I’d like to thank all of you who spend time reading my blog, looking at the photos and so often commenting. 2022 has been a challenging year for some of us, and it’s nice to put thoughts out into the blogosphere, as a way of therapy or just to record events.
Thank you for understanding that sometimes I write for all of us, and sometimes I write for me alone. Either way I feel your support and I appreciate it so much.
Have a peaceful or chaotic holiday, whichever you prefer and then let’s all work on making the new year extra special. I’ll be around soon, you can count on more birds, more snow, more parks, more night skies, more walks, more musings, and more adventures. I can hardly wait.
Anyway, I was reading Quaint Revival’s latest post about all the snow she’s getting over in Wisconsin, and she said it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas…which led her into thoughts about how those lyrics happened to be written and a request for someone to find out for her. Which, being a want-to-be librarian I felt compelled to do.
I think Santa is on some sort of exercise program.
She thought maybe the lyrics were written by Meredith Wilson in 1951 as he sat beside a pool, hopefully under warm skies. But Wikipedia says it probably was written in Yarmouth, and when I google that I can only find Yarmouth Maine, or Yarmouth British Columbia, neither of which sounds very warm, even in midsummer!
Looking for her Christmas gift. Or a peanut, whichever’s available.
But looking for this information did remind me that we played this very piece of holiday music at our recent concert, so I went to listen to it again. Well, actually, I went and listened to it for the first time. Music sounds very different when you’re sitting in the middle of the band than it does when sitting in the audience, and I haven’t taken time to listen to our concert until now. (I recommend listening to this with a good set of earphones…it sounds a LOT better with earbuds than just using your laptop speakers.)
Holiday music always makes things better.
Last Sunday I had a couple friends come for lunch and painting. Well, truthfully, they brought most of the lunch (roasted tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches) and most of their own painting supplies too. After we ate the yummy lunch we settled in to paint Christmas cards. It was so much fun to experiment together. Plus it increased my stock of cards waiting to be mailed out to unsuspecting friends and family. I should do this on a larger scale next year!
Seems like birds infiltrate all aspects of my life.
We have a little bit of snow, enough to make things look pretty, but not enough to interfere with driving. Not that I’m driving much. One of the benefits of retirement is not having to go out unless I want to. When it’s cold and snowing I rarely want to. And though I miss my Katie-girl soooo much, I am kind of glad to roll over in bed and go back to sleep in the dark early hours of these winter mornings.
“I used to put up with an awful lot, mama.”
Speaking of not traveling, we’re staying home this Christmas. We have had invites to holiday gatherings, but this year we just can’t quite make ourselves wander out. Twenty Twenty-two has been a long, hard year for us. Instead of going out this year I’ll fix some of the family mealtime favorites, and we’ll snuggle up on the couch to enjoy the quiet.
I look forward to seeing these guys every year.
Though it might not be entirely quiet. We’re going to have a houseguest for awhile, a little 10 year old doggie will be staying with us while his mom is visiting family out of town. We’ve practiced him being here without his mom a couple of times and I think he’s going to settle in, but he sure does love his mom.
“Does this peanut make my head look flat?”
I saw a movie trailer this morning for something staring Tom Hanks. There was a year, a long time ago, when my husband and I watched several movies, unusual for us, realizing later that all of them were Tom Hanks movies. You know, Castaway, Green Mile, Saving Private Ryan. This movie is called something like A Man called Otis. While I was watching the trailer something felt familiar…and then I remembered one of my favorite books, A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman, about an elderly man who’s quiet life is interrupted by a family that moves in next door. I think the movie is based on this book, and I think I really need to go see it. Maybe during the Christmas holiday week, as a gift from me to me.
Sometimes Christmas feels like this.
I did get out to feed the birds at Kensington this morning. A lot of the photos in this post are from that visit. I didn’t look at the weather, or even the temperature before I left home when it was still dark. By the time I got to the park the wind was blowing the snow sideways. Not surprisingly no one else was around.
“I don’t eat out of hands, lady. But if you’ve got a spare peanut I’d enjoy it.”
I went out to the boardwalk to see if I could entice the Queen to my hand, but she wasn’t having any of it. In fact none of the birds were willing to get too close, though they were happy enough to come to the railing if I’d leave my treats and back off.
“Not today, lady, not today.”
I wandered in the woods a little, to get out of the wind, and even there things were very quiet. And then I stood still and waited.
“My turn!” “NO IT’S NOT! It’s MY turn!”
And soon enough I heard the flutter of wings and saw, through the trees, the fast moving little bodies of hungry birds. So fun. Even though my hands were freezing and my toes were freezing I stood around out there for a long time.
