I’d Rather Be In Sydney

It’s an absolutely beautiful day out here in the North American Pacific Northwest.

Rain is softly falling. It had snowed the 24 hours before, leaving a soft, wet cover of white on everything. Then the temperature moderated a bit and the rains have been falling since early morning. It is cold, of course, but not quite as cold as it has been the last week or so. The entire continent has been laboring under an apparently unusual series of winter storms.

As the rain falls it warms the snows previously fallen, and turns them to a semi-transparent state somewhere between snow and rain and ice. Somehow the cold air is colder than it must otherwise have been because it is now so blatently wet, cutting through the layers of fabric we wear to the pores of the skin, causing us to feel that going outside at all is a heartless thing to be doing – something akin to Shackleton and his crew shuffling across the antantarctic. Fortunately for us, winter’s outings are limited to short walks from the door to the car, or from the door to the garbage bin just a few feet away. Or from the door to the edge of the deck where we can watch the dog fetch the things we throw, hoping the dog will get it over with sooner rather than later – and get its piss and shit over with as expeditiously as possible to boot.

The sky is as white as the ground, which white is disappearing fast under the gentle influence of the cold, cold rain, inhospitable to man and beast alike. Everywhere now is a slush, a mush. The birds, hunkered, have nothing to say about it.

Come to think of it, though the thermometer says 40 degrees Farenheit, my entire countenance and frame says rather minus 12, or thereabouts, with humidity at 152 percent. Or something.

It’s an absolutely beautiful day.

Jazz in Two or Three keys

I’m high from getting all the stuff done that I had wanted to get done, so I roll down the window to take in the tempered breeze seeming to herald spring’s approach and me all randy, so I stroll down Isaacs like a high school idiot cruising up Division on a Friday or Saturday night back in the day, turned up my ingratio-tunes, old school classic chassy romantic fantastical sing-alongs, and roll in at a con-store to pick up an iced frap in a bottle and chug that like it’s a beer, not caring about the caffeine against personal policy at 6:30 pm because I still have a few hours and miles to go. Living it up – me, as close as I get these days. On the edge Me. Needing to bust out like I’m all full of piss and hope and youthful energy. This is me on President’s Day, which I in no way observe, but it’s a Monday, a free one, and I’m on my way to choral society rehearsal where an old woman my mom’s age (but more alive and gregarious as hell and really needing to get out of the house where she’s been dutifully caring for her husband with cancer) talks me up non-stop for 15 or 20 because she recognized me from before and neither of us had been singing in the group for 7 or 8 years now, and are now delightfully met, along with the 4 or 5 others I had known in other contexts; then one of the old choir veteran tenors, head full of snow white hair and snow white beard to match, comes up to my seat, bends over with his hands on his knees, and conspiratorily says, “Now, back in the old days…” and he emphasizes “old” and I, like the silly smartass I can be for fun in social situations says, “You mean the Jurassic? the Paleolithic?” and he smiles and says he’d sung next to met at the high school gym when the choir was known by a different name and I says, “I don’t remember singing there, when was this?” and he says, “In the early 80’s” and I says, “Couldn’t have been me, I was just out of high school and into college,” and he looks at me, and there’s that delicious pause, you know what I mean, where the penny drops, then grinning in his teeth because he’s mistook me for someone older (I’m 60, he’s 85 and apparently neither of us likes acting our age much) he goes, “Well, hell, thanks a lot,” and turns to walk away and I laugh because of course this is a punch line, me laughing like a hyena or gleeful witch like I do in these social moments when I can entertain myself with a raucous cackle for the sheer fun and joy of that particular human activity – secretely figuring that a lot of folks forgot somewhere that laughing is a better music for the soul and world both than whining and bitching, them that dropped their selfless joy somewhere along the way of getting caught up in who the next prez is going to be and never bothering to go looking for it.

Sweet Sister, Come

Sky is mostly blue and the air is moving. Ah, Spring – She’s a-coming. Taking her time, but a-coming just the same.

For a time we knew, as the days of light grew shorter, She hung back, a sleepy child napping.

Winter, that moody crank who comes forth when Summer – Spring’s older sis – recedes to let the earth rest in its soils and from its toils for fruit and prosperity, for the urgency of lustful singing.

Winter: He has his own mysterious beauty. We know He does. We concede it. Unhurried himself, He is wise beneath his dark brow and recyling ways, custodian of decay performing balancing acts amid stubborn shadows.

(Autumn is his fickle niece, ambivalent entre-act.)

But now Spring has awakened, and is coming. Walking toward this face of the wild planet, her hair in waves, a song breathing from her lips, and in her hand a crocus bulb. Get ready to hail her: She will never grow old.

She has already begun tossing sprays of sunlit cyan from where, if you peer through your scope, you will see her walking toward you on a carpet of warm ethereal shimmer her Sister has laid out for her.

Oh, sweet, sweet Spring of endfless hope and boundless lust for life: eke out our fervency for songs of salvation and rebirth while they labor on the other side to pull the young from the earth’s angry bitter cold raw quaking maw.

Time Warp

I understand neither Einstein nor notions of a magical universe where every coincidence is none. But an amazing thing happened the other night.

I decided to return to the local Choral Society for winter term. When I arrived on the first night of rehearsal I found that a woman I’d done community theater with two years earlier was present as well. It was a fun re-connect.

On the same night I found that a student I’d worked with in Rock Camp last summer was also there with her mother. Also a fun re-connect, but with the added pleasure of seeing the rare high school student singing in a group who’s average age is somewhere around my own.

