for missing out on YOU.

To put it more practically, being so beautifully sensitive means that you are also so painfully sensitive.

The openness to the world that we – having been blessed to be raised in loving, healthy, whole environments – have cultivated in ourselves, leaves us without the protection of cynicism, or even “disillusionment”. Instead, we must see life as it really is. (To paraphrase the Discworld witches, seeing what really is, is an altogether much harder gift curse.)

And that sucks.

Truly. Many of us seem to be struggling right now. I think it is something particular to this generation.

Yes, I know, generation upon generation have suffered, sacrificed, and died before us. But something seems different about this generation.

For one thing, as we come out of that Grand Era of baby boomers, technology, and “reason”, we as a group have been left looking for the “unreasonable”, the mysterious, and wonderful. (Also spelled, for clarification purposes, as “wonder-full”.)

This is my personal theory as to the prevalence of “New Age” isms. After so many years believing in NASA and other modern progresses, people were drawn to New Age thingies simply wanted to be able to see the sacred and beautiful in ordinary things. And actually have something considered sacred and beautiful. And mysterious and wonder-full and awe-full.

“New” Age? Pfft.

Christians have been believing – and acting upon! – that for the past two thousand years. Its called a Sacrament, people!

Which brings me back to original point; we, as young Christian adults, seem to have a strange malady these days.

It is a little bit like ennui, combined with homesickness and compounded by chronic job searching.

I suppose I must admit that it is likely other generations have felt this before. But pray, give me leave to wax hyperbolic about the trials and tribulations close to my heart!

Even Economists – those perilous number wizards- are insisting that this generation is having a ridiculously hard time finding jobs and paying off student loans and generally making ends meet for long enough that we can feel like adults.

And this intensifies just our original trouble.

Because the ennui-homesickness-loss feeling is by now a part of who we are, and it started a long time before most of us even began to look for real jobs. It seems to be part – to paraphrase one of my favorite books, The Blue Sword -  a feeling of not belonging, a strong desire to find a place where familiarity and wonder coincide. And part a fear of the discomfort and incongruity that such a place evokes.

Even those of our generation who are not Christian seem to be feeling it: this odd mix existential angst, immediate material insecurity, and the throbbing attraction of anything that promises it has a meaning.

We, in particular, must know that there is more than the life immediately before us. We were spoiled that way. And the outcome of it is, that it is difficult to accept the life immediately before us.

It is our home, and not our home. This can give us moment of awe and love, of the discovery and home-coming at one time which Chesterton describes.

Which is not usually the most comfortable of positions.

And it offers very little in the way of practical happiness.

Whatever you are facing right now, remember that you are a child of God.

And that I think you are AWESOME.

And anyone who thinks differently is being blind.

Including you.

I will be insulted if you distrust my opinion that much!

(So will God, but I cannot put him on the same level as myself. That would be a stretch, even for an Egotist!)

In any case, beloved, breath deeply, eat healthy, sleep well, and live wonderfully.

Love,

Melpomene

P.S. Some more Chesterton for encouragement summation of our path.

The Men of the East may spell the stars
And times and triumphs mark,
But the Men marked with the Cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.

~ excerpt from the Ballad of the White Horse

Fighting Moses

The appeal was strong and nagging, appearing at the slightest opportunity and only avoided by guarding both spectacle and deliberation.

Even when considered impersonally, the temptation was quite comprehensible; the curt ‘For Emergency Use Only’ stenciled directly over the red handle instructing, “Pull Here” seemed a paradox in need of resolution. Such a deliberate blend of reverse psychology and imperative language might actually dictate the pulling of the handle.

And taped firmly underneath was an oblong wafer of paper that stated, ‘Warning – Undue Use of Alarm Will Result in fine or imprisonment’. The handwriting was neat and almost even, with a decisive curl at the bottom of each ‘U’ that hinted dreadfully at personal experience with the cost of this ‘Undue Use’. Although normally staunch in the face of such a small warning – speeding or climbing into derelict buildings had much bigger Signs, after all – the attraction of trying to solve the conflict with a hearty tug on the handle was a tad overwhelming.

So the problem then, as he considered it, was to pull the Alarm either without using it “Unduely”, or without being caught. An actual fire would take the away the challenge, and would probably have even worse consequences. Burning baked goods in the microwave would sound the alarm by itself and not need the handle to be pulled.

And then, of course, the “without being caught” was easy, but the “without being guilted into admission,” that would be more difficult. The alternative course, naturally, was simply to not pull the demanding thing at all. He could convince himself that the ‘Pull Here’ was the reverse psychology and that the warnings were the commands.

Almost.

Picking up a thin stack of stapled papers, he held them upright and hit them the desk to make sure the edges were aligned, and slapped them into an open folder. And again with the next stack and folder. All neat, all in arranged, everything efficient and complete.

If only, if only . . . .

It would take courage, and that even more elusive quality, gumption. If only that alarm, with all the fascinating signs and commands, were not directly across from his desk.

Instead, he had the piles of organized, compartmentalized, and individualized paper folders. It was only a name tag paper-clipped to the folder, and a personalized greeting filled in at the top of the cover letter. But that counted for enough a difference, it was supposed. Rather like – if he wanted to be gloomy and clichéd – how each desk and cubiclized work arena looked the same but had a different name on the side. He could even imagine himself as a rat in a maze.

Did rat mazes have fire alarms?

“Now honey, mommy has to talk to this man in his office. Will you wait and here and be good?”

There was a woman with a little boy in the room, pausing in front of his desk to bend anxiously over the child. The child looked up at her quite intelligently, hands behind his back, eyes bright, and head cocked defiantly to one side.

“It will only be for 10 seconds. Ten. I know that you can count that much. Will you do that?” The mixture of firm and calm in her mother-voice was beginning to sound a tad bit strained.

His small, dark brows came together an expression of justified scorn at such an insignificant number. “I can count by twos,” he volunteered. “Two, four, six . . .”

“No, no.” She said hastily. “Count by ones, and wait till I am gone to start.” She herded him in the direction a chair, and looked up to give the receptionist a quick smile. He thought for moment that she was going to come talk to him, but she quickly tripped into the boss man’s office.

He watched the child for moment, as the boy stood in front of his designated seat, and looked at the wall paper. It couldn’t be that interesting, even to a child.

With great care, the receptionist chose a small silver paperclip, slipped it onto the folder, and slid the printed sticker of the individual underneath the loop. He looked up at the child.

The boy, being a child, was standing in front of the red alarm. Hands still clasped behind his back, he was leaning forward to look at the white letters. The receptionist could see his lips moving as a sounded out the words, “Pull Here”.

For a child, there is no dilemma, only instruction.

Unclasping his hands, he reached up and pulled there.

It took a moment, and a small sound screeching, but low siren began to whine through the building, and with a sputter, the sprinklers came on. The place sprang into bustling, loud, life, as people appeared, clattering and chatting, and streamed towards the fire escapes.

He sat still for a moment, feeling his hair being drenched through to his scalp, and the water trickle down his ears and neck. The words on the tags and in the folders were all streaming together on the wet paper, the bits of personalization – and hard work – dissolving under the blast from the ceiling.

The boy’s mother had him by the hand, and was talking very loudly and even more firmly and nicely.

He stepped into the collision of people, bodies and voices mingling.

And he heard, between the rustling movements and the keen wailing of the alarm, the high burbling of human laughter.

A Baptismal Fount