“Hey Lady! I’m waiting patiently over here!”
I stood there just smiling and watching them, all puffed up against the cold.
“Puffing up helps you keep warm lady, you should try it.”
Merry Christmas to my little birds, and to all of you too. May you all enjoy this holiday season, in whatever way seems right for you this year.
Friday night we attended the Ann Arbor Symphony’s Christmas Pops at Hill Auditorium where I’ve enjoyed many AA Symphony concerts with my aunt. Friday my husband sat on one side of me but there was an empty seat on the other side.
I was lucky enough to hear Sleighride and Christmas Festival again, pieces I play every year with my own community band. I have to say I think CCB’s whip instrument was more effective than the one used Friday night, but having strings really makes those pieces extra wonderful.
At one point Silent Night was filling the auditorium, voices and instruments singing softly, the sound rising up to hover near the ceiling and I thought about my aunt and how she would have loved this concert. I wished she could be there, I could imagine her, dressed in holiday red, grinning back at me as we silently acknowledged just how good it all was.
I got sort of misty-eyed.
Then I noticed some movement in the lights up near the stage. One of the big round lights near the ceiling was flickering faintly. And, as I watched, it blinked. Twice.
And I grinned.
Because I knew right then and there that my aunt had figured out a new way to grin back at me. Merry Christmas, Aunt Becky, I think you had the best seat in the house.
A friend and I got to visit the Meijer Sculpture Garden this week. The conservatory building was all decked out for Christmas, which is why we planned our visit.
There’s been lots of expansion to the building since I was there, notably a huge room with giant marble sculptures of faces on all four walls.
But the main attraction were the Christmas trees, each decorated as they might be countries from around the world.
They were all beautiful, and it was so much fun to stop and examine them.
All those trees, lined up or tucked into corners sure got me into the holiday spirit!
And then we wandered in the desert room, filled with catus and seasonal poinsettias…
…and the tropical room filled with jungle plants and more poinsettias….
…and watched a model train wander through a village filled with iconic Grand Rapids buildings made out of natural materials…
…surrounded by more poinsettias.
We even spent some time trying to figure out a couple of art installations.
Even after reading the notes on the wall we didn’t really get it. But it was fun trying.
We stopped at the gift shop, where I stared at a bag of marbles for a long time, remembering all the games we used to play back a few decades when I was in grade school. I still like the way marbles feel, and almost bought this bag, just for fun.
But I didn’t. We bought lunch instead and then headed home, taking the back roads the better to find some barns. Of course we found one…
.
..or two…
…or three.
So fun!
Thanks, Linda, for driving us around on our latest adventure. Let’s schedule the next one soon!
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas and along with holiday lights and temporary lots filled with fragrant greens, there are holiday concerts happening in towns everywhere.
Thursday afternoon, while scrolling through Facebook I noticed an announcement for a community orchestra concert in a town just twenty minutes from me. I didn’t know the city of Fenton even had a community orchestra.
The concert was free. What did I have to lose?
Excited to hear the program.
Turns out it was nothing but a win for everyone that attended, both the musicians and those of us in the audience. A multi generational musical organization, much like my own Clarkston Community Band, the group had a wonderful, full, sound, and played a variety of music, some of which most of us recognized.
I couldn’t help but smile through the whole thing.
Was the performance perfect? Of course not. There were times intonation was off, a few, rare, wrong notes. A squeak. But I learned something. I learned that, as an audience member, these small errors didn’t ruin the experience. Each little blip disappeared under layers of beautiful sounds, the overall enthusiasm of the musicians and music director, and the obvious love and support from the people around me in the audience.
A large crowd turned out to support their local community orchestra.
I left the auditorium with a big smile on my face, humming Leroy Anderson’s Christmas Festival, something I’ve played multiple times, but had never heard while seated in an audience.
Testing the sound system in advance of our concert.
And on the drive home I thought about all the concerts I’ve played where I’ve been focused on the parts that didn’t go perfectly, felt bad afterwards because something had gone wrong. The reality is, for most in our audience, the overall experience at our concerts is probably good, maybe even great.
And if members of our audience leave our venue with smiles on their faces, maybe even humming a bit…well…then the concert was a success.
Making our audience smile.
My own Clarkston Community Band played our holiday concert Friday night. We had less than an optimal number of rehearsals, and though I practiced, I was still nervous. The nerves were well founded, as I lost my way on one piece of music, missing almost an entire page of music before I could join back in.
Santa shows up with the world’s largest whip slap percussion instrument!
But the reality is, one 2nd clarinet’s loss of concentration did not ruin the concert. Most likely no one but the clarinet playing next to me even knew. And the overall feeling of the evening was happy, fun, perhaps even joyful.
