I can’t even believe I have to tattle on mama again. It’s not as if I haven’t discussed time management skills with her before. I even thought, these past couple of years, that she was finally getting the hang of paying attention to me and only me.
But she fell off the wagon yesterday.
Deuce and his little brother Ace on the shores of Lake Huron.
While I was home napping supervising my daddy she was off galivanting with other dogs. And worse, they were boy dogs! She can’t fool me, I might be old and deaf but my nose still works just fine!
I can’t believe it! Seriously, I am too old for these kinds of shenanigans. Mama should know better.
Ace is only 2, and he likes the water. Silly boy.
She says she thought about taking me but decided the drive would be too scary, what with how I shake when I have to go in the car these days. I told her that she’d shake too if the only place she ever got to go was the vet!
Deuce is 10 and smart, like me. We don’t like our feet getting damp.
So she said she was sorry, and she made me my supper and tickled my ears and tried to play lovey-dovey.
These guys will pose anywhere for a treat. I need to tell them about my one image, one treat clause.
But I told her there was only one way she could make it up to me, only one thing she could do to make me consider forgiving her this time.
Yep.
That’s how I got to go on a nice long walk with my mama in my park right after supper while the sun was setting.
You owed me mama, and you know it!
But shhhhhhh. Don’t tell mama, but I didn’t mind staying home all that much. I got lots of loving from my daddy and lots of naps and I didn’t miss a single meal either.
That was your one picture, mama, now lets get to walking.
What do you do when it’s a cold rainy day, when the rain never stops falling and everything seems to be grey and soggy? Well, you go out and take pictures! Of course.
So here’s the story of the tree branch…first noticed when I was taking Katie out on a walk up the street. I noticed the horizontal row of raindrops on the tree in our front yard. It looked interesting.
Hmmmmm, that could be interesting.
So when we got home I put her inside and grabbed the camera. Katie, of course, wanted to go back out too. Because if mama has her camera, surely Katie herself would be the subject. And there’s that one shot, one treat clause in her contract.
Silly girl.
Not quite what I was imagining.
I took her with me anyway, because she asked nicely, even though I knew it would be harder to capture those raindrops with her. And it was. Cars going by, sniffing, tugging on her leash, all of it caused me to stop doing what I was doing. Which was trying to focus on the drops of water.
I eventually just put her leash under my foot.
Still an especially noisy truck was coming, and I had to stop once again and pick her up, she squirming, me grumbling under my breath. Especially when I slipped in some poo that somehow I had missed while cleaning up the yard earlier in the day.
Yep, it wasn’t easy. But this is what I was looking for.
Our world, captured upside down in each drop.
For me, it was worth the soggy coat, soggy dog, poo on the shoe and cold rain down my neck. But I’m sure hoping for sunshine tomorrow.
I was participating in a group of truck crash families and survivors a few weeks ago and one of the topics that came up was foggy brain. Many of those in the group that day were brand new to the reality of coping with life after a traumatic event.
A local park, early this foggy morning.
A discussion about living in a never ending nightmare morphed into a discussion about foggy brains. How hard it was to concentrate. How the memory wasn’t as sharp as it once was.
I didn’t bring it up in the meeting, not to discourage any of the new families, but my dad died in a crash caused by a sleepy semi driver more than seventeen years ago, and my brain is more foggy today than it was way back then.
A sentinel stands strong in the fog.
On the other hand, I doubt my fog is related to Dad’s death. It might be menopause. It might be covid. It might be something else, still to be diagnosed.
Whatever it is, it’s tiring. I know from months, maybe years, of experience that I can’t remember anything that I don’t write down. And that often, if too much time goes by, I won’t know what I meant by the scribbles I find on random pieces of paper.
Trying to pick out the clarity amidst the fog.
I have never been able to remember people’s names. Now I can’t remember conversations, or finishing tasks, or whether or not I took the clothes out of the dryer.
For several days this week I couldn’t find the remote that moves our adjustable bed until it was found, out in the living room, on a table next to the sofa. I am constantly looking for my phone. And my shoes.
Sometimes it’s so hard to see.
More scary, I don’t always understand what people are saying. Not just the concept, but the actual words. Sometimes it all sounds like noise, with only an occasional word I recognize. Other times there are words but their combination doesn’t make sense to me. Lots of times, after the fact, I’ll figure it out, and usually it’s just words that sound like other words confusing me. Ah, I think, that’s what they meant.
Trying to focus.
Most of the time my confusion happens while watching tv, often while doing something else, and not concentrating on one thing or the other, and, as it turns out, not hearing with context.
