People who have lived with a personality-disordered individual can recognize one a mile away. We are held hostage to the whims, moods, and tantrums of someone who brings chaos and alarm wherever she goes. She will forget (or deny) anything she says when it’s convenient to. The rest of us will still be reeling days or weeks later, trying to understand what just happened.

That is a description of my mother, which will surprise no one who has read my memoir.    But does it not sound like someone else?  Someone with tiny hands and a big mouth? The weeks since the inauguration have felt reminiscent of my growing up. Actually the months since the FBI director re-opened the investigation into the alleged HRC e-mails have felt like my childhood: chaos and conflict and a sense that events were out of control.

Like many of us, I have alternated between light and dark, between uneasiness about the future and calm within the present.  Everyone I know is swinging on the same swing-set.  I have felt encouraged by people who have shared how they are coping with their fears and how they are maneuvering through the new American landscape.

There’s the energy and outrage that propel us into the street, to meetings and to small acts of resistance.  Then there’s the need to crawl back into ourselves –at least this is my experience as an introvert who loves being with people but only for about three hours a day.   Anxiety makes me feel beside myself.  I treasure the times when I feel inside myself.

Arranging music last Monday, for example, was a lovely way to spend a morning (even when I find out after I’ve made 35 copies that I’ve done something that’s not going to work.)  I arrange a lot of the music for the OK Chorale and I had meant to finish an arrangement of “Fiddler’s Green” over the weekend, no, a week, that is to say, two weeks ago.

It’s time consuming and meticulous work; I need to be in the right frame of mind.  Ironically, it’s an activity that puts me in the right frame of mind the minute I start doing it.  Written music is precise.  It’s fussy.  All those little black circles have to be carefully inked in the lines and spaces.  I use a ruler to draw the measure lines and the eighth note beams.  It’s important that everything lines up and is easy to read.  It’s absorbing.

Fussy tools of the trade

Knitting was calming until I started learning to knit lace.  Since then it’s been less so.  On the up side of struggling to knit lace, I walked to the Fiber Gallery a mile from my home, three days in a row to get help with finding those pesky yarn overs that run away when I’m not looking.

I poured candles one evening. I burn beeswax pine-cone shaped candles that come from a shop in Longmont, Colorado: Amber Lights   The chandler is a friend of one of the Susans in my life– the one known as The Other Susan at All Present because there’s also Susan of Susan and Mike, try to keep up. The Other Susan couriers several candles to me every time she visits Longmont.  I burn three or four of them every winter, lighting the first one on the fall equinox.

Anyway, these pine-cone shaped candles burn efficiently and cleanly, often with very little wax left.  But I manage to collect a small saucepan of wax bits by the end of the year.  I like to melt them down and pour tea lights.

I am cooking again.  I’m not much of a cook.  I haven’t been a good cook since the 70s.  That was the last time I actually read cookbooks and tried recipes and had kitchen routines.  Things have changed in the culinary world and I haven’t changed with them.  Plus I’ve taken a detour into gluten-free and anti-inflammatory diets, also known as shop-and-chop diets and that’s a world unto itself.

Regarding gluten-free: A student of mine once asked me if I had “that disease” or was I just one of the annoying ones?  I guess I am one of the annoying ones but it really does make difference in my joints.  I would be much more annoying with gluten in my system.

In any case, I am reading actual recipes and trying new dishes and it’s been fun.

There’s always Bach.  I am working on a recital, the centerpiece of which will be the Bach wedding cantata (#202).  Bach is more holy to me than any scriptures.  As I work on this cantata phrase by phrase, line by line, recitative and aria, I try to sing it straight through several times a week.  Those are the times it feels most holy.  This piece of music has been around for hundreds of years.  Thousands of people have sung it. With every performance it has poured itself into the world and the world is richer for it.  This music connects me to a long line of singers who have sung Bach and been carried out of the darkness by him.

For sheer, mindless escape I play Trump Yahtzee.  This involves playing Yahtzee on-line.  Every time it looks like I am losing, I refresh the game so it never shows up in the stats that I have lost.  So far I haven’t lost a game.  That’s Trump Yahtzee.

Events in friends’ lives have a way of righting me when I start to totter.  My friend Putzer, the Attorney who incidentally has retired so I don’t know if I get to call her that any longer, has a new grandchild. This little girl had some huge challenges at birth.  When her life was assured and her mother called her Mighty Miss Matilda, I burst into tears.

Mighty Miss Matilda

Tears were a huge release when I went with Gwen to send her cat Lucy to new adventures in another world.  I’ll miss Lucy.  Gwen buried her in my yard.  That evening I lit a candle on the grave and stayed until the wind blew it out.  I tried to get my cats to participate but they acted like I was trying to pull a fast one on them. I’m always trying to enrich their lives and they are so resistant.

Lucy as a kitten

I’ve discovered the poet Carl Dennis. One poem in particular digs a little deeper into me every time I read it: “On the Soul.” Maybe it seems poignant because with high levels of anxiety comes uncertainty as to who owns my soul.  The poem begins with the line “They told you you owned it” and eventually catches up to:

It would have been better if they’d said nothing
Or told you it lived its own life, like deer
Hidden in the woods, not seen from the road
As you drive past in the car, not seen
When you stop and climb the fence.
Even if they browse on your own land,
They’re happiest left alone,
Stepping down in the evening to the stream,
Bedding down in silence under a screen of thickets
To dream what you may guess at and can’t know.

It started with a stray thought on a Facebook page the day of the election.  Teresa Shook in Hawaii invited some of her friends to go to D.C. to protest.  Then came yesterday: marches all over the world.  I was on-line early in the morning on January 21 sobbing over what had already happened and was still happening.  To see that people in New Zealand and India and Austria were standing in solidarity.  What sweet, sweet words.

I remember when the world stood in solidarity with us after 911 and our then president blew them off.  Tough guys don’t need help.  I was almost as ashamed of us then as I was on November 8 when we gave power to this very, very, very, very, very personality-disordered individual who, by the way, has the vocabulary but not the empathy of a third grader.

I feel so grateful to people who all over the world joined with America in a counter-inaugural, so to speak.  An inaugural is a beginning yet the events of yesterday were more of a mid-stream explosion. Imagine Niagara Falls.  And the river continues to flow. Joining the 175,000 who marched in Seattle was certainly the most dramatic event I’ve ever participated in.

