Lusciousity

There’s a lot to be said for watching the rain come down. As I was carrying in some last minute weekend groceries earlier this evening, I had a sudden vision of what I would most likely to be doing this evening, round about 8pm. I saw myself sitting on the postage stamp my landlord calls a balcony, in the second-hand folding chair with a freshly opened beer in my hand, resting on my propped up legs. I could just imagine the cool air wafting off of the heavy rain, and the droopy palms outside my window getting even droopier as I sat and let the act of doing nothing sink into me. It’s like that Guster song that made me cry when Daniel played it on his tiny speakers in his Paris bedroom: I used to sit and watch the pouring rain…when do we begin? It’s not a bad way to spend a Friday (even though it will always come in second to a night in D&F’s backyard, in which way I’ve had the good fortune to spend the last couple of Friday’s). Not to mention that we’ve been having a drought down here in the Fla, and even a single drop is cause for a minor celebration. Not to mention that it’s been a long week of pushing at things that seem to be going nowhere fast, like teaching jobs and novels in progress, and it feels good to have a night to just give in to what happens and know that it is good. And wet. Nothing’s for sure yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed and the sky is getting darker.

…but as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would tell us, it bends towards justice if we all keep doing our little bits every day. Celebrate the lusciousness of fighting the good fight by checking out video of Dr. King here and write a letter to your Representative about the plight of Iraqi refugees. 50,000 of them are fleeing their homes every month, and so far the US has accepted only 202 refugees from a war we started into our country. As Senator Kennedy says, we must do better. Sorry to get all soapbox on your Monday, but this really bothers me, and anger feels a lot better if it is directed somewhere and what else are Congress people for?

…and that’s why, on my latest trip to the public library (not the stuffy academic one I work at), actually my first library trip of the new year, I couldn’t resist picking up this slim volume. On the one hand, the “you can change your life by thinking less, doing more, and getting started right now” philosophy that this book espouses is bit repellant in and of itself, but on the other hand, it is entirely possible that one small hint could get you out of a rut you might have wandered into. So I’m not reading this book cover to cover, I’m just leaving it around the apartment and reading a couple of pages every now and again. This is guaranteed to last only as long as my new year’s resolutions, so not long, but here’s what it has offered me most recently: understanding is the booby prize. In short, what author MJ Ryan tells us is that it is far less important to understand why you do what you do than to be able to change what you are doing if it makes you unhappy. This is advice that I would generally qualify substantially (hey, understanding is the whole god@#$% raison de etre of us English, not to mention that I am a believer in the talking cure for a variety of ills), but I put it to good use tonight. While making dinner with D, I found myself relegated to the task peeling, coring, and slicing of one green apple. The peeling went fine, but when I got to the coring part I realized that I was 1) completely inept with a paring knife and 2) extremely scared of chopping my thumb in half as I attempted to pull the knife towards me in an effort to remove the core part of my quartered, peeled apple. I had a choice. I could give up and make D do it, which he usually does all on his own as soon as he sees a blade come too near one of my fingers, or I could just take it slow and get it done somehow and not let myself get stalled in my usual muck of questions when something slightly frustrating comes into my life. I.e., Why am I the kind of person who can’t core an apple? Why can’t I cook? What am I doing wrong and does God hate me? In this instance, I chose to believe that understanding was the booby prize and soldiered on until I had only the edible parts of the apple ready to chop before me. I may never know just why coring apples isn’t my strong suit, but tonight I cored an apple and did my bit to get that Chicken with Apple and Mushroom Sauce and Steam Asparagus on the table, proving that at least once in a while, the less examined life is actually more worth living.

Here concludes this Monday’s Lusciousity cheerleading pep talk. Go forth and understand no more!

We’re babysitting this weekend, or should I say teen-sitting. The question arises, what is luscious about spending your Friday off from school cooped up in your sister-in-law’s one bedroom apartment while she desperately tries to keep her head about the rising tide of homework? The Internet is out. HBO is a memory. Thus, answers so far: anything on MTV, anything on the Disney Channel (yes, we have a Suite Life of Zack and Cody fan in da house), anything to do with a cellphone before its batteries died, and the occasional episode of the X-Files. Suffice it to say, we’re all feeling a little lusciousity challenged today. Hmmm. This is going to take some doing.

My Moby Dick paper is a mere 24 hours from due, so I’m going to give you the lusciousness straight up Melville style:

(This is from the first chapter, “Loomings”)

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul,; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

See? Doesn’t that just say it all? Let’s to sea, ASAP. Or, as soon as this paper is FINISHED.

This morning, as I gleefully shivered my way from the parking garage to the library, one of the homemade, computer print-out signs taped to the stairway door caught my eye. At the top in bold lettering it said “I Sell Tickets, Not Tragedies” and proceeded to explain that the poster had two floor level tickets to sell to the upcoming Panic! At the Disco concert, helpfully including that if you logged on to Ticketmaster right now the best you could do  is somewhere in the fifth balcony for twice the poster’s asking price. Although I would describe myself as only a mild fan of P!ATD, the fact that this person took the time to create a pithily worded sign brought a wide smile to my face. In the barren imagination wilderness of Large Third Tier State University, this counts as sheer brilliance. Adroitly integrating the title of the band in question’s hit song into the headline of their poster made it seem like a personal effort, not just one more bland roommate request poster or frat party come-on. This was an example of using a little creativity where resignation to misspelled normalcy would have been adequate, and that is luscious in this overly attentive poster reader’s book.

