In which I find in Samuel Taylor Coleridge a kindred soul. It might be his struggle with depression.  It might be his experience—so common to women—of feeling that nothing he does is respected as much as something a(nother) man does, in this case Wordsworth.  The two of them conceived of a book they called Lyrical Ballads.  Wordsworth wrote his poems of the common-folk and Coleridge contributed his mystical, magical story poems. Coleridge was self-deprecating when it came to Wordsworth, unjustifiably, I think.  I find his “Christabel” and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, much more accessible, engrossing and downright interesting than Wordsworth’s “Michael.”

I read “Kubla Khan” when my friend Nancy assigned it to her college English class. I will be forever grateful to her introduction to it because the sexual imagery makes me swoon and I like a good swoon every now and again.   Go through the poem and circle every word that has sexual connotations.  Then think how much fun it would have been to have taken high school English from Nancy:

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! As holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-mitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Of chaffy grain beneath the threshers’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves:

Where was heard the mingles measure

From the fountains and the caves.  .  .

Coleridge never finished “Kubla Khan.” He was interrupted in his process of writing by a business acquaintance from the nearest town, Porlock.  When he returned to the poem, that particular muse had gone into permanent retirement. The expression a “person from Porlock” refers to an intruder who interrupts inspired creativity. That’s a freebie for your next party.  Here’s another, in case you weren’t assigned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in high school:  The mariner is the man with the original albatross around his neck.

One of the Coleridge poems I liked most in this past week’s reading was “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison.”  Coleridge had hurt his foot and couldn’t accompany his houseguests on a walk in the Devon countryside.  This poem arrived from that experience.

When I read the poem I immediately feel the emptiness and quiet after the house party moves off down the hill, leaving the poet indisposed underneath his lime tree, which he at first calls a prison. He imagines where his friends are going and what they will see. When he imagines them in the woods, his language suggests enclosure: the ash trees making arches across the dell.  When they emerge from the dell into the sun and fields, the language is more expansive.  I know all this because I made a list of all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in each stanza.

It struck me that the first two stanzas are all fantasy.  Coleridge imagines they are walking from the dell into an expansive vista. He imagines what they will see because he knows what he has seen when he has made the walk.  But he doesn’t know that they aren’t going around a corner of the house, to smoke opium and speculate that he is faking his injury.  His lovely descriptions of nature aren’t immediate.

In the last stanza he comes into himself and notices what it feel like to be alive at that moment, right there under the lime-tree.  In doing so the lime- tree bower is no longer a prison and “no sound is dissonant which tells of Life.”

Coleridge had fresh and provocative ideas about the organic organization of Shakespeare’s plays and about poetry theory, more than I want to explore here.  I’ve got my father’s The Portable Coleridge which is on my list for when I get out of my Norton Anthology Prison.  Here are a few lines from Coleridge I loved:

.  .  .  Pale beneath the blaze

Hung the transparent foliage: and I watched

Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see

The shadow of the leaf and stem above

Dappling its sunlight. (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”)

*******************************************************************

.  .  .  whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the silent moon.  (“Frost at Midnight”)

A week ago I would have told you that I loved William Wordsworth. After reading the selections in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, I have concluded that it’s only a few of his poems that I love, and a few lines from here and there. I was all excited to read The Prelude because I thought it would be 56 pages of the same kind of bliss I get from reading “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798,” mercifully shortened to “Tintern Abbey.”  The Prelude is essentially Wordsworth’s memoir in 14 “books” of blank verse.  I was only a few pages into it when I was already thumbing ahead to see how many more there were, which is how I know there are 56 pages; and I was reading an abridged version in the Norton Anthology.  I read half of it, then just read all the footnotes for the second half and called it good.  There was a funny footnote on the following line from Book Five:

.  .  .The visible scene

Would enter unawares into his mind,

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received

Into the bosom of the steady lake.”

Of this line, Wordsworth’s friend Coleridge had said: “Had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out ‘Wordsworth!’”

It’s hard to appreciate Wordsworth’s contribution to poetry in an age when a poem can be written about anything: a big toe, a leaky pen, Elvis, a road in the woods, or a lanyard.  But as I learned in his interminable preface to Lyrical Ballads, his folksy poems about commoners were a departure from the grand subjects and formal language of earlier poets.  Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” He felt that the working classes lived closer to the common feelings that unite humanity.  They also have more fun. While the aristocracy is sitting around the drawing room trying to be cool and unmoved, saying things like “So amusing to hear a bit of Chopin,” the servants are waltzing in their bare feet in the hall.