I wanted to do the march with my friend Nancy who is my goombah for protest events as well as a weekly walk around Green Lake.   Nancy wanted to start at the beginning at Judkins Park.  I threw my lot in with her husband, Scott, to take the bus from their house in Wallingford and  meet the march as it came up 4th Ave.

This was a calculated decision.  Scott dislikes crowds and noise as much as I do.  He knows the bus system better than I do.  Worst case scenario: if I had to walk home, Wallingford is closer to Seattle Center than Greenwood.  Besides, Scott is good company.

We joined a small group at the bus stop and boarded a bus that was already standing room only.  It packed in even tighter before we burst out of it downtown.  We caught the beginning of the march as it came up 4^th Avenue.

I was immediately in tears and didn’t stop crying for half an hour.  People packed the street like they had the bus, smiling and laughing with the occasional vocal wave that undulated through the crowd.  Men, women, boys, girls, all ages, all races, all causes.  The only thing that made it a women’s march was that women started it.  The signs were as varied as the people.  This is what a feminine sensibility brings to things: a jumble of love, an acceptance of differences.

I stood there with my little homemade sign and my (ridiculous looking) pussy power hat on my head and gawked for a while.  Suddenly a man with a camera and another with a microphone approached me.

“Tell us about your sign,” Microphone man said.

I looked at my sign: Kindness Counts.  What was there to say?  I felt completely inarticulate.

“Well,” I said. “It’s alliteration.”

The camera zeroed in on my T-shirt, one of the official Women’s March in Washington shirts.

“Tell us about your shirt.”

Again, completely inarticulate.

“Get that thing off my boobs,” I said.  Kindness Counts in varying digits, I guess.

The camera man smiled, I smiled, and finally I said, “This is the most dramatic thing I’ve ever been part of, who are you with?”

“KING-5.”

Oh, great.

Any plans–and I had several– to connect with people via texting were soon thrown out.  This was too big.  Scott and I scanned the crowds for a while, looking for Nancy.  Finally after an hour, we found each other and continued up 4th Ave.

It’s not sexy or provocative or attention grabbing but the sign that I think most reflects what a feminine sensibility brings to any discussion or policy or decision is this one: Women’s Rights are Human Rights. People all over the world know this.  I know there are people who are ecstatic about the new president but I am not one of them.  For five million-plus more of us, the outpouring today made the events of the 20th seem puny and whiny.

Two hats I knitted. Nancy wore one, the other went to Washington D.C.

My knitted hat in Washington D.C.

Alliteration

Dublin

Marseilles

Seattle (Brian Clarkson photo)

And Seattle again: the Fremont Troll

Sometimes the unstructured days are the hardest.  The day is my own.  There’s nothing scheduled today although I have a lot to do.  Instead of doing it, I’ve been wondering how one personality disordered man and a group of opportunist congress people are going to cram down the throats of a majority a lot of things they vehemently don’t want? How exactly is that going to work?

Everything I was ever taught about what it means to be an American: that’s all gone. The election was a coup d’etat really.  If not within the meaning of the act, then emotionally, viscerally.

The ideals of freedom of speech and of belief are gone: ideals to be proud of, ideals that set America apart.  Even as I write this and think about putting it up on my blog, I wonder if it means trouble for me later.  The poison has thus already entered the system.

I have a Not My President pin, which I will wear a long as I have to.  To civics nannies who say that’s not the way to behave in a democracy, I say this: the contract between us and our government was broken a long time ago.  I don’t have to keep holding up my end.

I know I am not alone. We are starting to come out of our crouched positions and find each other.  Here’s a quotation from a piece by Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker (I will read anything by Adam Gopnick, anytime, anywhere, even when he writes about baseball.  He never disappoints:)

“The best way to be sure that 2017 is not 1934 is to act as though it were. We must learn and relearn that age’s necessary lessons: that meek submission is the most short-sighted of policies; that waiting for the other, more vulnerable group to protest first will only increase the isolation of us all. We must refuse to think that if we play nice and don’t make trouble, our group won’t be harmed. Calm but consistent opposition shared by a broad front of committed and constitutionally-minded protesters—it’s easy to say, fiendishly hard to do, and necessary to accomplish if we are to save the beautiful music of American democracy.”

I am not a reformer or an activist so I have nothing to urge on you but I have made a decision about my own first steps out of my crouch.  I now subscribe to the Guardian ( international independent journalism,) monetarily support Planned Parenthood (national, women’s rights) and am a member of the Phinney Neighborhood Association (local, community building.)

I’ve dug out my books on the French resistance to re-read.  The stories are inspiring and encouraging.  Resistance is possible.  It begins in small ways.  People turning over magazine covers so Trump’s face is hidden is reminiscent of how the French resistance started.  They painted la croix de Lorraine and later V (for Victory) on walls. Eventually people found each other and found ways to organize and to push back. We make jokes about the French surrendering in World War II but they didn’t surrender.  The French resistance was magnifique.

Here is a partial list of the books I recommend should you be so inclined:

Code Name Christiane Clouet Claire Chevrillon—an ordinary woman who did what she could

The Freedom Line Peter Eisner –about the Comet line that got downed airmen out of Belgium.  Two television series take off from the Comet line story: The Secret Army (drama and very good) and ‘Allo ‘Allo (comedy and really silly)

A Good Place to Hide Peter Gorse–hiding Jewish families in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon)

Village of Secrets Caroline Moorehead ( also about Le Chambom)

Flames in the Field Rita Kramer—about women secret agents, well researched and well told.

The New Yorker Book of War Pieces Reynal and Hitchcock –some great journalism

The Resistance Matthew Cobb

Between Silk and Cyanide Leo Marks –I’ve already done my book report here.

Resistance Agnès Humbert—Book report here.

Outwitting the Gestapo Lucie Aubrac

Wolves at the Door Judith Pearson

Sisters in the Resistance Margaret Collins Weitz

Inside S.O.E. E.L.Cookridge

Anything you can find by M.R.D. Foot

What are the rest of you doing?  Leave me a comment.  See you along the way to the liberation!

I’m up on Whidbey Island writing a novel.  I have no idea how to write a novel.  This novel actually began in 1997 with a very long short story that I thought would develop itself.  I thought a novel would spool from my imagination without my having to think about anything like structure or an outline.  I managed to get through 16 years of school with a degree in English literature and education without learning how to make an outline.