When I arrived on the second night I said hello to the community theater acquaintance again, but did not see the high school student, nor her mother. (Everyone is allowed three absences before being dismissed for that term’s concert.)

The two-hour rehearsal concluded, everyone was packing up and heading out. I was helping to stack chairs. A woman called my name. “Mike.” It wasn’t one of those explosive shouts you sometimes hear unexpectedly (which is why there is no exclamation point), but also wasn’t exactly a question (which is why there is no question mark). It was somewhere in between: on the line between “I know that name,” and “I’m not sure what I’m seeing right now.”

I turned around and didn’t recognize the woman standing there. Then she said her name: Ellie MacDonald. Right away it sounded like it should ring a bell. But it took several more seconds of standing there staring at her like a man in a fugue state before I realized I was looking at someone I hadn’t seen in over 40 years.

Ellie MacDonald (I’ve changed her name to protect her innocence) and I were both members of the elite vocal jazz group at our high school from 1977-1980. It was an audition-only choir. I had wanted to be a part of it since middle school, when the choir, known as “Shivesen,” had given a concert there.

I had auditioned as a freshman, but hadn’t made the cut. In the fall of 1977 I auditioned again and was selected. So was Ellie.

The next three years gave me some of the brightest memories of my early musical career. The choral director and I became close during that time, and he was a mentor for me as a developing pianist and writer. Friends and I collaborated on helping to arrange “charts” (songs) for the group to experiment with. One of these charts, an arrangement of an old jazz number called “Cloudburst,” had captured our imagination and the director agreed to help us arrange it for the group’s repertoire in the spring of 1980 for annual festival and competition.

At competition, I was allowed to play piano in the rhythm section. Mendoza sang the solo. When everything was tallied, we were announced the winners of the festival. That moment is still one of the greatest of my life. I can still see Jeff, Pat, Susie, Rick, Sherie, Kelly, Greg, Ellie, and the rest as we floated into the air and laughed and cried all the way home.

It was our last festival together. When we graduated, we moved on, as kids do.

As we stood there the other night, beholding one another (literally beholding), 40 years disappeared in a flash. I was actually stunned, particularly as I had long ago lost touch with anyone from high school. I finally threw my arms open and we held each other as if we were long-lost friends. Which, I guess we were. She actually wept (probably over the shock of me not having any hair on my head).

I said, “But how did you recognize me?”

She said, “I didn’t.” She reached out and tugged at my name tag.

What are the chances that two high school choir mates, having bonded over a unique and exceptional experience 40 years ago, would find each other at a choir rehearsal 40 years later? I can’t imagine this kind of thing happens very often.

Now we will see each other every week. And we’ll sing.

flow river flow

It’s now softly blowing and now and then softly raining

not even very cold; but a winter breeze carries its own frosty edge.

It’s walking weather

Here it doesn’t surprise you at all

isn’t unusual for the wind to accelerate into gales, gusts

for the rain to fall swiftly, urgently

It’s walking weather all the same

albeit with an edge

the element of discomfort

a challenge to accept and enfold into the walk

allowing the energy of atmosphere to infuse itself into you

until it becomes yours

you matching the wind and rain

you acknowledging and answering

gusto for gusto, pluck for pluck

respectful determination to claim your place

I live here, too.

Do you wish you were the horse standing in the corral

somehow patiently ceding the wind, enduring it

your back turned toward the wind with your head to the lee?

Do you wish you were the straying dog

glad of freedom, always looking for a post to pee on

oblivious to rain, even of the coat you wear for protection?

Do you wish you were the songbird now huddled in the hold of a pine bough

waiting out the earth’s fervent lecturing

glad of a brief reprieve from scavenging and watching for every sign to fly again?

Well, smile at them and let them go

It’s you that notices after all

who walks here, who breathes your way through;

you all the way home.

Border Issues

Foggy on the first day of 2023, which I’ve no reason to expect will be substantially different from 2022 in the general run of things. Presidents come and go, epidemics, this spring’s fashions, hog futures. Demonstrations. Hogs and fogs forever.

Fog comes and goes like the wind, sun, moon, rain. Comes and goes like Canada geese. You don’t pay too much attention to it except when it’s so dense you have to drive the motor car at 32 knots instead of 55. Add a white-out blizzard and you’re down to 20, even 15 in a caravan of cautious pensioners. Finally, you drop down the hill to the south gate of the city and you’re out of the clouds. As if there were a border there and damned glad of it.

Another geese gaggle in the field yesterday. Cheap fowly junket to the south, stabbing at grubbies in the stubble. They’re always Canadian, never any other kind. Coming and going across the border as if there weren’t a border because they can’t see one, the reason for this being that there isn’t one.

Or they’d have special Visa’s. Migrant passes, special dispensations from Rome or something.

Descending out of the soup into ten-mile visibility, crosswinds at five knots. Taxiing without a taxi.

“Where you headed today?”

“Redding.”

“Nature of your business?”

(Nature of yours?) (Yawn) “Same as last year. Seasonal cycle, blah blah. Survival, perpetuation of the species, a little R&R…”

“Are you carrying any illegal substances today? Weapons, drugs, invasive species? Poached whale blubber? Anything that might upset our fragile economy?”

“Nope.”

“Open your flaps, please?”

(Yawn)

“Okay, good to go. See you in April.”

Word Pictures

noodling the muse

Tag: Seasons