In our post-Freudian age, it’s also hard to appreciate how much poetry anticipated psycho-analysis although I think Freud appreciated it: “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Wordsworth was interested in how our perceptions and imagination “half creates” the world we inhabit and in how memory re-orders our experiences.  In many of his poems he visits the idea that “. . .in this moment there is life and food for future years”  and “thy memory be as a dwelling place.” This is the appeal for me of “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798,”and usually mercifully shortened to “Tintern Abbey.”

The last time I visited England, my cousins took me to Tintern Abbey.  I wandered off (as a cloud) on my own as I usually did, with plans to meet later.  I walked half a mile and found a clearing in the trees where I could see the pinkish colored ruins from a distance.  I stood in the quiet and read the poem aloud, hoping to catch some of the genius loci.  In the midst of my mystical experience I heard a tramping and the sound of voices.  Around the corner came a woman who looked like an old time scout mistress and two younger women.

“Of course, there are a few places where there still is ethical fishing.  .  .” the scout mistress was saying.

They tramped on past me.  My mood completely broken, I thought, “This is why I like to travel alone.”

*****************************************************************

Here are some Wordsworth jewels:

.  .  .that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindnesses and of love.

.  .  .  I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity.

.  .  . And I have felt a

Presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused

Whose dwelling is the lights of setting suns,

And the round ocean and living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought

And rolls through all things.

(From “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798,”and usually mercifully shortened to “Tintern Abbey.”)

There is a comfort in the strength of love:

‘Twill make a thing endurable which else

Would overset the brain or break the heart.  .  .  (from“Michael”)

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.  .  .

.  .  .Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower:

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind:

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be:

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering:

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.   (from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours:

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.  .  .

(from “The World is Too Much with Us”)

*Up! Up! My friends and quit your books.  .  .

Books! Tis a dull and endless strife.  .  .

(from “The Tables Turned” and often quoted by Debi, my fellow English major at Whitman College, now Putzer, the attorney)

The pink Tintern Abbey

Who couldn’t like Robbie Burns? Well, the British, I suppose.  And he didn’t wear well with the Edinburgh Scots.  When I turned the page from William Blake in my trek through The Norton Anthology of English Literature, there was Robert Burns with all his apostrophes.  After I got used to the a’s, the whas and the gies, I found him oozing warmth and conviviality.  I also found a flood of associations that go back to my childhood.

As a girl, I loved a book called Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink. As a result of a shipwreck in the Pacific, Mary and Jean Wallace, age 12 and 10, find themselves in a lifeboat with four babies.  When the boat washes up on an island, the intrepid girls find a way to not only survive but make a home for themselves and the babies. 

There was an old salt of a British sailor on that island who had a parrot that would squawk, “Oh Bedelia, I’d like to steal ya,” a line of verse that I have remembered all these years, having no idea of the song’s context.  It’s one of those stray pieces of ephemera that float to the top of my consciousness at odd moments.  I might be pulling a weed from the garden or rolling down a window at a stoplight and suddenly I think, “Oh Bedelia, I’d like to steal ya.”

When the girls got scared they would chant “Scots Wha Hae,” by Robert Burns. The lines I remember from way back in second grade are:

Now’s the day and now’s the hour,

See the front of battle lour.

I had no idea what that meant.

I didn’t know that “Scots Wha Hae” had been put to a beautiful tune until a piano student came in one day talking about her paper on William Wallace.  We found this arrangement of “Scots Wha Hae” by The Corries.  It’s quieter than the one from the Braveheart soundtrack and, I think, much more moving.

In 1980, when I first visited my cousin Hazel who lived in the Cornish village of my great grandfather, I kept a copious journal of everything she and I did: the walks, the vegetation in the hedge-rows, the biscuits and cakes we had for tea, and the weekly bus to Tavistock.  Back home I typed up my journal and sent her a copy with photographs I had taken.  One of the photos was of Hazel and me in her sitting room in the middle cottage of the three miner’s cottage that had been remodeled together into one house.

Hazel wrote me a letter in which she quoted from Robert Burns’ “To a Louse:”

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

And as a rider, she added, “I don’t usually allow my knees to be photographed.”

The verses of Robert Burns have gifted the world with songs: “Afton Water” and “Coming Through the Rye,” both of which I grew up singing because they were in the Mark Nevin series for piano Tunes You Like.  “Ye Flowery Banks,” sometimes called “Caledonian Air,” sometimes “Bonnie Doon” does indeed break my heart with its line:

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonnie bird

That sings upon the bough.

Thou minds me o’ the happy days,

When my fause luve was true.

