Old Notes

February 23, 2006

OLD NOTES

Checking in

Height 5 ft 7 and a half inches
Weight 150
Sex female
Eyes blue
Age 85
The Department of Motor Vehicles
Will send me a new license
But my car is gone
Because I am more sensible than my friends
Who are driving into walls and rivers
So I have moved here to this quiet place
Where they weighed me and measured me
And decided I would do.
Height 5 feet four inches
Weight 140
Sex greatgrandmother
Eyes blue
Age 86 almost

Slings and Arrows

Your ears are too big
You can’t carry a tune
You can’t read – you’re just looking at the book
Where did you get your disposition
Where’s our regular teacher SHE was pretty!
Why don’t you straighten up
You write very well but it remains to be seen if
You have anything to say
My sister could play any tune she heard
Don’t tell me you’re Frank’s sister!
Do you really mind not qualifying for the department-
Perhaps a tutor and join us next year….

How come I didn’t grow a thicker skin?
How come all those A’s and diplomas and and plaques and pay checks and
thanks from students and echos of friend’s voices
Don’t tip the balance down ?
Some days they do.

I lost my temper

I lost my temper.
In all these years I have not learned to cope
With the quiet courteous enenmy who first
Makes friends and prepares the area like a nurse painting the skin with some cool clean stuff making it ready for surgery
It’s only after the knife goes in that I learn not to trust
I should be able to look down and flick this insect away
and break off a piece of aloe plant and rub the bite and forget it
But I lost my temper. Again.

Breakfast

They said Peter Benchly died, I saw him in a church in Princeton where I arranged a cello performance for my “adopted” Chinese grandson. Peter Benchley was there for the baptism of a baby son. The church was full, The people clapped after the cello music. I had never heard applause in a church before.

Someone said she didn’t like California. I remembered the Cascade Mountains and pulling off the road to sleep on the tail gate because hairpin turns at night with lumber trucks roaring by were scary. Lumber meant twenty foot logs with more diameter than I could reach around. I wondered how anyone could judge a state that big from just one end.

They talked about family and a baby who died. I had a brother who took one breath and died. If he had lived I would have been the middle child, a girl between two boys.

They talked about making jewelry for the first time. I made earrings for Liz once, delicate bits of green and silver glass beads on thin silver wire. She wore them on days when she wasn’t wearing turquoise ones or pearls.

Everything they say reminds me of something I’ve done, somewhere I’ve been, something I’ve seen. But Im learning to keep still. People like their own memories, not mine. Today my T-shirt says Been There Downloaded That.

The Hymn Sing

I have a fake book with 1000 hymns. CyberHymnal on the web provides lyrics for more than that. I have been building a book of music to go with song sheets. We have twice had a hymn sing- along when the weather kept people home from church. I am learning that people only like the hymns they have known for years, and resist learning a new one, and that there are a great many churches here within a small radius, each with dedicated adherents, each with its own base of frequently sung hymns. After growing up Episcopal I asked to be allowed to go to the Community church where the hymns were much better. Long, long ago, someone told me no one knows if Christianity works because it’s never been tried. I thought that was just a clever remark then, now I am inclined to agree. The last church I went to had two banners out front. One said All Are Welcome. The other said God is Still Speaking. The first of these is organized hypocrisy. The second may be true but who is listening? In any event, a lot of hymns have really good tunes, and as Fred Waring told us at a workshop, “Sing. You can’t fight while you’re singing,” and as the motto of the Mountain Lakes Glee Club, with my hero Mark Andrews conducting, said, Ecce Quam Bonum …cantare in unum ( more or less) which my father liked to translate as: “It’s a damn good thing to get together and sing.”

Matthew Arnold:

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...