Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.

Category Archives: music


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Learning to slow down

This week I was out shopping for a zippered sweatshirt to wear to doggie school.  While I drove I was listening to public radio; such soothing and beautiful music!  As I pulled into the parking lot a clarinet was playing a contemporary piece based on a 14th century hymn.  It was absolutely stunning.  I was sad that I had arrived at the parking lot because I wanted to hear the rest of the piece.

Then I had an epiphany.

There was no need for me to jump out of the car just because I had arrived at my destination.  With no employment I was operating with no schedule and  had the luxury of sitting in the car listening to the radio all afternoon if I wanted to.  So I did.

And as I entered the store later I was assulted by ceiling high red Christmas trees and Madonna singing “Santa Baby.”  Should have delayed reentry a bit longer.

Katie 1004


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Cramming a lifetime of memories into one long weekend

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Spending the July 4th holiday weekend with family in the south was a treat.  Part of the weekend was spent at my brother’s home on a big lake, part of the weekend was spent at my parent’s home on another large lake.  Both places played host to all four of us; siblings together again for a few days, goofing off like we did when we were kids.  Of course not having Mom and Dad there to share it all with us lent a low grade melancholic feeling that persisted beneath the laughs, good food, great boat trips and crazy conversations.

Along the way were a few things that stood out:

  • Watching 4th of July fireworks from a boat, just like we used to do as kids.  There were at least a thousand boats anchored at one end of the big lake, private fireworks going off along the shore, the official fireworks at the dam competing with the almost full moon, and Dad’s big dipper hanging high in the sky.
  • Photographing scores of patriotically decked out wave runners as they sped by our boat in a watery version of the traditional  holiday parade.
  • Listening to a celebratory concert at “two tree island” while floating next to the boat, my toes turned up to the evening sky in a salute to Mom’s swimming style.
  • Eating a sweet ripe peach, the juice running down my chin, then eating another just because I could.
  • Running my fingers over small wooden figurines on Dad’s bedroom dresser that years ago had resided on our kitchen windowsill, bringing back memories of teenage years in another place and time.
  • Stopping for a moment during a boat ride in the warm summer air  beside the mountain where we had spread their ashes to pay our respects.
  • Watching a storm come in across the lake, listening to the wind beat the roof and windows, the rain going sideways across the yard, being glad we were there so the house wasn’t facing the storm alone.
  • Playing Mom’s piano.  It took both my sister and me to haltingly make it through some of the music left behind.  Our four hands couldn’t play what her two hands had played so beautifully such a short time ago.
  • Looking around the cabin as we left, saying a silent goodbye to them.  Telling them I loved them.  Hurrying away before the pain overwhelmed.  Seeing a marquee sign out front of the first little gas station a couple of miles away that said simply “Love You.”  Knew it was a message that they loved us back.

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Sittin on a Sunday

katie-1643 Katie and I spent some time weeding this morning.  Well to be truthful I weeded and Katie napped on the warm black asphalt of the driveway.  She’s the only Sheltie I’ve ever met that likes to be really warm.  After awhile I got too warm myself and we retreated to the rocker on the shady deck.  She’s being very good, intently watching the birds at the feeder, but not (yet) lunging off the deck to attack.  I keep telling her what a good girl she is, but I’m sure as soon as the resident chipmunk arrives all bets will be off.

Meanwhile the most beautiful wonderful thing just happened.  As I’m sitting here on the deck reading email (got to love that wireless!) and listening to a neighbor’s country music while sipping on iced tea, there is a ruckus in the trees just above the bird feeder.  And then down swoops a blue jay being chased by a Baltimore oriole!  The oriole chased the blue jay up and down through the trees for quite a long time, so I got to watch the sun flickering off of its bright orange back.  Then they both landed on the ground and the oriole continued to chase the blue jay until the jay left with a big squawk.  Sadly I imagine the cause of all this is that the jay tried to raid the oriole’s nest.  Or something equally traumatic.  But I only see an oriole maybe once a summer and never for as long as I got to watch this one.  I’m hoping he (she?) is around more this summer.  I have a feeder for them somewhere in the basement.  Guess it won’t do much good down there; I should find it and try to entice them to visit me again.  Last year an oriole tried to eat from the humming bird feeder, which is why I bought the oriole feeder.  Of course I never saw the orioles again after that first appearance.