None of Burn’s poems are as famous as “Auld Lang Syne” so it’s a pity that most people don’t know the whole song because it’s another that will break your heart with joy, sadness, and longing. It’s probably the most requested song we do in the OK Chorale. Here’s Susan McKeown and Johnny Cunningham from the album A Winter Talisman: Auld Lang Syne

And here is an intimate view of The OK Chorale singing “Auld Lang Syne”last Christmas:

It hit me the other day what I wanted to do for a summer reading project: read The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. I and II.  Collective gasp all around.  This venerable collection has been around a long time but I don’t believe anyone has actually read it—certainly not the college students for which it was compiled.  I have the fourth edition which thankfully reflects the fact that women are and always have been sentient beings. Since there are no women listed as the editors, I say to the eight men listed: Good for you, let’s continue to try to keep up.

I haven’t given up on Ulysses.  I’ve just temporarily stalled halfway through the book as have my Joycean compatriots.  I think Bloomsday, June 16, would be a good target date to begin again, and it needn’t interfere with the Norton book because I only can read a small chunk of Joyce at a sitting.

I decided to start with Vol. II– because it’s my project and I felt like it—which opens with the Romantic period (1798-1832).  It’s not a long period in literature because they all died young of theatrical consumption and angst. I usually clock the romantic period as lasting from the death of Beethoven in 1827 to the beginning of the 20^th century, but that’s the perspective of a musician who doesn’t really care and just needs an easy definition.

I began reading a few days ago.  Right out of the gate I didn’t think I could bear to read William Blake.  I need more help than the footnotes give me.  As well, I expect Blake is better read from a book that includes some of his etchings and engravings. But I read some of the shorter poems and have this to report:

I remember a college professor going on and on about “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” which rails against the thinking of the philosopher Democritus and the poet Lucretius whose De Rerum Natura was ultimately the impetus for my reading the complete canon of Shakespeare’s plays last summer. That’s all. Just a confluence of memory and history.  Pause to muse about the mysterious nature of life and time.

Then there is the extremely odd marriage of a Blake poem called “And Did Those Feet” to the Women’s Institute, a kind of 4-H for women,  in England.  It was put to music by C. Hubert H. Parry in 1916. It makes a stirring anthem but seems a bit odd as a W.I Song.

After singing next to my robust cousin Hazel on Christmas morning in Cornwall however, I can picture her at her monthly W.I. meeting singing,

Bring me my Bow of burning gold,

Bring me my arrows of desire

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold

Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

and then sitting down to listen in disbelief to that woman from Saltash who claimed she got her crispy pie crust with margarine instead of butter.

And finally, here is one of Blake’s easier short poems.  Literary periods and trends come and go.  Some things never change:

    The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

I’d like to see those Women Institute ladies with their arrows of desire have a go at those priests.

As I write I have my nose in three Sungold tomato plants.  When I finish this post I’ll put them out for a day of hardening off.  They are emblematic of the journey I take every quarter with The OK Chorale.  If you’re new here, the Chorale is a community choir I started in 1992.  We operate through the University of Washington’s Experimental College so we’re on a quarter system—thank God—because I would explode from over-stimulation and unrealistic expectations (primarily by me and of myself) if I didn’t get a break every two months.

I’ll explain about the tomatoes in a minute.  I’ll begin when this quarter began soon after I got notice that The OK Chorale had been accepted to perform at the Northwest Folk Life Festival in May.  Acceptance into Folk Life causes a flurry of excitement and a re-evaluation of the music I had already planned.  It was going to be an all Beatles program which appealed to everyone except the deepest bass and the best counter in the current crop of singers.  I scrambled for some substitutions to lure them back. It worked.

The Folk Life Festival occurs at a point where I would normally expect to have another week to rehearse.  The pressure starts with knowing that.  Then there are the instrumentalists.  For some unfathomable reason I had been in the habit of using the guitar pickers and autoharp strummers in our ranks for spring quarter.  When it takes all I’ve got to rehearse just the choir for a normal quarter, I have to add a motley and cheerful group of amateur accompanists to a shortened one.  

“I don’t have an f-sharp minor key.”

 “I can play everything pretty okay except the bridge. Here, I’ll show you the part I can’t play.”

“I don’t think I can sing and play at the same time.”

I watched them drop their music and tip over their stands and thought, “Folk Life. Stage. Audience.”  I started to sweat along the hairline.  If I’m not having fun, no one has fun.  I decided to can the instrumentalists.