I’m here to say that if I actually finish this book, then anyone can write a novel. I come to it as, well, yes an English major, a writer for 45 years, a published memoirist, a disciplined reader, and a self-initiatory learner.  I have taken one post-graduate writing class that was good for my ego but I didn’t learn anything.  I have read a stack of books about writing fiction, some more useful than others

Here has been my approach to this novel:  Well, I guess I need a character. Check.  She needs to live somewhere. Check.  She needs to say stuff so I need people for her to talk to.  Check.  Now there are so many characters in play I need a graph to chart where everyone is every hour of the first two days.  Check.

There has to be some kind of conflict so I need a plot. I was stuck on Plot for YEARS.  Since 1997 I have amassed a collection of interesting characters, many small vignettes, and an overarching idea that I kept hoping would coalesce into a novel.

Finally I had to break down and construct an outline.  I did that last September, the last time I was on Whidbey.  That felt like such an enormous accomplishment that it kept me cheerfully working on this book in dribs and drabs even after my time got reassigned to making a living.

The election and my subsequent mainlining of sugar drained my energy to an extent I found alarming. Then I slipped on the stairs and ended up with a bump and bruise the size of Montana on my butt. Between that and the nasty weather, the election and sugar I thought I might never again even get out of bed.

So really against odds, I am back at the Buddha House at my favored writing retreat with my voice teacher, Tommie, down the hill in the Big House.  The deer are here, the goats and the big shaggy white dog, Mishka, who drools and who has those poor goats herded to within an inch of their lives.

Tommie and I have dinner together.  The rest of the day I am alone writing, walking, looking at the world. I’ve never been here in the winter.  Whidbey Island is famously windy and the wind is going to town as I write this.  At night the world is an opaque black and I need a flashlight to get down the hill to Tommie’s house.

I drove up to Whidbey on Christmas morning.  I remember last year thinking it had been one of the loveliest Christmases in memory.  This year it feels like one of the most disorienting. It’s because the election is hanging like smog over everything.  It stinks and I can’t see.  I tell myself that I am groping to connect but in fact my connections feel more vibrant than ever.

My watercolor class has coalesced into a group of five regulars who say to me, “Just tell me the date and I’ll be there.  I don’t care what we are painting.”  They all came over early December and I showed them how to paint a poinsettia.  I made wassail and lit a fire and we painted and gossiped.

The ladies who paint

My friends Nancy and Scott came on the Solstice for a Scotch tasting. I have a hobby that’s really beyond my means: single malt Scotch. (“Oh, Elena, everyone needs an expensive hobby,” Scott said.) I scored four bottles of Scotch from friends this year, including a 16 year old Lagavulin. The three of us had a nice sampling, including the Laphroaig Nancy brought.  I felt known and loved.  I won’t say that is necessarily an unusual occurrence.  What’s unusual is for me to feel safe enough to let it in while it’s happening.  I tend to get out my “known and loved” experiences to play with when I’m home alone.

Nancy, Elena, Winston and Laphroaig, Solstice, 2016

The OK Chorale had four performances, all of them satisfying. Next year the Chorale will have been in existence for 25 years. Twenty five years.  I’ve been with the Chorale that long because I started it.  After me our longest standing member Jean (tenor)–has been there 18 years.  Susan (soprano) and Terry (alto) and Gail (alto) have been there almost as long.   This year I especially felt a sense of our continuity and commitment to each other.  The OK Chorale is a community, not just a choir.

I took Christmas bread to my former analyst, something I have done for 35 years.  When I was still seeing him I used to joke that I planned my baking schedule around his office hours.  I still do.  He has moved to Edmonds, his fifth office in the years I have known him and I wanted to see it. Even when I don’t see him for years it feels very important to me to know where he is.”

We hugged.  We touched each other.  That has never happened since the day I met him in 1985 when we shook hands.

My former student (the brilliant and beautiful) Anna put together an elegant tea and we spent an afternoon talking, both of us still shaken over the election.  I don’t want her to know how much I count on the energy of her and her compatriots in this terrible new world order.  I think she knows.  In any case, she read my posts.

Anna (left) and her sister Julia in annual American Gothic Christmas photo

My cousin, Sue, in England and I have exchanged many sisterly emails since my visit in June and since Brexit.  After our election she with relief handed us the baton for being the stupidest nation on earth.

My friend Andrea visited the snobby Chef Shop (so I don’t have to) and bought me a bag of marcona almonds, which she delivered on Christmas Eve.  I am crunching them up here on the island and thinking about how much I enjoy the friendship with her.  A friend is someone who knows you like marcona almonds and that you had a withering time when you went to the Chef Shop so she goes there for a bag of marcona almonds and gives them to you on Christmas.

Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, and I had our celebration on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day: ham sandwiches, fruit salad, pumpkin pie, Scotch.  Gifts. We both like to open things so we try to have lots of things for the other to unwrap.  I walked back across the street on Christmas Eve in the cold, in the dark.  Everything felt different.  Everything felt the same.

And here I am trying to write a novel.  I have 62 pages and 16,000 words.  It lurches forward for a while, then stalls.  Over and over I think, “I don’t know how to do this.”  Then I go for a walk, play the piano or sing in Tommie’s studio, go into Freeland for something or other at the grocery store.  Something comes to me and I write another section.

I don’t mind the feeling of “I don’t know how to do this.”  It’s actually kind of exciting.  It means that I can try anything.  I can try everything.  It’s like singing: When it’s not coming out easily, I talk to my vocal cords: “Well, ok, then how will you sing this note?”  Something new happens.

It’s like psychoanalysis.  I lie on the couch and I start talking. I say anything, I say everything.  Something emerges.  Something I never thought to think of.  Then somewhere along the road I feel lighter, more spacious, calmer.

It’s like painting.  When I don’t know what else to do, I throw in a big gash of purple.  Where’s the harm?  It’s only paper.  And then the big gash of purple transforms the painting into something startling and alive.

I think this terrible new world-order won’t be all that different for the artists, the poets, the musicians, the actors and storytellers. The terrible new world-order has been there all along and the artists have always known it.  Nothing changes for us now that everybody else knows, too.    It’s a not bad thing to say “I don’t know how to do this.”  We continue to do what we do. We can all try anything, we can all try everything.  Something new will happen. Something startling and alive.

The day after the election the pall that settled over Seattle was dreadful.  It was as though someone had died in every home–except for the guy around the corner who has had a big sign in his front window for eight years: No Obamanation.  For a month he had a Trump/Pence sign plastered over that.  Now the window is finally at rest with its white curtains.