Sleigh Ride is guaranteed to make an audience smile.Especially with a whip that can be heard into the next county.
Cookies and cider at a reception for Santa afterward didn’t hurt either.
Smiles all around.
Happy Holidays, everyone! May all your days be warm and inviting and fun. And look around your community, there’s likely a group out there that would love to have you in the audience!
It’s now a proven fact that walking quickly on a treadmill, especially at an incline while wearing a mask, is not fun. I had a stress test this morning, as if life in times of covid isn’t already stressful enough.
While the tech was gathering “before” ultrasound images of my heart I gazed up at the ceiling wondering what a broken heart looked like. And if he’d be able to see that mine surely was.
Dad and his sister.
Seventeen years ago this morning my dad was killed, while slowed in traffic, by a semitruck driver who fell asleep at the wheel. Dad never had a chance.
So today I wonder about a lot of things. Whether our driver ever thinks about the man he killed. Whether today’s date stirs his heart like it stirs the hearts of my family. Whether he measures time in before and afters like we do.
And I think a lot about the recent sentence of the truck driver in Colorado who killed four people and injured several more in a firey crash in 2019. Colorado laws required that sentences for each of the charges he was convicted of be served consequently, and that’s why his sentence was 110 years.
Being a big brother.
Is 110 years too long? I don’t know. What is the right number of years for killing a person, intentionally or not? The Colorado driver made several bad decisions on his way to that devastating crash, the most important being him passing the truck runoff lane on his way to rear ending all those cars.
The driver that killed my dad made several bad decisions too, the most important being continuing to drive tired and not stopping at the state visitor center only 12 miles prior to the crash site. But in Georgia his bad decisions resulted in a misdemeanor and the max time he could serve in jail was 30 days. Is 30 days too short a time to pay for negligence that results in the death of someone else?
Being a dad at Christmas.
On one hand I’m sorry the Colorado driver got such a heavy sentence because it’s garnering sympathy for the driver. He says he wishes he had died instead of all those people. I thought for a moment that he felt remorse. And then he added, he wishes he had died ‘because this is no life.” His statement reflects his own fear and frustration and loss rather than any feeling of responsibility. Lost in all of the hyperbole are the injured, the dead, and their families. The real victims of this crash.
On the other hand, I am grateful that the Colorado driver got such a heavy sentence, because it’s bringing attention to these types of crashes which occur all too frequently. Time and time again I hear the same story. Someone was stopped in traffic. A truck doesn’t stop, for any number of reasons. People die horrible deaths. Truck drivers die too. Some people survive to live lives that are never the same.
Everybody involved lives in a world of before and after.
Being a dad to such a big family carries a lot of responsibility.
Earlier this week I attended a Zoom meeting with several volunteers of the Truck Safety Coalition. We’re trying to get through the holidays by leaning on each other. My heart, toughened by seventeen years of scarring, broke again as I listened to several new stories.
One young man feels lost because his fiancé was killed on her way to work a few months ago. They had a whole life planned — he was helping her get through nursing school, after which she would work and help him get through pilot school. Now he sits in their apartment stunned as he trys to come to terms of his ‘after.’
And another young person has been married only eighteen months when her husband was hit by a semi last month. He’s in an ICU now, can’t move, is on a ventilator and communicates by blinking his eyes. She had just started law school. Now she sits with him, advocating for his care in a hospital short staffed and overrun with covid. It’s not clear yet what their ‘after’ will look like.
Being appreciated by his employer.
That night our group talked a little bit about the Colorado driver and his sentence. The widow of one of the victims of that crash is new to our organization. She doesn’t want his sentence commuted. She says the people pushing for that have not sat through three weeks of testimoney. That they don’t know the whole truth.
She says that she, and all of us, were handed life sentences, too, the day that marked our own before and afters.
We used to laugh a lot. Before.
It’s a complicated issue and will take more pondering on my part before I know exactly where I stand. Meanwhile, I’ll start again repairing my battle scarred heart. No matter how many layers of patches I’ve put on it, it seems to break just as easily as it did seventeen years ago.
Thank you all for reading this far. Drive carefully. Stay safe. Protect that heart of yours and hug your families close. It’s a proven fact that broken hearts can’t ever be entirely healed.
Our community band has been rehearsing since September for last night’s Christmas concert. It hasn’t been easy. As librarian I sit on the board and we met numerous times, over the long months when we couldn’t play together, to access the situation.
Getting ready.
When we finally could meet again it was under the strict rules of the school system whose buildings we use. Everyone needed to be masked, even when playing our instruments. The instruments themselves had to have bell covers. And our audience had to remain masked at all times too.