After that it was a typical quarter.  I made my usual speech about not pointing fingers and tattling on others for singing the wrong note.  I want rehearsals to be a place where people—including me– can make mistakes and not be criticized.  The protocol is for a tenor to say something like, “Can you play the tenor part at measure 38?” and not something like, “The sopranos are coming in too early and messing us up.”

It’s funny, but it’s usually the tenors and the sopranos that get into it.  The basses are too shy or too confused—not sure which—to say much of anything and the altos are steady, reliable and patient.  The higher voices –I can say this because I am a solo soprano—are as high strung and demanding as racehorses.

When you listen to a choir perform, especially one where everyone is dressed exactly the same and the sound is sculpted like a hairdo—not the Chorale, incidentally—you probably can’t imagine the drama that goes on behind the scenes in rehearsals: the jealousies, competition, snarking, and hurt feelings.  One of the Chorale’s longtime members began life as an alto.  She switched to tenor to get away from an annoying alto, and then became a soprano in the hopes of bothering another soprano enough to cause her to quit.  

Every quarter there’s something.  Somebody lets me know all is not well.  I’m like a priest.  I have to hear it and know it and, most of the time, not interfere.

I was trying to address some such situation with a comment I made prior to the potluck-rehearsal.  The potluck-rehearsal is something I instituted to boost comfort levels for people who need to stand in close proximity to other human beings doing something as intimate as singing together.  We’re not a uniform choir.  We are an Aquarian Choir.  We are individuals who retain our eccentricities, oddities, aloofness –whatever it is we bring within our personalities—while we sing in four-part harmony.  It’s important to the mise en scène that we look like we can stand each other.

I said, “If there’s someone in the Chorale who annoys you, you might use the potluck to get better acquainted with him or her.  Sometimes that helps reduce.  .  .”

I was drowned out by the explosion of laughter. So I did what I often do when I’m too much in earnest. I started re-explain myself and ended up saying exactly the same thing which resulted in another assault of laughter while a few people –tenors, I think– began acting out the parts of Annoyed and Annoying Person. 

Nicki (soprano and also a teacher) mouthed to me, “Leave it alone. You’re done!”

“OK, fine,” I grinned but I hate it when I know I’m blushing. “See you at the potluck.”

At the potluck, Terry (alto) sat down next to Chris (tenor) and said, “I’m supposed to sit next to an annoying person and Hal isn’t here.”

I think for the most part, we all tend to get along.

The Northwest Folk Life Festival, Memorial Day, 2013. I always wish I could be dropped right into our singing venue because I hate the parking, the crowds, the noise, and this year, the rain and the humidity.  But once we were assembled at the Center House Theater with a luxurious half-an-hour to do a sound check because the group before us had cancelled; and once I had ascertained that the piano was not an upright, but a console, I was relaxed and happy. 

And then I got The Rush. The first time The OK Chorale sang at Folk Life, we were on the Intiman stage and that was a complete thrill.  But I think this year was the best we have ever sung.  The theater was packed and the audience was appreciative.  They yelled for an encore.  If I hadn’t been so high, I would have thought to repeat what was arguably our best: “Hold Me, Rock Me” by Brian Tate.

Instead, it was over.  The next day, Tuesday, Susan (soprano) sent a video her husband had taken from his phone.  It brought back the energy and joy of “Hold Me, Rock Me” and I maintained my high all day.

On Wednesday, I got an e-mail about the Sungold tomato plants I was expecting from an organic farm owned by friends of a friend.  I had asked the farmer last May if I could buy a couple of Sungolds from her this year.  I reminded her in January and again in April.  In the e-mail on Wednesday she sent her profuse apologies: she had forgotten all about my tomatoes and the plants were gone.

I burst into tears.  I was unreasonably depressed, crying intermittently all morning.  I wanted those tomatoes.  I hadn’t been able to find them last year and they were the only tomatoes I liked. Nothing else would do. How many times should I have reminded her?  Once a month? What was I going to do now?

Around noon, I thought, “I don’t think this is about the tomatoes.  This is the down after the high. Oh yeah. That.”

I live eight blocks from Swanson’s Nursery.  One phone call ascertained they had organic Sungold tomatoes and on sale. I was over there before they closed.  I’m taking them outside right now.  Those tomatoes and I are both going to be case-hardened by the end of the week, and ripe for summer.

You can hear “Hold me, Rock Me” here.  (Just scroll down an inch or two once you get to the link.) Our best counter, the Human Metronome, is the woman marching in place on the far right.  Thank you, Heather (alto)!

Nina(rhymes with Dinah) and I went to a piano concert on Saturday evening.

“I am so looking forward to the couch,” I said as we set off.

“So am I.” Nina said.