He’s a perfectly nice guy with a love of a huge furry dog, a Malamute or some Siberian giant.  Once when I was weeding outside the fence, he came by with the dog who basically lay down on top of me in affectionate neighborliness. I am trying to remember the dog’s name.  Emily, I think.  This is a man of contradictions and certainly an anomaly in my neighborhood.

But as I said, the pall. Distractions have been thin on the ground and it’s been hard to concentrate and to work.  My littlest students had their Halloween/ costumed/chocolate fountain during the weekend that I had gone into a tailspin over the FBI director and his scammy announcement.

Chocolate Fountain at the end of the day

I bought the chocolate fountains years ago after I made a special trip to Costco for something they didn’t have: a shredder or printer or something boring.  I was so irritated with the waste of time that I spent the $50 on a chocolate fountain and over the years it has been featured at many a recital.

The actual recital went by as fast as cows on a road trip because most of the songs were four lines long.  The roar of applause lasted longer than the music.  The week prior to the recital everyone had a dress rehearsal at his or her lesson.  I had each of them sit somewhere in my living room, holding their music:

“OK, now let’s pretend it’s Sunday and the room is full of people.  There’s your mom and there’s your little brother squirming around.  You can hear people breathing.  Somebody coughs.  The person before you is taking her bow and everyone is applauding.” I applaud wildly. “Then I announce that Sarah is going to play ‘The Detective Agency.’  So now you walk up.”

I talk her through the protocol.  She sets her music on the piano rack and anchors it with two little rice dolls.  She plays ‘The Detective Agency’ and she practices her bow.  The cat comes in and whines—that would be Winston.  We run though Sarah’s part in the recital again.  Most of my students like to do this playacting several times.

I have to run down a side street for a second and tell you about the rice dolls.  I have 24 of them– two for each month–that I bought at a holiday craft fair years ago.  I laid in my supply when I realized they were the perfect weight and size for holding music open on the piano rack.  Whichever (interested) child has the first lesson in the month gets to pick out the next month’s music proper-uppers.

English Separatists holding music open

I remember when two years ago when Alex was first up for November.  She put the witch and the ghost from October in the box of dolls and with some coaching managed to fish out the two Pilgrims.

“Huh?” she asked. “What are these?”

“They’re Pilgrims,” I said.

“They’re not Pilgrims,” she said scornfully. “They’re English separatists.”

We got through this year’s Halloween Costume Recital with the help of the English separatist music holders and carried on into the sunroom for the main reason all the kids came.  One of the older siblings had been given the job of stirring the melted chocolate on the stove during the recital so it was smooth and the right consistency to be poured.  It’s really fun pouring all that chocolate into the basin and watch it rise up the tower until it spills out on all sides.

One of the smallest children asked me what I did with the fountain after everyone left.

“I set it up right by my bed and run it all night long so I can stick my finger in it every time I wake up,” I said watching his big round eyes try to work this out.

My adult singing students participated in A Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale two weeks after the election.  The Musicales have so much variety.  There’s something for every taste.  Cindy sang something from Messiah. Susan sang “St Louis Blues” and “Kansas City” with her husband Mario on the bass and me getting to improvise the piano. Nina sang “Jubilee.”  Sheena and Leah both did songs from the Italian art song tradition (Schirmer edition for those of you in the know) as well as a folk song and “Anyone Can Whistle,” one of the few Sondheims that are easy to accompany. Johnine sang a Beatles song.  Amber sang “99 Red Balloons” with her partner accompanying her on guitar.  I got to preview the first aria of “Weichet Nur Betrubte Schatten,” Bach Cantata #202 that is to be the centerpiece of a recital I’m working on. I’ve been living, breathing, and singing myself to sleep with this Bach and performing something that has been so much a part of my private world was remarkably gratifying.

These recitals are part of my Work Life.  Sometimes when I have an emergency rehearsal or a sectional for the OK Chorale, I tell people to come at 3:30 and “I want you out of my house by 5:00.”  It’s my little joke but also a way to suggest that I am at work during those sectionals.  I have to be on.  I have to be diplomatic and polite.  I don’t necessarily want to be that way on a weekend.

Something about how awful we had all been feeling made this afternoon glow. I had looked forward to having people over and to making music.  I was glad that people stayed longer than usual. At one point I curled up on the couch and watched everyone eating the wonderful food—Susan makes these amazing dates stuffed with almonds and topped with crème fraîche–talking and laughing with each other, meeting new people, telling each other how much we’ve all “improved.”

Nina (rhymes with Dinah) saw me.  “Do you want us gone?” she asked.

I didn’t.  An afternoon with friends and music—it was something I needed.  I think we all did.

But the most magnificent and most anticipated distraction of all came the day after Thanksgiving: Gilmore Girls, A Year in the Life.  Before I discovered Gilmore Girls I had a student who wanted to change her lesson because it meant she missed the show.  I had no sympathy at the time.  Had I known then what I know now I would have moved heaven and earth for her to not have to watch it on tape (I don’t think we had DVR then) even though it meant she could skip the commercials.

If you have somehow missed this show, it ran from 2000-2007 and had what many felt to be an unsatisfactory seventh year and one which reeked of bureaucratic and corporate interference. Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life is the eighth installment, probably its finale.  It consists of four 90-minute episodes and it premiered the day after Thanksgiving.

I was up at 5:30 to watch it.  I watched for two hours, then went for a walk.  Two more hours and I had to go set up my stuff at the Dibble House Holiday Craft Fair.  I finished watching it around 2:00 in time to meet Nancy who was fitting the Apple Cup into her day to walk around Green Lake.  That evening I played the piano at the Dibble House Holiday Craft Fair Preview and special wine and appetizer evening.  I came home, fired up Netflix and started watching Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life all over again.  I finished it for the second time around noon on Saturday.

Gilmore Girls is a wonderful story with great writing and unforgettable characters.  I laughed and I cried through this year in their life.  I turned off the TV thinking that I want to be a better person and I want to eat less sugar, which is surely ironic given how much junk food those girls famously eat.

I am over the despair hump from the election—I think.  I hope we all are.  We all have our part to play towards making this a world a place in which we actually want to live.

“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”

Rebecca Solnit

(Thank you, Jenni, for this quotation)

I am no stranger to panic.  I suffered for nearly 20 years with panic disorder.  A counter-intuitive thing happens to me when people around me are in a state of panic.  It normalizes what had once been a huge part of my life. This is familiar country to me: this trauma that has been visited upon a majority of us.

