Inch Three: Another Bird Story

Last weekend was the Symphony's March concert. This year was a blockbuster: Saturday and Sunday performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The Ninth takes a full chorus as well as four soloists, one of whom, the soprano, was our guest for the weekend.

Paola Gonzalez is a doctorate student in voice at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She is a sparkling, beautiful person both inside and out. Having her stay with us for a few days likewise turned out to be a sparkling experience.

We have had soloists stay with us prior to a concert before, but they have always been instrumentalists, not vocalists. Vocalists are a different type of guest.

Saturday morning, while I was tidying up the kitchen, I heard a bird trilling somewhere. Despite our cold weather, the birds that wintered over have started to emerge and more often when I step outside, I sometimes hear their chirps and trills. So when I heard the trills, I looked out the kitchen window at the dogwood tree, often a gathering point for several types of birds.

Seeing nothing, I listened for another moment, then laughed at myself. The bird was inside my house. The bird was Paola, warming up her voice a little with trills and runs.

Paola appeared a little later for breakfast and I told her my confusion. She blushed and apologized.

Oh no, I assured her. I loved hearing her. It is so different to hear a human voice trilling instead of a roll on the timpani.

Sunday morning when our upstairs bird began trilling, I smiled and listened with pleasure to the runs.

Paola and her fellow soloists gave two spectacular performances and I was at both. Sunday afternoon, with concert weekend almost over, I sat back in my seat and let the music wash over me. Paloa's voice soared to the high domed ceiling of the performance hall, taking sure flight.

It was bittersweet saying goodbye after the concert. Paola's thanks were as musical as her singing voice and we hugged each other hard before our songbird picked up her bags and headed back to Cincinnati.

Several of the soloists from the weekend. Paola is the redbird third from the left.

Inch Two: The Nest

Recently I came across this line of poetry:

Out there
a bird is building a nest out of torn up letters.

It is from a poem by James Schuyler, an American poet unknown to me. I did not read that line in any poem by him, but rather in a review of a memoir that opens with that line.

The image fascinated me the moment I read it. In my mind, I could see the bird sitting on a nest, scraps of envelopes and stray paragraphs surrounding it. The envelopes were in shades of pink and blue, the stuff of bakery boxes. Some of the scraps were love letters. Maybe there was a condolence letter in the mix or a letter trying to repair a family breach.

I fell asleep some nights thinking of the nest of torn up letters. What did the letters contain? Why were they torn up?

After more research, I found the line was from the poem, "An East Window on Elizabeth Street," and was not even the entire line. The complete line reads:

Out there
a bird is building a nest out of torn-up letters
and the red cellophane off cigarette and gum packs.

Oh. That's a whole different image, a whole different nest. This is an urban bird, a bird scrapping for whatever bits and pieces it can find to construct its home. Those torn up letters? Oh, any old thing would do—an electric bill, a notice from the optometrist, a collection letter.

With the (slowly) warming weather, birds are starting to be more visible. I hung two suet feeders on the old dogwood that is just outside the kitchen window. Occasionally I see a grackle or two perch on them. Sometimes I stand and watch the grackles tear at the suet, twisting their heads at impossible angles before flying up to a higher branch and peering down again. The other day I saw a Downy Woodpecker hop up the vertical trunk of the same tree, testing the wood as it went.

The birds will be building their nests again. We sometimes have robins nesting near the house—once over a front porch light, more often in the dogwood. Their nests are made of dried grasses and old flower stalks and sometimes even a piece of shredded paper that has blown out of the recycling.

But no torn up letters, no pastel colors, no bird sitting atop a broken heart.

Inch One: The Pie

March 14 was Pi Day, not to be confused with National Pie Day, which is January 23.

The point of Pi Day is the same as Pie Day, as far as I am concerned. You need to eat pie on Pi Day.

Early in the day of the 14th, I decided it should be a coconut cream pie.

But not just any old coconut cream pie. I didn't want a store bought coconut cream pie or an artificially rigid slice from a restaurant. And I certainly didn't want to make one from a box pudding with coconut flakes stirred in, poured into a crust from the grocery shelf and topped with Cool Whip (my mom's version back in the day).

That left the pie in my hands, which is exactly were I wanted it to be.

One of the websites I have bookmarked on the computer is Curvy Mama Pies, a web-based pie bakery in Bethesda, Maryland. Catherine Gewertz, the pie maker, blogs on the site, and often shares pie recipes that have caught her attention. I took the recipe for my Pi Day's dessert from her blog.

Making the custard

A good coconut cream pie starts with a thick custard base. I learned the art of custard making over a decade ago, when my friend Gus asked for a custard pie at a meeting for which I was baking. While I quailed at the thought of making a custard (it sounded hard), I wasn't about to let Gus down. Custard turned out to be simple and I have never been intimidated by any recipe calling for a custard base since then.