We headed downtown to Sherman and Clay to hear Fred Kronacher.  It’s something we do three times a year.  The first two concerts are always at Green Lake United Methodist Church where the platform is staged to resemble a drawing room and the lamps and flowers obscure the keyboard.  We always complain about it. We sometimes ask a staff person to do something about it.  There was one memorable occasion when we re-arranged the stage ourselves. 

The last program of the series is always downtown at the Sherman and Clay piano store where they re-arrange the showroom to accommodate an audience.  Rows of uncomfortable folding chairs dislocate a couch and two armchairs to one side of the room.  Nina and I always sit–and sometimes lie–on these renegade pieces of furniture.  They face away from the performer but we don’t care.  We sit –or lie—on them because we are middle-aged women and we can.

I had had a long, busy day on Saturday and I was looking forward to claiming the couch for the duration of the recital.  This took precedent in my mind over the actual content of the concert which in any case is always brilliant.

“What’s he playing this time? I can’t remember.” Nina said

“I don’t know either.  I just want to lie on the couch.”

At the door we rummaged for our tickets.

“Oh, it’s Schubert and Schumann. Oh good, I like them,” I said.

“We couldn’t remember what the topic was,” Nina explained to the ticket takers who we privately call Fred’s Groupies.

But when we got into the showroom, the couch and armchairs were gone.

“You moved the couch!” I said to the first staff person I saw.  I didn’t know if he was Mr. Sherman or Mr Clay. (He was Oscar Spidahl.) I might have sounded a teensy bit accusing.

“You liked the couch?” he inquired

“It’s the only reason we came.”

He looked at me like he was appraising me somehow.

“I like demanding and entitled people,” he said. “I think I can help you.”

Nina and I looked at each other. Demanding and entitled. Huh.

Oscar pulled two armchairs –not as plush as the ones to which we were accustomed, but more comfortable than the folding chairs—out of an office.  He set them up for us well away from, as he put it, the riffraff.

“Demanding and entitled,” I said. “I like it.”

Fred is an exquisite pianist.  He also has a gift for transmitting his enthusiasm for classical music.  He tells the audience a little about the composer, and demystifies some of what we will hear in the work he is about to perform.  He plays snippets from the pieces and suggests what to listen for.

He has two other penchants which I, as a teacher and performer, applaud.  He understands attention spans.  His lecture/concerts last one hour and thirty minutes. The end. 

Secondly, he silently directs audience etiquette.  He sits at the piano and looks at the offender if there is any talking or rattling.  He is much nicer than the sister at Late Nite Catechism but he gets the same message across: we are not going on until it is quiet. Once the concert begins people do not talk and they do not rattle candy wrappers and programs.  Even so I don’t feel the terror that I do at a Wagner opera or a Gilbert and Sullivan show, terror that I might breathe too loudly and cause someone to miss an iteration of a motif or a line in a patter song.  I especially don’t feel the terror when I’m lying on a couch.

Alas, there is nothing Fred can do about helicopter parents such as the one who sat in front of us. The father and the two boys sat still and attentive but I swear the mother did not come to listen to piano music.  She came to watch her youngest child attend a piano concert. 

She turned to look at him. 

She fussed at him, put her arm around him, and smiled at him. 

She looked at the piano and nodded two or three times to the music.

She sat still for five seconds.

Repeat.

Though I was in danger of falling off the chair which I wouldn’t have been if I’d been on a couch, I closed my eyes. It was a good call anyway. The work was Schumann’s “Carnaval,” a musical description of a series of characters entering the ballroom for a masked ball.  Fred had given a wee introduction to the characters and the musical themes and then suggested that we not follow along as he played the 21 short pieces because, as he said, “This is music.”

You, too, can have an excellent musical experience: http://www.musicalexperiences.org/ but I get first dibs on any couches.

I discovered Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s writing when I was 18.  Her Diaries and Letters from the years 1922-1945 were beginning to come out in print and I read all five volumes. (Bring Me a Unicorn, Hour of Gold Hour of Lead, Locked Rooms and Open Doors, The Flower and the Nettle, War Within and Without.) I read her eight other books.  (North to the Orient, Listen, the Wind, The Wave of the Future The Steep Ascent, The Unicorn and Others Poems, Dearly Beloved, Gift From the Sea, and Earthshine.) I read every magazine article of hers I could find, many of them on micro-fiche or only available through inter-library loan.  

I was a confused and depressed young woman reading the works of a confused and depressed young woman who seemed to think and feel much like I did, and who showed me a way to process my reflections and to record my impressions of life.  I learned, like her, to think with a pen in my hand and to go through the day knowing I would write about it at its close. I began my own journal as I prefer to call them, and continue to write in it to this day.