In my experience panic was about something that had already happened. I was having flashbacks.  One of the things I learned to do was to enclose myself in a closet and reassure myself that I was contained within my own body. I hadn’t leaked out.

I haven’t experienced anything that rises to the level of a panic attack for fifteen years.  When I get to feeling high anxiety it’s usually about an imagined future but the best response is still to reassure myself that I am still in my body.  I don’t have to physically go into a closet although thanks to Maxine, my feng shui goddess my closet is empty enough to do so.

In the past three days I have had to remind myself over and over that nothing has changed: I’m in my skin. I still live in my house.  I still have my friends, my work, my health.  I still have Bach.  The clarity of Bach acts like an equalizing of the body registers for those of us who are fortunate enough to sing and play the music.  I still have poetry.  Everyone repeat after me: we still have the poets. Some of us still have Xanax prescriptions.

I have uncontrollable grief alternating with rage stoked by fear.   When the fear subsides and the rage calms, grief will open the door that disperses the panic.  Once the panic clears, I’ll find a way into and through a “strange sideline path of change.” The task right now –for me– is to tolerate intolerable feelings.  At the same time I stand up and cheer at the top of my classically trained voice (and it’s loud and resonant) for the angry, hurt, shocked protesters all over the country.

I talked to my former student Anna, the beautiful and brilliant young woman in law school in Virginia.  I called because I was hoping to find some comfort in her energy.  I quickly realized that that is my job now: comfort and support for the young women who are probably going to have to fight our fight all over again.  But I will say this:  whenever I talk to Anna, I do not despair over the future.

Wednesday night is when The OK Chorale rehearses.  The Chorale gives to me as much as I give to them.  I knew I didn’t have to hold it together for them.  At the same time I knew that I would.  I knew we would do it together.

The first thing I had the Chorale do was something I have done many times in voice lessons.  We whined.  We whined as stridently as we could.  Then we wailed.  Then we took another breath and wailed, me with as gut wrenching a wail as I had in me.

I passed out a reprint of a song with the unlikely title of “Milford” and told everyone to just throw their old copies on the floor.  That was when it registered that whoever set up the chairs had put us not in rows or clusters but in a big circle.  We sat in a circle and sang to each other.

Fittingly we sang “We Need a Little Christmas:”

For I’ve grown a little leaner, grown a little colder,
Grown a little sadder, grown a little older,
And I need a little angel sitting on my shoulder
I need a little Christmas now!

We ended the evening as we do all our rehearsals and all our concerts during the fall quarter: with “Auld Lang Syne. ” Not just the chorus that people manage to slosh through on New Years’ Eve but the whole beautiful song.

Thursday morning is when All Present meets.  Our friends with dementia came in. Many of them came in happy but many came in looking blank; they’ve been coming for years but they still don’t recognize why they are there.  They were the lucky ones;  they don’t get the news.  Their caregivers looked tense and worried.  We began our song circle with “Roll Out the Barrel” and “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Everyone came alive and the caregivers—I hope—put down a smidgeon of their care.

We sang “when you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”

I thought, “This really sucks today.”

We sang “Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women” in memory of our Violet who we lost this week.  She was 92 and loved being with us though she wasn’t able to sing many of the songs any longer.  She could always contribute to “Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women.”  It hardly registered with our friends with dementia what it meant that someone had died.  They have no memory of Violet.

The rest of us looked more glazed over than ever.

It was when we got to “Let it Be” that I stopped being able to see the music.  There is a line that has comforted me on more than one occasion:

And when the night is cloudy,
There is still a light that shines on me,
Shine until tomorrow, let it be.

Let it be.  That does not imply passivity.  That means to pay attention not to just what’s happening in the world, in the streets, in D.C. but to what’s happening inside.  In our grief we will find a way through.  If the central government closes itself to us we’ll find a sidelong path.

.

You all know my neighbor Gwen by now. My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything.

When it comes to gossip and goings-on, Gwen and I have pretty much got the neighborhood covered.  In spite of her tall fence, she seems to know a lot about what goes on to the southeast while I have the northwest covered.  Due west is the cemetery wherein live the least troublesome neighbors of all except during that awful period of the skunks.  Not that our neighborhood is troublesome. Quite the contrary.

Most of the trouble that concerns me concerns cats. Now that my Winston is a cranky old man I don’t have to pay off the owners of the cats he’s fought.  Artemis doesn’t fight now that she and Bill’s cat, Suli have finally come to An Understanding. There’s a new bully in town: a red-orange cat with a fluffy tail who terrorizes Suli and Gwen’s cat, Lucy.

Cranky Old Man, Winston

Suli can pretty much take care of herself.  I’ve seen her take on a German shepherd.  She’s drawn blood from me on more than one occasion. One minute she’s purring and rubbing me and the next minute she has launched herself at me and red welts are rising on my arms.  Somewhere in between the two states she has apparently told me that she’s had enough and I haven’t respected that.

Suli patiently waiting for Bill to come home

Lucy is an old cat.  We aren’t sure how old exactly, but she’s certainly older than Winston who is 15.  As she has aged, she’s drawn lines in the litterbox (so to speak) with various neighborhood cats, principally Cosmo who finally moved to Oregon.

In her young days, Lucy was quite the little outdoorswoman. But she was never the same after being stuck up a telephone pole for four days while neighbors were on the horn with Gwen who was in Texas.  Finally someone came with a tall ladder and fetched Lucy down.  After that Lucy spent her days inside the fence.  If you could see the camera-ready garden hidden inside Gwen’s old fence, you probably would, too.

Recently Gwen told me that some rogue cat had figured out how to get in Lucy’s cat door.  It’s one of those doors that require the cat to wear a magnet to which the door responds.  The magnet door lets Lucy into the basement.  Up the basement stairs and another cat door lets her into the kitchen. Gwen and Lucy curled up in the plaid room reading and napping, respectively, heard the kitchen cat door open and looked at each other.

“What’s wrong with this situation?” they asked.

The outside cat door

Lucy probably knew who the intruder was, but for several of his illegal visits Gwen only heard him.  But then she hit on the most ingenious idea.  Gwen, the technology wizard, could probably fashion surveillance equipment out an angel food cake pan, indeterminate wires from a box in her garage, and an old computer.  Here’s what she did: she hung a mirror on the fence outside a bay window so it reflected the outside cat door.  When she heard the cat door opening she could stand in her front room and see the activity at the cat door. Still she wasn’t fast enough to spot the cat.