By supper, the custard, thick with eggs and coconut milk, was cooling in the refrigerator. Later that evening, I filled the crust (which I had baked early that morning) and let it continue to set up.

Warren was gigging all this weekend, so Pi Day would be a late celebration. When he walked through the door late Friday night, I leaped to whip the cream that would top the pie. I cut thick slices, serving it on painted china plates that were wedding present for his parents decades ago.

Pies are wonderful things, full of good flavors and good feelings. Our Pi Day pie was no exception. As I type these words Sunday evening, some of the pie is still cooling its heels in the refrigerator. A slice will go to my friend Anne and the rest will go into us.

And I will savor every bite.

Inch by Inch

Anne Lamott, in her beautiful little book about writing, Bird By Bird, shared that she keeps a one-inch square frame on her desk.

"It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being."

I was reminded of Lamott's frame this week when I read Still Writing, by Dani Shapiro, yet another gracefully written little book about writing. Shapiro writes about the necessity of setting aside time in which to write, about the necessity of honoring and respecting that time.

"Be a good steward to your gifts," she says, borrowing from the late poet Jane Kenyon.

It has been a long, cruel winter, both inside and outside. While our winter weather did not come close to what family and friends experienced in Minnesota and Wisconsin, we had a hard siege of single digit  temperatures and harsh, frozen landscapes. Many days were spent stumbling from the door to the car, from the car to the office, then reversing that journey to stumble back into the house and try to warm up for the evening.

Inside, my myeloma was hellbent on making sure I was incapable of doing anything more than the bare minimum, reducing me most evenings and weekends to being curled up on the couch under a blanket, reading. I managed work by the skin of my teeth, I managed some limited household chores, and I managed to stay alive. Even once I started treatment, the daily quality of my life remained poor. The myeloma appeared to be subsiding, but the treatment more than made up for its retreat. I remained on the couch and many things remained out of reach, including any sustained interest in writing.

Even a one-inch frame seemed impossibly large.

The snow has finally melted, the last traces in the yard just recently disappearing. It is not yet consistently warmer outside, but the light is that of early spring and not of winter. That realization hit me when Warren and I topped a hill and saw the brown fields spread out in an afternoon light. "That is not winter light," I said firmly. "That is not winter light at all."

As I look out on the newly uncovered landscape—the brown lawn, the kitchen garden waiting to be tilled—I recognize that I will need to measure out my days for some time yet. My energy still flags faster than I would like, and when I overdo, I pay swiftly. So I am working on staying mindful of the day at hand.

I am painfully aware that brutal as winter was in Ohio this year, it was even more brutal in Cancerland. Stumbling through the frozen stubble of the distant fields of that fiefdom in which I reside, all that came to mind was this sentence from City of Thieves: "You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold." While I hoped I would reach shelter, this is the winter that made me realize at a gut level that I will not be able to take such shelter for granted again.

And yet spring is in the air.  Green things, including the first weeds, are trying to poke up. My oncologist and I have tweaked my treatment regimen, hoping to suppress the myeloma without suppressing me as well. We are hopeful that the myeloma will settle down once again, allowing the life in me to poke up and flourish.

What I learned this winter in Cancerland, not for the first time but perhaps so deeply that it has taken root, is that I need to be committed more than ever to spending my days deliberately and at a slower pace.

Deliberate living. A one-inch square focus out to be a good starting point.

So I have set myself a goal. A small goal. A one-inch square goal.

A post a week. A little post. A one-inch square post, respecting the writing and respecting the time.

It is all I have to bite off for the time being.

Turn Around

This picture of Ramona popped up on Alise's Facebook page the other day. Alise commented, "She picked up some info at NAYA tonight. We always knew she was advanced."

Ramona is 18 months old today.

What I wanted to say when I saw the photo was, "Don't turn away, Ben and Alise, because when you turn back again, Ramona will be receiving college mailings!"

I remember still when the very first college letter came to Ben, close on the heels of his PSAT scores. I remember opening the mailbox and wondering what was up when I removed an envelope from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

That Depauw entreaty was the first of an avalanche of letters and catalogues for Ben. And when I turned around again, he was in Portland, graduating from Reed College.

When I was little, the Sunday night "must see" television show was Disney's "Wonderful World of Color." A Kodak commercial ran weekly either during or immediately after the show. It was a song sung by a father to his daughter, with the opening lines of "Where are you going, my little one, little one?" When I saw the photo of Ramona, I thought of it immediately.



Time is fleeting. Every time I turn around, there is a new Ramona. Is she already 18 months old?

She must be, because I can already see her reaching up for that doorknob.

Pie Day

January 23 is National Pie Day, thanks to the National Pie Council.

A box of culled apples we bought for $5

National Pie Day is not to be confused with Pi Day, which is, of course, March 14 (3.14). Pi Day is a day on which many folks, especially science/math nerds (per my friend Pat), celebrate by eating pie. And we all know the equation for determining the area of a circle, such as the surface of a pie, is πr squared. And for the circumference of the circle, as in the pie pan itself? 2πr.