So now it’s just Katie and I, one neighbor’s country music, another’s lawnmower, my backyard wren singing her heart out, and the frogs across the way joining in on the summer’s symphony.  Can’t say I’ve heard better .

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

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And music filled the evening

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a concert put on by the University of Michigan’s Department of Musical Theatre. It was a 25th anniversary concert, with past graduates, many of whom have gone on to Broadway in New York City, both attending and performing. They also featured the soon to be graduating class of 2009 and others currently in the school.

The concert consisted of bits and pieces of the many musical productions the department has staged over the past 25 years. The voices were strong and the supporting University Symphonic Band was wonderful. There were funny moments from comic theater and poignant moments as well. Like when a large group was singing “What I Did for Love” and I realized how significant the lyrics were to their lives; that they didn’t regret anything in order to do the thing they loved, preform wonderful music to adoring audiences.

The concert was long, three and a half hours, but you could tell those past and present students that sat in the audience between their own brief appearances on the stage didn’t want to leave. It was a giant homecoming for them, a homecoming of such talent as was hard to believe. And it was a joy for those of us privileged to be able to sit and listen,  to watch them glow.

Sometime during the evening it was said that the state of the arts is a good way to measure the state of humanity.  Last night humanity soared.


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Bright Side

This past weekend my husband and I took my aunt to Detroit to see “Spamalot” with Richard Chamberlain. It was a lot of fun;  just a crazy musical that makes no sense, and doesn’t have to. We laughed through the whole thing. And in a state where the unemployment is over 10% it was heartening to look around and hear the audience singing along with the cast at the top of their lungs:

Always look at the bright side of life:

“Some things in life are bad

They can really make you mad

Other things just make you swear and curse.

When you’re chewing on life’s gristle

Don’t grumble, give a whistle

And this’ll help things turn out for the best…

And…always look on the bright side of life…

Always look on the light side of life…

If life seems jolly rotten

There’s something you’ve forgotten

And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing.

When you’re feeling in the dumps

Don’t be silly chumps

Just purse your lips and whistle – that’s the thing

And…always look on the bright side of life…

Always look on the light side of  life…


–originally from Life of Brian, Monty Python.

(Words and music by Eric Idle)

The audience laughed and sang and whistled along.  And for a few moments we were all looking at the bright side of life.

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A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

It seemed like a lot going on this weekend, and yet not so much.  Katie and I did agility on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon I drove through snow to Ann Arbor to attend a concert at the University of Michigan, Sunday morning I drove back home, again in snow, so that I could work at the library Sunday afternoon, and now Monday  I’m enjoying a day off thanks to Martin Luther King, watching inauguration doings on television and cooking stew.

During agility Katie and I practiced a lot on all the different equipment.   She got over her fear of the dogwalk, and loved leaping up and over the A-frame.  She still had problems with the chute, and had to have it held open for her to run through, but she ran through the tunnel no problem and even went over a very high jump that had been left high after a German Shepard had jumped before her.  No problem!  Then we got to the teeter totter which she decided she hated.   The instructor and I worked with her for quite a long time, but only succeeded in making her afraid of the dogwalk and the A-frame again!  Just doesn’t like that yellow paint.  Oh well, we’ll try again next Saturday.

The concert in Ann Arbor was lovely.  It was called a Collage concert, all the departments in the University’s music, dance and drama departments participated.  The stage had either the band or the orchestra in the center, and smaller groups along the edge, the chorus on risers along the back.  What was really cool is that while the spotlight was on a particular group and they were preforming, other groups were coming and going, and as one group ended, the next began, the spotlight moving to them.  It was snippets of music, dance and drama, one right after the other, each piece totally different from the one before.  It moved really fast and was fascinating and wonderful.  At one point lights reflected off the cymbals and threw patterns of moving light on the wall.  For an instant I panicked thinking Katie would start barking at the moving light!  And later I noted that concerts are sort of like agility, except it’s the musicians and dancers all taking cues from the conductor rather than dogs taking cues from their handlers.  This particular concert probably felt more like that because there was such a sense of quick movement between the groups of performers.  It just felt so similar to what I had been doing with Katie earlier in the day, in an odd sort of way. I have to say I loved the four cellos playing Fandango by Jeremy Crosmer, and the group of five saxophones who played The Girl with the Flaxen Hair by Claude Debussy, the dozen or so drummers doing Samba Batucada arranged by Sissauyhoat; but my favorite turned out to be the full orchestra playing Nimrod from Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar.  It just made my heart swell and float away it was so beautiful.