The surveillance equipment

Gwen bought a different kind of door, the kind that requires the cat to wear a coded medallion.  A code that can be changed.  Now Lucy clinks like she has never clunked before what with her new medallion, her proof of rabies shot, and her I.D. tag.

Gwen finally spotted the intruder.  She heard the sound of the cat door trying to open.  The intruder waited expectantly for the door to open and apparently was mystified enough to wait long enough for Gwen to take her position in the bay window where she saw a butt and fluffy red-orange tail.  It was the bully cat.

The surveillance post

Now we are both on the lookout for the orange-red cat.  I have chased him out of my yard several times.  I chase him down the street until he goes under a house or somewhere I can’t follow.  When I see him scaling Gwen’s fence I e-mail her. I’ve not managed to get a photo of him but I’ll leave you with one of the cat who started this blog post:

Lucy with giant medallion

(This is the final post in a series about a 40th college reunion
Walla Walla Begin Again
Doin’ Our Stuff Again
Memories and Menus)

When last we met I was curled up in fetal position in Mem after getting away from the raucous music at the all class reunion picnic on Ankeny Field.  When the band packed up, I crept out and joined Bruce and Helen who were watching the tennis in the (new to me) courts jutting out onto Ankeny.  A bit much, I thought, but then I don’t play tennis and I was cranky from the picnic that I didn’t pay for and shouldn’t have crashed and it served me right if the band was too loud.

Picnic on Ankeny Field

The next event that interested me was the choice of faculty open houses.  The English department was not represented so I chose to go to Rhetoric Studies as the closest I was going to get to English literature.  Bruce and Helen and I found our way to the home of Dr. Heather Hayes who had laid out a spread from Olive, the deli on Main St. and I was able to finish my lunch.

Dr. Hayes was fun, energetic and passionate about her field.  She is the kind of intellect I like being around: one that doesn’t let you feel inferior for not knowing as much as she does.  It’s how I learn.  I learned to play Scrabble by playing repeatedly with someone who won every time and never once treated me like I wasn’t a valuable player.

In the process of a lively discussion I learned to pronounce synecdoche , a word that stumps me every time I try to say it.  I got the best explanation I have ever gotten for what exactly a meme is.  I learned the difference between rhetoric and oration and between literary and rhetorical analysis.  I don’t mean to be ungenerous but I’m not going to be more specific about any of the above.

Back at home, I took a nap.  When I wandered out to the kitchen, John was leaning against the sink.

“She finally shows up,” he said.

“90 per cent of life is showing up,” I said.

I opened the door to the liquor cupboard and pulled out the Jameson that Debi keeps on hand for a few of us.

“And the rest is being prepared.”

(Deb, do you still have that bottle of Jameson?” I emailed her last week.

“I have two bottles,” she wrote back.  “Will that be enough?”)

Jim found me a small funnel and I decanted whiskey into a hip flask, which just fit in my purse.

Marcus Whitman Hotel
Walla Walla, Washington
The Blue Mountains

Our class reunion dinner was at the home of a Whitman graduate.  Usually the dinners are held at the Marcus Whitman, the grand old hotel of Walla Walla (I’m so glad to get a reference to this icon into a post.  I was wondering how it would happen.) As nice as the hotel is, the dinner was so much more intimate at a home. A very large old home of which Walla Walla has a glorious supply.
The buffet was good, especially the shrimp and the tiramisu—though not at the same time.

I poured some of my Jameson into a wine glass and sipped along with all the wine drinkers.  A few people in the know held out their glasses and whispered to me, “Hit me!”

Jim, my fellow introvert, and I had a pact that we would leave at a mutually agreeable time, when both of us had had enough noisy socializing.  We left together and I was asleep when everyone else came home.

John had some kind of pact with the devil that is Alaska Airlines; he was leaving from Portland even though he flew into Seattle. I had a ride home with my Seattle neighbor Bill who was in town to visit his son Christoph. When they arrived to fetch me, I introduced them to the bunch of us congregated at Debi and Jim’s house.

Worlds collide: My neighbor in Seattle in the living room of my 40 years ago roommate at Whitman College.  I am so momentarily stunned that I falter halfway through the introductions. Connecting the two worlds is Christoph, the sophomore at Whitman who is exchanging contact info with Debi who is always good for a home-cooked meal (cooked by James but stay in my flow.)  It is a precious moment in what has felt like a precious weekend.

“I was spinning out of control a few days ago,” I said to John on the ride over.  It was apropos of nothing.  I guess I thought he was following my unspoken thoughts.

“For any particular reason?” he asked “Or just something to do?”

“Very funny.  No, I was excited about the weekend.”

The weekend itself had felt like being in a spin cycle.  There was so much to do and so many people to be with.  There was Mary-Ellis who I don’t see often enough and with whom I always have conversations that make me feel acknowledged, understood and loved.  There was John who I had seen once in the past 30 years.  There was Bruce, also only seen once, and Helen who I had never met.  There were the two professors I met. There was the gorgeous campus.  There were all the supernumeraries who made up the backdrop and set for the weekend.  There was the lack of sleep.  There were the periods of regression and self-doubt that I haven’t mentioned in these blog posts because quite frankly I don’t want to go there, other than to say they came up in the odd moments. Put it all together and it felt like a dream, like something that didn’t quite happen.

I wonder what our 50^th year reunion will be like.  I wonder if we’ll get golf carts for the parade of classes.

This is the third in a series posts about a 40th Whitman College reunion that begins with Walla Walla Begin Again.

On Saturday morning were the class photos, the parade of classes and convocation.  For the photos we all congregated on the steps of “Mem,” the Memorial Building, a truly iconic structure to Whitman students.

Memorial Building, Whitman College

I watched Nancy, the director of the alumni office, as she arranged us so that everyone’s head was visible.  I had nothing but admiration for the good energy that flowed from her while she laughed and smiled and directed traffic with her arms.  The last time I had to arrange the OK Chorale to sing, I yelled at them.  We were on the ferry and the space wasn’t optimal.  Still I could not believe that a group of adults who understood that they were there to sing, that there was an audience and an accompanist (me) could do nothing but stand there helplessly in little clumps facing every which way.

“Just MOVE!”  I shrieked.  Not my proudest moment.

I am going to remember how much fun Nancy seemed to be having when the Chorale is at the Green Lake luminarias and our time slot is sifting away.   I am going to smile and laugh even if on the inside I am shrieking, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

I have showed up in the past for class reunion photos but I had no idea what the parade and convocation were about.  I would usually wander off to do something by myself after all the social stimulation of having our picture taken. When the photo was taken on Saturday, we were herded over to a designated spot on Boyer Ave where we waited until all the reunion classes had been photographed.