But other times it happens when people are speaking live and I try to slow my brain down and concentrate. That often works, but sometimes I have to ask questions, where I risk appearing dense. Other times I just let it go. Pick your battles, that’s my rule.
Foggy brain. Is it age, life experiences, past traumatic events, illness, stress, or just a lack of concentration? I don’t know, but I’m beginning wondering if the drugs they’re peddling on television to forgetful seniors really work.
Walking through the fog.
And I’m wondering when I turned into a senior anyway. Looking back, it’s all turning into a foggy blur.
I needed to take an “interesting” cookie to a dinner. Something that would go with the orange ice the hostess was serving for desert.
Hmmmmmm.
In 2009 I worked in a library and a new cookbook arrived called “Cookies to Die For.” I loved looking at the beautiful images of perfect cookies, so I bought a copy for myself.
I’ve never actually baked anything from the book. But I like to look at the pictures and dream, so it’s never been donated to our local library book sale. This week I decided to find something interesting, yet doable, in the book to take with me to dinner. And I found it.
Gingerbread streusel thins.
This perfect cookie was pictured near the front of the book, a small dollop of fresh whipped cream adorning the thin, crispy square of goodness. A tasty work of art.
I was sure I could replicate it.
But it called for molasses and I’d been out for awhile. So had my local Kroger, the last few times I’d ordered my groceries for curbside pickup. Maybe I should go in and see for myself, you know how these young shoppers are, they might not even know what molasses is.
Nope. No molasses on the shelf at Kroger.
So I drove to another store and darned if they didn’t have a whole lot of it. Confusing, but not so much that I wanted to stand there and think about it. Time was short. But, wait. When was the last time I baked anything with powdered ginger. Or allspice? Better pick some up while I was at the store.
When I got home I checked the expiration date on the small tin of ginger. Hmmmm… November of 2017. Not too bad. After all, what’s 4 years among friends’ baked goods? And the allspice? December, so I’m good, right? What? What year you wonder? Well….December of 2001.
I tossed them both.
And how did the cookies turn out? Well, note there are no beautiful images of my cookie. No artfully lit square of spicy goodness. No dollops to be found.
No…my cookies turned out spongy. You might say soggy. You could probably scrape them out of the pan and into a bowl over which you could spoon the more elegant orange ice.
I took a few of them to dinner anyway, because I believe homemade cookies should always reside in the no judgement zone. Plus they tasted amazing, likely because of those fresh spices.
OK, I’ll show you my result. Not crispy. But certainly thin.
But…I felt I needed to hide the evidence of my soggy failure.
I play in a community band and I haven’t talked about it in a long time. Probably not since we did the pop-up concert on the grassy circle of a cal-de-sac in September of 2020!
People who play live music suffered withdrawal during the covid pandemic. And when, in the fall of 2021, the community ed department said we could hold rehearsals at the school again we were happy even though we would have to wear a mask at all times, even when playing, and the bells of our instruments would need to be covered as well.
We sent out a survey to our members, asking who and what instruments felt they would be able to play with these restrictions, while knowing covid was a risk. About 50% of the band felt they wanted to play, and so we began, last fall, to plan our season.
Instrumentation was rough. We had, in the beginning, only one percussion player who lugs his personal drum set to and from rehearsals and another to play all the rest of the instruments back there. We had a handful of clarinets, some came most rehearsals, some came some rehearsals. Sometimes it was just one young man and me. We had no trumpets to speak of and only two trombones.
But as the weeks went by we began to fill in the vacant parts. Tenor sax players played the trumpet and cornet music. The tuba players wrote timpani parts into their own music. Everybody played all the cues written, to cover what would normally be played by someone else.
Individuals stepped up. People who never before played first parts gained confidence with practice. Often I’d say to the young man seated next to me in the second clarinet section, “It’s just you and me tonight, but we’ve got this.” and he’d give me a thumbs up and it turned out we did.
And a benefit of being short handed? You get to play really loud most all the time.
In the end band members and other people recruited musicians for us, and with only a couple rehearsals left before our concert we gained two trumpet players, both of whom play beautifully, a baritone player, and some high school students to fill in on clarinet and percussion parts. We even got a community band alumni, now a music major away at college, to come play timpani for us the night of the concert!
So, how did it go? Did this cobbled together group of retirees and working adults and busy students pull it all together in time? Well, we played fun music, music from old television shows like Gilligan’s Island and Perry Mason and MASH and Dragnet and Leave it to Beaver. We played music from the Beatles, and from movies like Chariots of Fire and The Way We Were and Gone with the Wind and Star Wars. We played bits of Send in the Clowns, Another Op’nin, Another Show, Let Me Entertain You, You Oughta Be in Pictures, Hooray for Hollywood and more. And of course we threw in a march or two, because what’s a community band without marches? We did Red Skelton’s Red’s White and Blue March. We ended with the original Overture to West Side Story, and for our encore we played The Stars and Stripes Forever, because, as our conductor told the audience, we needed to hear it.