Last minute instructions.
This fall we polled our members, asking whether they felt comfortable playing together under these guidelines. About 50% of the band agreed to play. I agreed too, but with trepidation. I am still uneasy being around other people in a closed space. Even if we are all masked up.
A special guest arrives.
But we all tried to be careful, and it was so good to make music again. Even if we sounded a bit ragged, given all the parts weren’t covered. Even though we only had one poor lonely percussionist, and holiday music is full of percussion!
Some rehearsals made me wonder if we’d get our stuff together in time.
We were lucky to have some high school players come in at the last moment to help us. Lots of percussionists, three clarinetists, and several others helped fill in the holes and our sound filled out.
Sleigh Ride isn’t right unless Santa conducts.
And, as is usual in community bands, when everyone shows up for the concert we show up focused, and we played so much better last night than at any one of our rehearsals.
You wouldn’t have been able to tell, because we were wearing masks, but I think every one of us was grinning by the end.
Making music is magic. We are so lucky that we were able to do that last night.
Thanks to our guest conductor, Paul!
The audience gave us a standing ovation. I don’t know if they were just anxious to leave, or glad to hear live music again after such a long break.
I think I’ll just assume they were grinning behind their masks too.
I want to write a post thanking all my fabulous donors who contributed to the Truck Safety Coaltion today during the Giving Tuesday campaign. That’s what I thought I’d be writing about tonight, because you were all truly amazing.
But just before 1 p.m. today, Giving Tuesday, five days after Thanksgiving, only weeks before Christmas our county became another statistic. There was a school shooting here, in a high school a couple of towns over. While we were talking about trucks and death and injury and funding, while we were congratulating each other on moving toward fundraising goals, a 15 year old was shooting classmates and a teacher.
There are three dead students so far, 8 more people injured, several are critical. A fourteen year old girl is on a ventiltor.
Oxford is a small, tight knit community. They are all in shock, as are the rest of us in this county. Just like truck crashes you never think it will happen to you or your family or your community. Until it does.
Tonight, after a full day of fundraising and an afternoon moving from disbelief and incredulity to sad acceptance, I went to my community band rehearsal — our Christmas concert is next Tuesday night. It seemed a lot to process.
The truck crash stories I’d heard today bounced around in my head, ping ponging against the sights of ambulances and medical helicopters and running students and crying parents that I’d seen on television, offset by comforting music played distractedly by folks that are parents and grandparents and high school students themselves.
So many emotions converging, it’s all a jumbled mess inside my brain. So the thank you post I planned to write will have to wait.
Tonight on my way home from rehearsal I thought about the three families who’s children didn’t come home from school today. Who will never come home again. And I thought about the families who’s children are fighting for their lives in the hospital. I thought about how the actions of one person can irreparably damage an entire community, a whole county. A family. How Christmas, and Thanksgiving too, will never be the same in Oxford.
And how Christmas music will forever bring up wells of grief for so many, just as it did in our family for so many years.
If you believe in the power of prayer, please send some this way. Because it feels like crazy has converged here, in a small town, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the holiday season.
Our community band headed back to rehearsal this week. Tuesday night was the first time we’ve played together since March of 2020. Though we normally start up again in September after the summer break, this year we delayed starting so that the school system could decide what the protocol for our playing in their buildings would be.
We are required to where a split mask while we play, and our instrament bells must be covered as well. It’s kind of crazy, because, at least for woodwinds, air blows out through all the keyholes too which remain uncovered.
Several people protested that playing band instruments while wearing a mask was ridiculous. I suppose it is. I’m on the board and we decided early on to send out a survey, telling our musicians what the requirements would be and asking if they would be playing this season. About 50% decided they weren’t comfortable and opted out.
I understand, I waffled myself.
But in the end, for me, the chance to play overrode lingering fear of contrating covid again. Though I have to tell you, playing while wearing a mask is not easy. Playing while wearing a mask when you haven’t played more than a handful of times in the past 18 months is really hard. Playing while wearing a mask when you haven’t played much in the past 18 months and while wearing glasses that fog up is reallyreally hard.
We’re practicing Christmas music; our first concert will be in December, and Santa will be there, so we’re motivated. I’ll be practicing this week while wearing a mask so I can figure out how to breath without fogging up. And so I can blow for longer than one measure without getting winded.
Santa from another concert, another year, another lifetime ago.
Yep, I have a lot of work to do. But we’re playing music again, a sure sign that the world is beginning to right itself. And that makes me smile. I hope you have found reasons to smile this week too. Even if you’re wearing a mask and fogging up your glasses.
Change Is Hard 