I chatted with people I had never spoken to before but who I had probably seen numerous times.  When I was a student, there were 1000 of us.  You couldn’t walk across campus to get your mail without passing pretty nearly everyone enrolled.  And who you didn’t know, you heard about.  Someone was always talking about someone else to the point that names became familiar but not necessarily the faces that went with them.

We lingered in the bright sun and chilly morning air.  No place does beautiful fall days like Walla Walla.  People (male) came up to me.  I read their name tags and thought, “Wow, one of the cool kids is talking with me.”  Or people (female) said hello.  I read their name tags and thought, “Yikes, I was terrified of you!”  I had some lovely conversations with people I had never spoken to before.

Bruce asked me to take a photo of him and a classmate whose name I cannot now remember although we had a long, interesting conversation.  He handed me the smart phone.  It was heavy and unlike anything I was used to.  I pointed it toward the two of them and looked at the screen.

“Bruce, all I’m getting is your crotches.  Is that what you wanted?”   It would have made the photo request unexpectedly interesting.

Bruce showed me how to pull the screen in and push the scene out.  I took a conventional photo.

I walked to what we used to call the SUB (student union building) but which is now called the Pete Reid Center– something I cannot call it– for some water.  I wandered back.  We waited.  All of a sudden “Louie Louie” began to beat its way down Boyer Ave.  A ragtag bunch of middle school kids in bright red shirts reading “Touchet Indians” came marching past blowing and pounding their instruments.

Touchet is a small town on highway 12.  When you pass through Touchet, you know you are almost to Walla Walla.  It’s the last landmark before the Whitman monument..  Apparently the college usually asks the Walla Walla High School marching band (the cool kids by comparison) to play at the reunions, but these kids were so precious it made me cry.  There weren’t that many of them, their sound barely meshed, they were nervous, and the school is probably so strapped for cash they can’t afford uniforms that don’t read “Indians,” but they were my favorite part of the morning.  So small town, so corny, so splendid.

Behind the band came the class of 1951 in little carts and jeeps. They scooted by, honking and waving. We fell into line after the class 1961.  They marched us all down Boyer Ave and up the steps of Cordiner Hall.

“Aha,” I thought.  “This is how they get us all to go to convocation.”

I peeled off and went to the bookstore to look at the reunion kitsch and to pinch a few more reunion pens.  Then I went for a slow walk following what used to be Lakem Duckem from Park Street across Boyer to the amphitheater where our  commencement ceremony was held on a beautiful May day in 1976.  Lakem Duckem has been elongated into a stream.  People can no longer be “laked.”

Barefoot children with painted faces, their bodies twined with ivy were running around playing Tree Scouts or something like that.

What used to be Lakem Duckem

“And look,” they said to me.  “We’re barefoot.”

“And I love that about you,” I said.

Not a game boy in sight (Is that even a thing anymore? Again, trying to be cool.) These are the children of Whitman graduates: children who knew how to play outside.

I sat on the steps of the Hunter Conservatory, which used to be called MacDowell Hall until a student came along and opened the building.  Inside I went into Kimball Theater, which also used to be called MacDowell Hall.  The whole thing was MacDowell Hall.  It was its own play on words: the big hall itself and the mini hall that was the little theater.  It was where the music professors had their offices and where the practice rooms were and the small theater for recitals.  I stood on the stage and sang, looking around and thinking how un-intimidating it all looked now.

Hunter Conservatory/ MacDowell Hall

Inside Hunter Conservatory/MacDowell Hall

Eventually convocation let out and the all-class reunion picnic began on Ankeny Field.  Apparently I hadn’t signed up (or paid) for it and when I heard the band blast itself all the way to the Green Lantern, I knew why.  When I read there was to be live music, I had anticipated that I would hate the band and I did.  I was hungry but they wouldn’t sell me a ticket or give me a plate so I took a water glass and helped myself to what looked like Spanish rice and some pulled beef and an apple.  I found Mary-Ellis, Phil, and John and sat down with them.

John and I reminisced about a column called “The Trouble Shooter” that showed up in the Feb 26, 1976 issue of the Whitman College Pioneer, the school newspaper.

Dear TShoot,

 A bunch of us were wondering what the food really is in the Jewett kitchen.  Not what’s on the menu.  We want the real lowdown on the kitchen. 

The Trouble Shooter printed a menu purporting to be a more accurate description than the menu posted in the dining hall.  It included:

Julia’s Child
French Toes
A sordid fruit juice
Snot Cakes
Sip ‘n’ Rinse cocktails with strep syrup
Gangreens
Grilled Sneeze sandwich
Finger sandwich—open face
Scurvy
Chocolate Mouse
Carbon
Corns
Hair Pie
Cold Slav
Chef’s Surprise

The advising professor, a scholarly and proper British man, commented that while he upheld the right to free speech, this column was particularly tasteless—which in itself is a funny comment.

Eventually the loud music drove me to curl up in fetal position inside Mem.  Here I will leave you while I recover.  I’ll be back with my 4th and final installment of the 1976 Whitman College Reunion weekend.

(This is the second in a series about a 40th college reunion.  The first is Walla Walla Begin Again)

On Friday morning, I sat with Debi over coffee for a long time before walking the few miles to campus.  Mary Ellis pulled up alongside as I walked along Birch, headed for the Marcus Street foot bridge across Mill Creek.

“Halloo,” she sang out.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“I’m showing Phil all the churches I tried out.”

I looked at Phil and thought about my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) saying that she and her husband agreed years ago they wouldn’t attend each other’s reunions.

“How fun for Phil,” I said.

Mary Ellis laughed her infectious laugh.  It gurgles and bubbles.  It brings me along like my Aunt Frances’ laugh used to.  When Mary-Ellis laughs, the world is a wonderful place.  Phil, by the way, is a good sport.

Olin Hall, Whitman College

I chugged along after that because Debi and I had a 10:00 class in Olin Hall: Shakespeare with Dr. Teresa DiPasquale.  The text under under observation was “The Rape of Lucrece,” one of Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems and one which I had slogged through several summers ago and got nothing out of it that I didn’t hate.  After one 50 minute class with Teresa, I am keen to read it again because now I have several ways to access it.