Yes we pulled it together. And what a fun concert it was to play! Not easy, it’s never easy when you only rehearse once a week and the cast of musicians changes every time you meet. But fun because we were together.
And, in fact, that’s the real purpose behind a community band. Playing in our concert Tuesday night was a man in his 80s who hadn’t played in decades and who considered not preforming that night, worried that he’d make a mistake (he didn’t) and a freshman in high school who stepped in to help us and who got to play his very first concert solo, who did a beautiful job.
That’s the age spectrum, in a community band, people who love to play, from 15 to 80 something. Making mistakes and flubs and blats and ringing tones and harmonies beautiful enough to make your eyes water while you’re playing, a community band is a bunch of people pulling together, even when it’s hard, to make each other smile, and to make our audience smile too.
“That was so much fun to listen to!” I heard one woman say to her musician on our way back out to the car that evening. Yep. And if it was fun to listen to, just imagine how fun it was to play.
If there’s a community band in your town, make a point of attending their next concert. They’ll have a website, you can find out times and dates there. And if you play, but just haven’t in a long time, dust off that instrument and go see how it feels to be in the middle of something pretty amazing.
It’s been a long time since most of us felt amazing about anything. Go listen. Go play. It’s bound to make you smile.
I’ve been taking a series of free online classes about night photography. Of course the instructor believes we should all be shooting in RAW. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this.
At Katie’s park on a pretty day in March.
Many years ago I took another night photography seminar, where RAW was suggested as well, mostly because you can change the white balance when you’re processing if you shoot in RAW.
“No snow, mama, but still lots of ice!
What does it mean to shoot in RAW? Well, it just means the image you are getting hasn’t been processed at all. There’s more data in the image and it’s all unmodified.
The blackbirds were singing, so it must be spring.
I’ve been shooting JPeg, because, for some reason, RAW made me nervous. Years ago I did a few test shots in RAW, but my processing software wouldn’t allow me to download them. So I haven’t tried again.
“Kinda windy out here, mama!”
But lots of time and software has passed since then, and I figured I should try again. So I took Katie to her park yesterday; in 50 degree (10C) with a stiff breeze, she was in heaven.
“I’m having a good hair day!”
It has been a long time since we visited her park, and, as I remember it, a blizzard was bearing down and it was so very cold that we didn’t stay long at all.
“I love my park!”
Yesterday she pranced like a puppy, tail wagging, nose to the ground looking for all the pee-mail left by other doggies just for her.
“Hey mama, the smells are just wonderful over here!”
I took a few pictures, in RAW, just to see how they came out. To be honest, I can’t tell the difference, but I’ll keep shooting in RAW until I figure out why it’s better.
“It’s so good to be out here, mama!”
Katie says she’ll gladly model for me again. As long as I bring treats.
Ah yes. I went out to Kensington nearly a week ago to see if there were red-winged blackbirds singing there. I had one lone male visiting my feeder at home, but I hadn’t heard the early blackbird chorus that announces spring every year here in Southeast Michigan.
Not a blackbird.
But I got distracted, first by the turkeys and then by the redheaded woodpecker. Still….were there red-winged blackbirds here in Michigan, aside from the lonely guy at my feeder?
Can’t get over this guy.
I could hear a few, down another icy trail, and I hoped I didn’t have to go too far to gather proof. They were mostly far away, hiding in the cattails. They weren’t making much noise, and seemed a bit shy, or maybe they were just shell-shocked by the freezing temperatures and snow.
“I’m hungry, but I don’t know if I can trust that lady over there.”
One was walking up the path ahead of me. I thought maybe if I put some peanuts and oilers out I could coax him up into a more photogenic location.
“HEY! Hurry up you guys, she left us SNACKS!”
The longer I stood there the more blackbirds I saw, though none were brave enough to come get the treats I put out.
I’d appreciate a snack too, lady. My feet are cold.
Eventually they came closer, and ate some treats that I tossed near them. They even sang a little, but I know that later in the season they’ll be much happier to see me, once they figure out that the people visiting generally have food for them.
“If I don’t look at you, you’re not there. Right?”
So yes, spring has officially sprung in Southeast Michigan. The red-winged blackbirds are here, let the snow begin to melt!
Change Is Hard 