Lost and Found

Scrabbling among the cookbooks this morning, looking for something else, I pulled out a folded newspaper insert of cookie recipes. As I refolded it to place it back on the bookshelf, a stained and well-worn oversize index card slipped out from the folds.

I held it up to Warren. "Ah! Look what I found."

My grandmother's popcorn ball recipe.

The card slipped back into my life at a good juncture. Good as in "I needed that." I am coming off several intense days: intense activities, intense work, intense travels, intense interactions. Most of them good, mind you, but intense all the same. Warren is in his own intense period: an upcoming blockbuster concert, a flurry of grant applications coming due, the general press of the Symphony even when there isn't a blockbuster concert in four weeks. It has been so grueling that I often feel by the end of the day as if we have been thrown up on shore after hours in a heavy surf, exhausted and beaten by the cold water and grateful beyond words just to be alive.  

In the middle of this intensity, we packed in a trip (intense) to New York so Warren could attend the midwinter managers meeting of the League of American Orchestras. (Yes, it was intense.) In past years, I would split my time between friends, all of them dear to me, making trips into the city to see them. This year, I spent all of my free time with my longtime friend Katrina. 

Both Katrina and I have been experiencing intensely tumultuous personal times, and both of us had been looking forward for weeks to seeing one another. As Warren aptly noted, I needed time with Katrina. 

Katrina is preparing for a cross-country move and much of what we did while we were together was sort and pack books. Tens of books, hundreds of books. We set out for inspection a massive doll collection that Katrina inherited from a friend of her mother's. It was a tsunami of dolls, so many that I turned to Katrina and said "these are depressing me," which caused us both to start laughing. We sorted through lifetime accumulations of her children's and even her own school papers and drawings and photos. We left the house a few times, to run some errands, to tour the Cloisters, but mostly we stayed home working.   

And throughout the packing and the sorting and the tossing and the boxing, Katrina and I talked and talked and talked. It was healing talk, it was exploring talk, it was comfort food talk.

I am typing these words on Saturday morning while Warren works nearby marking bowings on music for the upcoming concert. Our evening plans have been rewritten; our dinner guests have been under the weather and called to cancel. I will miss them. All the same, I am looking forward to a quiet evening of just the two of us, away, if only briefly, from the intensity of the recent weeks. I am looking forward to an evening of comfort food talk and time with my beloved Warren.

And then there is the missing recipe that slipped back into my life today as quietly as it had disappeared. The card is sitting in front of me as I type and I am almost (but not quite) tempted to make a batch. I said when I began this that it came back at a good juncture and it did. I am still not "back" to writing, although scribbling even this small piece gives me hope. I am still at times all but driven to my knees with what I can only describe as sorrow, undefined and vague, but sorrow all the same.

But the recipe is back home. And so am I.

Christmas Spirit

I am sitting at a rehearsal writing this in pen. This is the last weekend of concerts for Warren in a month full of them.

It is the Friday night before Christmas.

While the musicians and chorus were taking their places on stage, I plumped my jacket up on the seat back next to me and tucked myself into the briefest of naps.

I am that tired.

The performances this weekend are in Mansfield, about an hour north of us. With the short days, it was already deep dusk by the time we left the house tonight. Much of the drive is through rural areas. The crops are all in; the bare field stretch away into the dark. In the cold evening gloom, the Christmas lights here and there stood out sharply.

The county immediately north of us is one of the state's poorest outside of Appalachian Ohio. There was a sign in the town square of the county seat that there would be a food drive, right there, tomorrow morning.

Just a small reminder of how hard the times are.

Despite the times, even the shabbiest houses have a string of lights on the door or a tree in a window. This reminded me of a scene from the short story, "Star Across the Tracks:"

Then Ernie signaled and the little procession swung down out of High View and circled into the part of town where the blocks were prosaically rectangular and everything became smaller; yards, houses, Christmas trees.

"Look!" mamma said happily. "Ain't it nice? There ain't no patent on it. Everyone can make merry. Every little house can have its own fun and tree, just the same as the big ones."

"Star Across the Tracks" was written by Bess Streeter Aldrich, a Nebraska writer in the first half of the twentieth century. Aldrich, whose legacy is a whole handful of novels, also wrote a number of stories mostly set in Depression-era Nebraska. A number of them, all about Christmas, can be found in her collection, Journey Into Christmas.

Aldrich wrote about what she saw and experienced firsthand in Nebraska during the 1930s. She wrote of the shock of losing the family business or the hard-earned savings of a lifetime. She wrote of everyday men and women struggling to stay afloat during a holiday time and feeling only a dullness as the holidays approached.

I like Aldrich's Christmas stories because while they often end on a quiet, positive note, she keeps them grounded in the reality of the era. Jobs are not miraculously restored; savings are not replenished. Her characters have to dig deep inside themselves to resolve the conflict in their hearts between the promise of the Christmas season and the reality of their daily lives. They invariably do so (it is fiction, after all), but not without considerable effort and thoughtfulness on their parts.

I have written recently that I have not found my Christmas spirit yet this season. If by "Christmas spirit" I mean the holly, jolly, jingle bells, deck the halls kind, I can safely say I probably won't be finding it this year.

But if by that phrase I mean the quiet, thoughtful kind of spirit, then maybe just maybe I am already halfway there. It was in the faces of the church school children caroling the other morning in the downtown coffee shop where I happened to be with Margo. It was in Warren's voice as we drove to rehearsal when he suggested we get a tree Saturday morning. It will be in Mt. Gilead's city parking lot tomorrow morning during the food drive.

And maybe, if I look deep inside myself, it might just be inside me too.

Postscript: We woke this morning to the first real snow of that season, both of us catching our breaths at the transformation of outdoors. That was enough to get us out the door early; we even bought a Christmas tree.