Over the years I have had numerous Bouts of Lindbergh when I have re-read her entire oeuvre.  I’ve been on what I call my Prurient Lindbergh Tours:   A private tour of Next Day Hill, the Morrow home in New Jersey which is now a school.  I rented a car purely to find the home from which the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, now also a school. I walked right in and nosed around waiting for someone to throw me out, which no one did.  The Lindberghs have been a weird little obsession of mine.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was a gifted writer, but not so gifted that any of us might have heard of her except that her husband could call up Harcourt-Brace and ask them to read her manuscripts.  She was married to arguably the most famous man of the 20^th century.  When I was 18, I swooned over her references to “C.,” Charles A. Lindbergh.  But as I re-read the diaries and letters at later periods in my life, I got impatient with the hero-worship.  After I finally pulled through my own adolescence at about age 49, I recognized her as stuck in a paradigm familiar to most women of my mother’s generation.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh was unable to see herself –at least up until age 40 when the fifth volume ended– as a person of value apart from being a wife and mother. As a result she masochistically tried to conform to her husband’s control and definition of her.

I was wildly excited when I noticed that a sixth volume, Against Wind and Tide, Letters and Journals 1947-1986, had come out posthumously. (AML died in 2001 at the age of 94).  I knew from reading her several biographies that Anne Morrow Lindbergh had learned to stand up to her husband, had gone through psycho-analysis and had had extra-marital love affairs. Here would be the writings of a mature woman who had finally come into her own.

The book wasn’t like that.  She sounded happier and more confident than in the previous volumes but there was so much left out that she doesn’t come across as psychologically believable.  It’s not surprising, I suppose, given that she wasn’t the one editing the book,  The editors were several of her own children who, God knows, have their own agendas and axes, whether conscious of them or not.

But here was the worst paragraph –for me– in the entire book:

“Women write for different reasons than men (That is, true women—who fufill women’s roles as well as write—not masculine women who are in another category.) There is a creative urge in men which I think is not as strong as in women who, after all, satisfy that in having children.  It seems to me that true women often write out of an excess of the mother instinct in them.”

After all her reflecting and thinking, after everything she went through with a husband who today would probably be diagnosed and medicated, after psycho-analysis, for God sake, this is her conclusion?  It sinks me without a trace.  It’s paragraphs like this that give idols a bad name.  It took me a day or two to consider that Anne Morrow Lindbergh was merely a person who came as far as she came in her life and whose writing influenced me.

It’s Mother’s Day.  I’m happy for my friends who are mothers.  Me, I love to write, to paint, to sing, and to teach.  I believe that the last time I checked I was still a woman.  To those of us who aren’t by strict definition mothers, we aren’t just “another category.”  We are women who give life in incalculable ways.

In a grumpy mood on Sunday morning, I realized that I seldom project my gray side at church.  I am a one-woman side show whom everyone knows because I play the piano, direct the choir and occasionally sing.  I am always smiling, always say hello to everyone, and always listen to what people tell me even when I don’t know who the hell they are and in the case of a few, can’t understand what they are saying.

On my way out the door, I grabbed a book of Beatles tunes.  Jerry M. once asked me if I was going to play something jazzy instead of “that hymn crap.”  It was news to me that anyone paid attention to what the bulletin grandly calls the “Gathering” music.  Since then I have tried to remember to take some Brubeck or Bach –who I consider “jazzy.”  One Sunday, just after the benediction had been pronounced, I launched into “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”  This past Sunday was definitely a morning for doing it in the road.  Something to jolt me out of my mood at least enough to be civil to people.

The church was over-heated so I wasn’t going to need the hot coffee that I spilled on the rug under the piano bench.  The rug is coffee-colored so unless it instantly mildewed there in the tropics I should be safer than the time I messed up the altar during an OK Chorale rehearsal.  But I still wanted that coffee and spilling it didn’t help my mood.

Nor did the hymns I had to play.  Here’s my dirty little secret:  I enjoy some of the old hymns.  They are great tunes.  They have some of the same nostalgic associations as Christmas carols.  They are a thread back to an earlier part of my life, much of which I might like to forget but I have learned that it’s often better to not forget because even the wretched years are part of who I am today.  I have passed many a church service sorting through the hymns in the hymnbook picking out the lines I loved and giving a thumbs-down to some of the more sadistic phrases. So I resent that a UCC committee did the same thing and eventually came out with an abysmal hymnbook: politically correct, gender neutral, and utterly lacking in poetry.  Much as I hate the gruesome imagery in some of the old hymns, at least the lines scan.  That makes them easier to parody.