Today Daniel and I busted out a new CD from LCB’s Christmas in July care package and used it to help us get this apartment of ours in shape after the ravages of eight weeks of evening classes and homework. Lucky for me that I grabbed her mix “Pop Is Not a Four Letter Word,” which included a great mix of catchy, up-tempo tunes that don’t require much thinking to enjoy and help take your mind off the blue sludge behind the toilet. (We think it has something to do with copper bolts, but we don’t like to ask too many questions.) It was a great mix of stuff I hadn’t heard and stuff I had, with just enough pandering to my baser music sensibilities to see me through the sweat. So now I must agree, pop is not a four letter word.

“… he’s a smooth operator, smooooth operatooooor…” Yes, you guessed it, my Melville prof has emailed Sade’s “Smooth Operator” as his Moby Dick song of the day. What do the low key vocal stylings of a British chanteuse have to do with the great white whale? Beats me! But with a nice chilled glass of white wine, a week of work to forget about, and comforting memories of listening to the easy listening station as I tried to fall asleep for my mandatory afternoon nap in the mid-80s, it is all good. “Coast to coast, LA to Chicago…”

Traffic on 95 today was sufficiently nonexistent to allow me to enjoy the ride down to Miami, with a minimum of terrified curls into the fetal position on the passenger side and finger wagging at Daniel, the driver, so I took the opportunity to introduce him to one of my favorite symphonies, Brahms’s 1st. I can never remember exactly how many years he spent writing it, but it was a lot because he was so stressed about living up to his reputation as the next Beethoven. I’m thinking like maybe 10 years he spent on this, and it shows.

I think any kind of musician can appreciate the difference between knowing a piece well from listening to it over and over and knowing it well because you have lived through the hours, sometimes stretched over weeks or months, sometimes packed into a short, intense period, that it took to learn how to perform it. The fourth movement of this symphony for me is one of the latter. Every time I listen to it I am transported back to the Kalamazoo Youth Chamber Music Workshop, a nifty little two week long summer program that broke us up into chamber groups in the morning and brought us back together as an orchestra in the afternoon. During my second summer there, Brahms 1 fourth movement was on the repertoire. In any accounting of my career as a young oboist, these would certainly qualify as glory days. I was first chair, and a concerto soloist to boot. I had good reeds and a mad crush on the first chair flute player. Dark curly hair, blue eyes, pleasantly shy but witty, and best of all he liked me back! I remember looking forward to the lunch hour between wind quintet and orchestra rehearsal. Mr. Flute Player and I would eat lunch together in the small courtyard, talking about the music and complaining about how sore our lips were (from playing our instruments people, that’s sadly all) and wondering if we would make it through three more hours of orchestra. I had strawberrry flavored Gushers in my packed lunch every day during the camp because they had been on sale at Felpausch so my mom relented. After lunch we would go reassemble our instruments and get ready to dig into Brahms and Tannheuser, eventually getting so wrapped up that we didn’t even noticed our legs sticking to the folding chairs. Gushers every day! A whole slot in orchestra rehearsal devoted to practicing the solo of moi! A blue eyed boy who gave me his picture without being asked! Summer thunderstorms rattling the windows as we roared through the finale of Brahms 1, completely drowned out by the resounding brass chorales and the sweeping strings! Is it any wonder these sounds are stamped on my memory? I think this was definitely a high point of sorts, not that we were the most accomplished young orchestra around by any means. Our experience learning the music was probably more rewarding than the audience’s eventual experience listening to it, but for some of us it was a chance to spend some time being taken seriously as musicians. Listening to the symphony now, I feel it all over again, all the adrenaline of playing a great piece for the first time,  the thrill of having just enough skill to sound the way you wanted to most of the time, the major requited love factor. As the strings and the brass surge toward the finish, I remember how good it felt to be a kid playing at being a grown up for one of the first times.
Things changed fast after that summer workshop. That fall I moved away to boarding arts high school. The flute player and I exchanged a few letters but fell out of touch, although I kept his picture for years. I practiced my everloving ass off for the next three years, but in the end decided that I didn’t want to be an oboist after all. Despite several more years playing in orchestras and bands, I’ve never gotten another stab at Brahms 1, and the flute player came out of the closet sometime during his freshman year of college. I checked out the recording from the library today so I could play it for Daniel during our drive down, and it might have just been my imagination, but as I listened to the Cleveland Orchestra heading into the chorale, I swear I could taste strawberry Gushers and see the conductor’s baton signalling me for my entrance.

My new library internship location is in Collection Development. That means I now spend half of my day working in small room adjacent to the reference librarian’s offices. There are several very luscious things about this room:

1) All the rolly swivel chairs are brand new and have sumptuous butt cushions and tall backs.

2) I work alone most of the time, and now that I know about the online classical music listening library my library subscribes to I can log in and turn the speakers up, wiling away my hours of manual library revisiting the Brandenburg concertos, expanding my knowledge of Mahler symphonies, and ferreting out little known recordings of voice works by Samuel Barber.

3) And speaking of manual labor, have I mentioned the infinite and vaguely therapeutic joys of sorting through endless stacks of quadruplicate slips listing new book titles that the library might consider ordering, each title suggesting the possibility of learning new things I never even knew existed. (Examples forthcoming.)

4) Finally, even though this room has no windows and is somewhat far from the side of the building, it somehow conducts the sound of thunder perfectly.

So here’s the scene: Liz, her deep blue travel coffee mug, classical music playing, thunder gently rumbling through the walls, hours of simple yet necessary work at my fingertips. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks that is luscious, but I think it’s a pretty good way to spend your work day.