Seeing Far Enough

Warren had a xylophone to deliver to a percussionist in the Pittsburgh area. He had repaired and refinished the bars, and built a new case (the part the bars are strung on).

Warren's custom work is beautiful.

He also had a large order of bass drum stands and gong stands, as well as a set of reconditioned xylophone bars, to deliver to Volkwein's Music, which is also in Pittsburgh. So Thursday night he loaded a trailer and his truck, and very early Friday we set off.

Pittsburgh is about four hours from our home, and we left before the sun had risen. Preferring the lesser traveled roads, we angled east then south before joining Interstate 70 at Zanesville. Our route took us through smaller communities and past farm fields, much of them swathed in a thick layer of fog. About 45 minutes into the trip, I happened to glance over my shoulder and see the setting moon, full and red-tinged with the rising sun, sinking into a fog bank.

We arrived in Pittsburgh in mid-morning, stopping first to deliver the xylophone to a very pleased customer. From there it was a quick hop to Volkwein's, where we spent the next several hours.

We were greeted at the Volkwein's delivery door by a sousaphone bell undergoing a touchup. I played sousaphone in high school marching band, so it caught my eye right away.

Warren and Jack, the president of Volkwein's, have had a personal, professional, and business relationship for three decades. They are both passionate percussionists, so we were not there merely to drop off the order. Instead, we were there so Warren and Jack could discuss percussion playing and gossip about other percussionists. We were there so they could talk their way through some problematic instruments and look at rosewood bars and snares and timpani pedals and slapsticks. Warren needed to measure a set of crotales for dimensions for the mold he will build for casting the set he is making this winter.

It was a chance for me to watch Warren in his element as a percussionist, as a craftsman, as someone whose skills and talents in percussion making are respected and valued. I had glimpsed some of that before, but this was five hours of Warren and Jack roaming through the workshops and storerooms of Volkwein's, pulling instruments off of shelves, joking each another, grabbing a pair of drumsticks and trying out a new practice pad and then discussing the tone and bounce of the pad.

It was a joy to behold. I told Warren later that he had bounced from topic to topic. Even his body language was different as the two men compared notes both on and off the multitude of drums.

We left Volkwein's mid-afternoon. We wanted to spend some time in the city before heading back; it was time for that part of that trip. Both of us wanted to stop at the nearby Ikea store. This was a great idea in theory; in reality, I was so exhausted after much of the day in Percussion Land that I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of stuff there. Under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed the sleek designs and bright colors; instead, even after taking a dessert break at the in-store café, I whimpered "Can we leave now?"

Despite my exhaustion, I still wanted to go to downtown Pittsburgh. I wanted to ride an incline, which is sort of a cable rail car that travels up and down the steep hills of the city. (Pittsburgh used to have 15 of them; it still has two fully operational ones which are part of the city's transportation system.) And we both wanted to eat hotdogs at the O, up by the University of Pittsburgh.

Warren checked and double-checked. "Are you sure you are up for this? We don't have to do this." He was worried about how tired I was.

One of the frustrations of being a citizen of Cancerland in that I have no control over my energy levels. I never know if taking a few moments here and there will recharge me or whether my reserves will still be below E. As a result, I tend to go ahead and do rather than stop. I gamble that I will find some energy somewhere and more times than not, I am right.

I was right yesterday.

"Let's go to the incline."

We rode the Monongahela Incline. The ride up was fun and full of folks just happy to be there. Speed is not the issue when riding an incline; just by choosing it as the way to scale a hillside, you are announcing that views trump haste. From the base station, it took us some 360 feet up a hill to a neighborhood. Some of the riders got off and walked on down the street; they lived there. Those of us who were day-trippers, though, wandered down the sidewalk to a series of viewing areas overlooking all of downtown Pittsburgh.

I turned to Warren and said "if I lived in Pittsburgh, I would want to live up here and work down there so I could ride the incline every day."

The views were magnificent. We were there as evening was falling, and the setting sun just washed the tops of the skyscrapers.

The overlooks are popular for bridal parties and we saw two different ones. I can see why, with the city spread out behind them as the photographers snapped away.

Lights came on all over Pittsburgh. The full moon began rising in the east.

It was magical. And I was renewed.

After an hour or more up at the top of the city, we reluctantly tore ourselves away, rode the incline back down, and headed out to dinner before driving back to Delaware. Our destination? The Original Hot Dog Shop, also known as the O.

The O was one of several hot dog shops featured some years ago in a PBS show about - what else? - hot dogs. One of our "for fun" goals is to eat at as many of those shops as possible. As my stepdaughter Elizabeth would say, why not?

The O is pretty much a dumpy diner that caters to the Pitt students. At 9:00 at night, which is when we arrived, it was hopping. Students, locals, Warren and I were all there, all ordering hot dogs.

These are the dogs cooking on the grills.

And this is the great neon sign outside.

After the O, we turned back towards Ohio and home. We arrived home late, tired and worn and grateful to fall into our bed at last. (It was three a.m.)

I am a little groggy today, not thinking or moving quickly. All the same, I feel more alive and centered than I have for weeks. The jaunt to Pittsburgh turned something on inside that had been much too dormant. Our little trip renewed my enthusiasm for experiencing something new, whether it was riding an incline or sampling a hot dog

Emerson wrote "The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough."

Emerson being Emerson, you never know whether he meant the physical or the metaphysical eye. Probably both, I suspect. All I know is that as of late I have felt worn around the edges, grasping for moments of quiet, for moments of gratitude, for small moments of great reward.

Today much of that lassitude has fallen away from me. I am no longer tired in the ways that count most - the ways of my heart, the ways of my spirit.

Yesterday I could finally see far enough.