Working at the library Sunday was fun as well, I was at a different location than I had ever worked before, so there was the usual questions from me as to where stuff was.  But this particular library had patrons that checked out books!  Real books!  Of course there were also the movies and music going out the door, but a big percentage of the stuff heading out were books!  I was elated and the time flew by.  Once home I realized I was tired, I’d been on my feet nearly the whole time because it was such a busy branch.

And today, Katie is wound up, needing attention as I try to watch news from Washington.  We went outside a bunch of times, but Katie wasn’t happy to be in her plowed out walkway.  The snow is up to her shoulders now, we got 5 or 6 more inches of snow over the weekend.  She wanted to go PLAY in the snow.

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So we did.  I put the long leash on her and the high boots on me and we went out in the back yard to play.  She loved running and leaping in the snow, and we only came in because my fingers were freezing.  Hard to try taking pictures of her while running and trying not to fall in the knee deep snow yourself!

It’s a wonderful, optimistic time for all of us.  Katie is grateful for the run.  I’m grateful for the hope I see coming from Washington.  Maybe we’ve hit the bottom; the bottom of the winter, the bottom of the economic downturn…maybe we’re headed back up into the light.

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Wicked – it's more than just a musical

My husband, aunt and I saw the musical Wicked this afternoon in Detroit. It was visually beautiful, musically delightful, and, if you let it, thought provoking. It’s the story behind the Wicked Witch of the West, the one who tormented Dorothy and her little dog Toto, and who frightened me when I was a kid watching the movie.

As the story goes, the Wicked Witch wasn’t so wicked growing up, but because of the way she looked (green) she was talked about and teased. She inherited some magical powers, and was used by influential people for their own gain, and that made her angry. Eventually these influential people spread rumors about her wickedness to cover up their own misuse of power.

The underlying theme is that we aren’t always told the whole story yet we regularly make assumptions and decisions based on things we’ve heard that may or may not be true. I couldn’t help but think of the parallels between this story and our political history these past 8 years.   I don’t think the musical meant to be political, but that was one of my takes on it.

Either way, political or not, it’s a great show, and if you ever get a chance to see it…do.  It would be wicked to miss it!


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Is it hard to play a violin if you're Cookie Monster?

Last night I attended the Halloween Concert put on by the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. As usual a wonderful time was had by all. The musicians were dressed in costumes; the percussion section were crash dummies, the violas were Crayola crayons, each a different color. Oboe players dressed as characters in Alice in Wonderland. There was a butterfly and a bee, ghosts and devils, a couple of rabbits, one with a tire print up the front of his white teeshirt. A few farmers played violins, a male geisha girl played the cello, and five assorted princesses played the piccolo part of the Sousa march “Stars and Stripes.”

In the audience were costumed people as well. Adults as well as children of all ages were dressed for trick or treat. The couple who sponsored this concert were dressed as bacon and eggs; he was the bacon, she was the eggs. Just down our row of seats was the most adorable baby skunk, and up ahead of us was a child dressed as a remote control. Really. Throughout the concert parents dressed as witches and pirates carried sleeping monkeys and princesses out of the auditorium. It was a delightful scene.

And I wondered absently as I watched the performance if it was more difficult to play a violin if you’re in a giant cookie monster costume. One of the first chair violinists was ensconced in a bright blue furry suit, with the giant bulbous eyes of cookie monster lodged above her forehead. It had to be hot. And certainly not as easy to hold the violin under your chin. I saw other members of the orchestra adjust costumes as they played. I wondered if they had practiced at home in their outfits, just to make sure it all worked together. Probably not!

But my wonderings came to an end during the last piece, “The Great Gate of Kiev” by Modeste Mussorgsky. The cookie monster played a beautiful solo, low and deep and melodic at the beginning of the piece, answered in kind by the Mad Hatter’s oboe. Apparently it doesn’t matter what a person looks like on the outside. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.


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Just a bunch of thoughts

To borrow a theme from a few blogger friends here are some unrelated thoughts, in no particular order:

Today I attended a half day seminar on oral histories put on by the Michigan Historical Society. It’s a concept I’m very interested in, and I thought the $10.00 fee to attend was reasonable for an unemployed librarian. I learned a lot, and am somewhat overwhelmed. Now I need to figure out what to do with the information and how to get more involved. I hope that, aside from enjoying working with oral histories, this may be a step to differentiate me from other library candidates when a position opens up somewhere near home. Plus it was fun to be in a library (it was held at a library not to far away) and be sitting with librarians!