Sunday I had to play a hymn I don’t care for: “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”  Let’s enumerate all the things I disliked about it even before the UCC committee got a hold of it: The use of the word hail for anything other than tiny lumps of ice is too archaic for an institution that is already past its sell date. “Let angels prostrate fall, bring forth the royal diadem.”  Who talks like this? Other than scholars, do people even understand what this means?  Does it mean anything?

Sadly enough, these particular phrases made the cut.  The Committee inexcusably added ones like “Attend the savior’s sovereign claim” and “Extol the wounded one foretold.”   Try saying them quickly because the tempo of this hymn is fast.  Try making meaning out of them.  The only positive thing I can come up with is that the word extol is good to know for Scrabble.

More offensive to my sensibilities, though, is the contortions the Committee went through to pretend that Christianity is not a male dominated belief system and Jesus was not a male.   (I personally believe Jesus was the first transgendered person: a female in a male body but that’s the subject of another post.) So they’ve changed this albeit stupid line “And crown Him Lord of all” which already has no relevancy in the 21^st century to “Crown Christ servant of all.”  It comes up eight times.  Try saying it fast: Crown Christ, Crown Christ, Crown Christ.  Have we forgotten that The Christ was male? No? Can we just go back to singing “Him?” And incidentally did The Committee think they were being clever with the image of crowning a servant?  I don’t think they were capable of expressing paradox. Seriously, there couldn’t have been an English major on this Committee or if there was, she wasn’t left standing at the end.

At this point in the service –5 minutes in– I had zoned into my happy place. This is where I see if I can read the little descriptive paragraph at the bottom of the hymn at the same time I am playing and not make any mistakes.  I see that the tune to “All Hail the Power” was written by Oliver Holden, an early American carpenter, legislator, musician and hymnal editor.  Hmmm.  He had every skill set missing on that hymnal committee.

Last week was awful. I was sickened by the news of the Boston Marathon bombing and I was stunned by the Senate’s down vote on gun control.  Several medieval bills regarding reproductive rights put me in mind of other medieval procedures, like castration.  A few more boulders came down in the on-going avalanche of ignorant ideas about rape.  The new pope is (apparently) upholding the Vatican’s paranoid investigation into those radical nuns.   Sometimes my response to such a week is to obsessively follow stories while chasing antacids with Alka-Selter.  Sometimes I sign petitions, send money, call my senators. Sometimes I go the other direction.  Last week was a good week to read history.

In Foundation, the history of England from its earliest beginnings to the Tudors, Peter Ackroyd has this to say: “History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity.  It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity.  We live again the twelfth or the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonance of our own time; we may recognize that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost. We may conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is fresh and ever renewed.”

Americans effervesce with idealism that pushes for the new, the “better.” When things don’t work out quite like we had hoped, we crucify each other on the notion that “it wasn’t supposed to be this way,” an attitude that makes the shocks of life even more unbearable.

For example, in America, we foam at the mouth that there is supposed to be a separation of church and state and yet the religious keeps leaking in no matter what concept is embedded in our Constitution.  Back in Henry II’s time, the clergy could not be tried by civil law.  They got the benefit of Canon law. Since the Pope was as out of touch with the world then as he is today it meant the clergy pretty much got away with anything.  It wasn’t too long before everyone who could read was calling himself a cleric.  The audition piece was the first verse of Psalm 51 which became known as the “neck verse.”  If you committed a crime but could read the verse, it saved your neck.  It was religious gerrymandering in the 1100’s.

 The privileged classes have always told themselves they deserve their advantages.  People on welfare soon come to feel entitled to it. Power has always been about going to war and amassing personal wealth, protecting one’s own.  Men have always tried to control women.  Actually women have always tried to control men, too, but men are bigger and have louder voices. Terrorism is the last refuge of the misunderstood and the violated.  You’d think we’d have figured this out by now.  Perhaps things are “better” than they used to be, but that’s not today’s point.

We live by the rule of law, not by the Spirit, and not much has changed in that department for a long time. Reading Foundation reminded me of the contortions we still go through in order to get what we want. Corporations are people.  Embryos (but not women) are persons.  Money is speech.  Generations from now people will laugh at how unbelievably silly and gullible we were, just like we laugh at the idea of bleeding as a cure for fever or of the Lydia Pinkham remedy, a “tonic” that was mostly alcohol and that my father used to say was for fallen arches and fading females.  Future generations will come up with their own stupidities.