I so appreciated hearing a woman talk about this poem.  I looked at the 19 year old boys sitting there while she talked rape, menstrual blood, and vagina and thought that this class could never have happened in the 70s.  I also thought that a man should never teach this poem.

As I watched Teresa turning over the pages of her Shakespeare and saw all the notes written in the margins, I thought how much I wanted to be a student again.  To sit here and talk about a text.  A text.  The word itself is enough to get me excited.

Lunch at the Walla Walla Bread Company Left to right: John, Debi, Phil, Mary-Ellis, Elena

After lunch at the Walla Walla Bread Company, Mary-Ellis and I went for a walk together, she still noticing churches.  In one parking lot was a labyrinth.  Long ago we had walked the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco together.  As I walked this one, I reflected that Mary-Ellis is my oldest friend in the sense of known for the longest continuous time.  We’ve kept in touch for 40 years.

“And that was only because we didn’t live in the same town,” I said.

“I know you always say that,” Mary-Ellis said.  “What do you mean?”

“There was a period of about fifteen years when I blew up every relationship I was in,” I said. (I had some dark times: read my book.)

Mary-Ellis is the only one of the group I could safely rely on to not bore me to death with sports talk.  I love that John is passionate about running.  I love that Debi, our little Putzer, is passionate about cycling and about the young cyclists she nurtures. I am passionate about singing and I recognize passion when I’m in its energy field.  I like hearing about the running and the cycling up to a point but purely out of love.  I think they sometimes mistake love for actual interest. Even Bruce ambushed a perfectly innocuous conversation with baseball statistics and scores and plays even after I told him I wasn’t interested and I truly did not want to hear any more.

It’s not that Mary-Ellis isn’t interested in sports.  She is. She has a son who’s an athlete.  But we go other places when we talk. We talked several times over the weekend about the self-doubt we had while at Whitman.  We were confused and often lonely.  I particularly felt isolated in my confusion.  There was so much I didn’t understand about myself. In the 70s Whitman may have been a good place to be for academics, not so much for mental health.

Mary-Ellis

Mary-Ellis and I pledged Alpha Phi together as juniors.  We could hardly get through the initiation ceremony for giggling.  People joined sororities and fraternities for different reasons: some took it as seriously as a religion.  Others wanted to find friends.  Mary-Ellis and I found each other.

Mid-afternoon I met up with Christoph, son of my neighbor Bill across the street from me in Seattle.  He’s a sophomore and newly moved into the Phi Delta Theta house, a place I was afraid to go into when I was a student.

Phi Delta Theta house, Whitman College

Christoph and I walked around campus talking about the buildings that are there now and the buildings that were there when I was a student.  I saw the magnificent science building, definitely not there when I was.  I pointed out where I lived in Jewett as a freshman.

The Phi Delt house was distinctly un-scary.  I actually didn’t want a tour.  I just wanted to step inside.  My father was a Phi Delt at Whitman College in the 1930s.

Christoph mowed my lawn for me last spring.  When I asked him his price, he said “Nothing.  We are good to our alumni.”

I gave him a $25 tip. We are good to our students.

Mary-Ellis and Phil took me back to Debi and Jim’s house where I was to sit with Helen who has middle stage memory loss so Bruce could go on an alumni bike ride.  I made tea and she and I talked a little bit.  I spent some time trying to figure out the Smart TV, which was clearly smarter than I was.  I finally got a woodworking video that demonstrated how to whittle a cookie mold out of wood. It ran for half an hour, and then started up again.  Since Helen had enjoyed it the first time I knew she’d enjoy it again because it would all be new to her.  It ran three times and I knit and drank tea.

I ordered a dozen cupcakes from a place called Frosted and called Jim to ask him to pick them up on his way home from work.  Kind of fun not having a car and everyone being at my beck and call.  It was actually a pleasant afternoon and I enjoyed being with Helen.  Even when memory is stripped away, the essence of a person can still be there and she is a lovely person.

Debi came home for a break from her duties as reunion co-chair and put her feet up.  She had been on the cycle ride in the capacity of domestique.  If you don’t recognize this terminology I’m not in the mood to explain.  My blog is a sports free zone except for when I want to complain:

Sitting around chatting someone mentioned “EPO” and I asked what it was.

“Well,” Debi intoned –she talks slowly. “If you are an endurance athlete of any kind, be it long distance running, be it cross country skiing, be it cycling, the more your oxygen carrying capacity—“

“For the love of God,” I said. “Can’t you just answer the question?”

“I was trying to,” she said earnestly.

“No, you weren’t.  You were using an innocuous conversational moment to bore me to tears with sportspeak.   You’re like an addict.  I can’t listen to any more! What is EPO? One short sentence.”

“It’s a drug to increase red blood cells.”

“Thank you.  Was that so hard?”

“I was also going to say,” she injected rapidly. “It was what brought Lance Armstrong down.”

There was a reunion supper at a brew pub that evening.  I hadn’t signed up for it because I knew we would be shouting at each other over some hyperactive sub-woofer (Is that even a thing anymore?  I’m trying to be cool.) in an enclosed space and I would hate it. Jim had planned to go “because Debi wants me to” but when he found out I was staying home, he got out of it. We spent two lovely hours not talking.  Jim was on the computer and I wrote using one of the promotional pens we got at registration.  They roll easily across the paper and are much nicer than the ones they gave us at the 35^th reunion.  They are really too good to give to Gwen who is feeding my cats; in any case, her house is more or less paper free. I think I came home with six of them.

A little before 8:00 Mary-Ellis called. “Are you in bed” she asked.

“Ha, ha, no I am up and ready to make music.”

Our little group got together with my guitar and John’s banjo and did some singing.  John sang a few songs and Bruce performed Schubert’s “Die Forelle.” But it was Mary-Ellis’ night.  She performed the Cowardly Lion, some funny lyrics to “Drink to Me Only with Mine Eyes” and “Boom Boom Badushka:”

“Boom Boom Badushka, that means that I love you,
And if you’ll be my baby, I’ll boom badushka you.”

Did we even know what that meant when we sang it at college? Or Mary-Ellis’ other comic song: “I’m a ding dong daddy from Dumas and you ought see me do my stuff?”

We surprised Mary Ellis with the cupcakes to celebrate her birthday and finished the evening with “Auld Lang Syne.”

And the morning and the evening were the second day.

Mary-Ellis doing her stuff.

Birthday Cupcakes

John

Together Again after 40 years. Back row left to right: John, Andy, Jan, Jim, Mary-Ellis. Front row: Bruce, Elena, Debi, Helen.