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Last night was week five of intermediate obedience. Katie and I had a good time, and we got to practice heeling OFF LEASH for the very first time! Good thing we were indoors! Still, it was stressful for me to think I didn’t have total control over her. But to be honest she did pretty darn good, except when she’d find a fallen treat along the way and stop to gobble it down. For a dog that initially wasn’t interested in treats while we were in school, she has certainly come out of her shell! I don’t think she even realized she wasn’t on the leash most of the time. And to top off our evening the instructor actually used her as a demonstration about a new skill because she knew that Katie already knew how to do a right finish (walking around me and sitting on my left side). So I got to watch Katie work from a ways away, which was enlightening. When I’m not concentrating so hard on getting her to do stuff, and when she isn’t sitting right next to me, with me looking down at her, I can see that she is a very pretty little girl! Rather than thinking how irritating she is when she won’t sit, or won’t stay, or won’t…well you know. And I know I’m still her favorite; when she got her treat from the instructor for doing the right finish, she glanced over, realized I wasn’t next to her and ran at top speed back to me. I could she in her face that she was saying “MAMA! MAMA! I got a TREAT!”

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I haven’t finished staining the deck. It’s been too rainy. Oh darn.

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I have started picking up “stuff” around the house. There is so much stuff it’s been overwhelming. So I decided to just work on one little part each night. Tonight while cleaning up a part of the closet I found a photograph of Bonnie, our previous sheltie, taken before she was so old. Gosh she was a cute dog! I showed the picture to Katie but I don’t think she cared.

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I also found some lyrics to a song that I wrote down while I was in Alabama. The first evening I was there I sat at my mother’s piano. Randomly I opened a song book (Alfred’s Basic Adult All-Time Favorites) that she used to use when she went to senior housing to play for sing-a-longs. I slowly picked the melody out, then tried to play it with the chords. (I had piano lessons when I was ten, for one very long year.) I could sort of play this simple song. Then I went back and read the lyrics and wondered how I had come to open this particular book to this particular song out of all the music piled on her piano:

There’s a Long Long Trail, by Stoddard King, music by Zo Elliot

Theres a long, long trail awinding into the land of my dreams,

Where the nightingales are singing and a white moon beams

There’s a long long night of waiting

Until my dreams all come true,

Till the day when I’ll be going

Down that long, long trail to you.

I wonder how I came to play this piece, because sometimes I think it’s a long long time until I get to see her again.


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A treat, and it's not even Halloween!

I spent the evenings in Ann Arbor twice this weekend. What a treat! Friday night I attended a rare book event, where I got to look at some of the University’s treasures and hear a few words from the University’s Librarian on the future of books in this digital age. This was held at the Hatcher Graduate Library reading room, a beautiful place to show off the rare books we seldom get to see. It felt comfortableto be back on campus, and back in a library. And the talk reminded me of some of the arguments and discussion we’d had during classes for the previous two years. Where will digital processes and the internet take us? How will it change what we’ve known in the past as libraries? Only the phantom knows…

Saturday night I was lucky enough to attend an Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra concert at the Michigan Theater. That was simply wonderful. We went to the informational talk prior to the concert, given by the composer of one piece, the piano soloist of another piece and the orchestra conductor who explained the third piece. The information we gained from that talk served to heighten our enjoyment of the music itself during the performance. The highlight of the concert for me was the first piece, “Three Poems by Walt Whitman” which was composed by Paul Fetler Mr. Fetler was at the performance and talked prior to the start, about how and why he composed the piece of music. It was so special to hear the inside story from the composer himself! The music supported the narrative of three of Walt Whitman’s poems, and the entire thing was at once beautifu as well as exciting. I have to say that listening to this concert made me want to go dust off the clarinet and rejoin a community band somewhere near me. And get back on track with finding oboe lessons! Those of you living in the Ann Arbor area should be proud of the treasure you have in the talented Ann Arbor Symphony. If you haven’t gone to one of their concerts, consider it. This was the first concert of their 80th season…there is more good music to come.

Thanks Aunt B for the tickets to both events! I had a wonderful time!