Pies are squared? Not for Pie Day here in Delaware. The pies were most definitely round. And while two pies are definitely better than one, there was no shortage of pies here on Pie Day because there were lots of pies.

In fact, there were 19 of them.

Piling up in the freezer

All day on National Pie Day, the Symphony handed out slices of fresh baked apple pie to anyone who walked through the door. Despite the bitter cold temperatures, lot of people came through that door. Attorneys, a magistrate, my mother, an organist, the mayor, someone in town just to pay his property taxes, a banker, the city manager, downtown shop owners, and the city attorney all stopped in. The youngest pie eater was just short of 3 years old, the oldest were well up in years. About half of the nineteen pies were consumed one slice at a time. The eight remaining at the end of the day went out into the world in various ways. Two went to high school wrestlers (courtesy of my friend Judy), three went to juvenile court, one went home with Buffy, who works at the Symphony, and one came home to our house (half of which I then gave to my friend Anne as a thank you for a wonderful favor).

The eighth pie went home with an elderly gentleman and his wife for a donation. He had a slice, she had a slice, they shared a third slice, and then he asked if he could buy one. No, said Warren, but he would let him take the pie for a donation.

I hope that man and his wife enjoyed every bite of the pie they carefully shepherded home.

19 pies. Yes, I made them singlehandedly in batches of four, doing everything from peeling and slicing the apples to rolling and filling the dough. As I finished each batch, I wrapped and froze the pies unbaked. The night before Pie Day, I baked pies all evening, filling the house with the scents of cinnamon and apples.

19 pies ready to go

What was I thinking?

Not entirely of the Symphony, although I made sure it was the beneficiary of my Pie Day observances. Warren helped immeasurably in making Pie Day happen, including calling a grocery for a box of culls and supporting my quest. I'm glad the pies pulled people into the office. But I didn't do it solely for the orchestra.

Not of my health, that's for sure. I'm in the middle of a relapse. I have not yet started treatment, and my energy and strength levels are at all time lows. That's why I made the pies in batches of four instead of eight or more: I couldn't make more than four at a time.

So what was I thinking?

Here's what, plain and simple: I wanted the community to eat my apple pies on National Pie Day. And I wanted to do it so that in the event that there are no more Pie Days for me, I will look back with great satisfaction on this one.

The poet Dylan Thomas wrote a haunting villanelle, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. The final two lines are often quoted:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

As I wander through the outlying lands of Cancerland, I give more and more thought to the ultimate end of my wanderings. I do not plan to rage, in the sense of being wildly angry, against the dying of the light when it comes to the cancer and medical intervention. I do not plan to battle and fight this terrible disease to its bitter end. I live with it, I am about to start a treatment that we all hope will make it quiet down again, but I'm not in a battle with cancer. There will come a day when I say to my oncologist "that's enough" and savor the days left to me. That's my plan, when that times comes.

The word "rage" can also mean a burning desire or passion. When it comes to my non-oncology/non-medical side of life, the day to day events that make up 24 hours, I am raging.  I have returned to volunteering at our monthly Legal Clinic, despite how awful I feel afterwards. And my quiet raging is what fueled my hands and spirit through the apple pie binge. Yes, it was exhausting, and yes, I collapsed on the couch when the last three pies exited the oven.

And yes, my heart was filled with joyous rage.

At the Symphony office

Handing Down Treasures Through the Generations

My good friend Anne called to me as I walked by her office today. "Hey, I have to tell you something real quick about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

I gave Anne a copy of Betty Smith's novel for Christmas when she mentioned earlier in the year that she had never read it. I am of the firm conviction that all readers (and by "readers," I mean avid, crazed without books, individuals who will read cereal boxes if nothing is at hand) should read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at least once in their life. (Confession: I've read it some two dozen plus times.)

Anne is a reader. I love Anne because she is bright and witty and attractive and reminds me so much of my daughter-in-law Alise at times that I get homesick for Alise (who is also a reader). Anne had to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

So this morning Anne told me her mother was pleased that Anne was reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because she had read it and it was a good book. Then Anne's mother said she had read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because her mother, Anne's grandmother, had read it and then given it to her daughter to read.

Anne's grandmother had only an 8th grade education but clearly did not let her lack of formal education keep her from expanding her horizons through reading. When Anne told me that about her grandmother, I immediately thought of Francie Nolan, the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and of how Francie's struggles for an education despite not being able to attend high school must have resonated with Anne's grandmother.

I love the thought of Anne's family reading this book through three generations. It personifies Will Schwalbe's lyrical reflections in The End of Your Life Book Club: "I will never be able to read my mother's favorite books without thinking of her—and when I pass them on and recommend them, I'll know that some of what made her goes with them."