I’m going with Peter Ackroyd on this one: to appreciate my part in the great drama of humanity.   I felt it last night when after a three week Easter break, the church choir, minus one alto and one floater, showed up for rehearsal: 

Mary Ann (soprano) who whinnies notes, but not a distinguishable part. 

Bill (tenor) who always forgets his reading glasses so the pastor has to root out an extra pair of his.

The pastor, himself, is the entire bass section. 

Maxine(alto),the Feng Shui goddess. She only comes every other week because she has Dream Group on alternate Tuesdays.  She and Tracye (alto), both of them shy, huddled together for protection against a world of flamboyant sopranos and booming basses.

Karen (tenor) and Marvin the Magnificent (Miniature Pinscher) walked from their apartment a half mile away.  Marvin always paws at me for treats during the rehearsal. “I’m working,” I hiss at him.

Tinsa(shy Shitsu), came with Charlotte( soprano) and hid under the pews.

Ruth(soprano), who cuts the hair of everyone in the entire church, came straight from the day’s last appointment.

Dennis (tenor) has a lovely, pure voice.  He is so shy that when he does say something, everyone listens and takes him seriously.

I’m the Squadron Leader.  I’m responsible for morale and for playing the correct notes.  We are all stock characters.  We’ve been doing this for thousands of years. 

My friend Deborah told me a nifty thing to do for garden-variety anxiety:  Focus on my peripheral vision.  When I remember to try it, it puts me in a frame.  It puts me in a context that makes sense of me.  I’m here in this place at this time.  When current events overwhelm us, a sense of history can locate us in a context where we all have a place in the world.

I just returned from four days at the ocean with my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) who had a terrible cold.  I had a wonderful time but if I get Nina’s cold I may have to revisit my memory of the mini-break in which case I will have had an awful time.  But let’s go with my initial assessment for now.  While we wait.

We stayed at an old haunt of mine, The Sandpiper at Pacific Beach.  It had been eleven years since I was last there and the place has gotten a little shabby.  Another thing that had gotten a little shabby was my memory of how to get there.  Specifically, how to get there without going through Ocean Shores, which I loathe.  Off 101 North we took the first left to the ocean beaches but missed the turn to Copalis Crossing because we were talking about the crazy people in our respective families. We ended up in Humptulips (yes, that is an actual place) where Dave at the general store seemed inclined to keep us there all day, chatting.  This has happened to me before.  It hasn’t always been Dave, but whoever is there, he is always dying for company.

Nina cheerfully backtracked the extra and–except possibly from Dave’s point of view– unnecessary twelve miles where we made the correct turn to Copalis Crossing.  It seems like it ought to be fairly simple.  We’re driving west.  We hit the Pacific Ocean.  We turn either left or right.  But as I said earlier, it had been eleven years and the only thing I was completely sure of was that the Sandpiper was on the main road, which we had yet to find.

“Well, here’s Pacific Beach,” Nina indicated a turn-off.  “Shouldn’t we go in there?”

“Hello. Main road.”

We drove north. When we entered Moclips, I said, “We’re going the wrong way.”

Nina got out her phone, turning it up and down to get a reading.  “You’re right.”

We drove south.  We passed Pacific Beach again. “Are you sure it isn’t in there?”

“Main road.”

Finally we came upon the Sandpiper, its gift shop jutting out onto the main road.

“So we could have gone to Ocean Shores and turned right,” Nina said.

“Yeah.”

I opened the car door and immediately closed it.  “I should have brought my winter coat,” I said.

Nina opened her door.  “Me, too.” She added a cough.

“Let’s go home and get different clothes,” I said.

Nina looked at me. “Yeah,” she said. “Now that we know how to get here.”

We stayed in Cabin 4, my second favorite place to stay.  We appeared to be the only guests in the entire complex so it wasn’t clear to me why we couldn’t get the A-Frame, my preferred accommodation.  On the other hand, the great feature of the A-Frame is the feeling that its inhabitants are the only people on the entire Washington coast. Since the new Sandpiper management, Ben and Jeff from Seattle who took over a month ago, had only us to please, it wasn’t a bad arrangement.

We had two chilly days of reading, painting (me), playing the baritone ukelele (Nina), playing board games, eating and walking on the beach wearing every item of clothing we had brought with us.  Beyond that, the big energy expenditures of each day were as follows:

Mornings: getting dressed

Afternoons: visiting the gift shop

Evenings: lighting the duraflame log

This—to me— is the best an ocean getaway has to offer.  Except a little more sun would have been nice.

I’m not sniffling yet.

From the deck of Cabin 4