We’ve wrapped up another Pajama Week at Local Dilettante Studio.  Participation was so great it spilled over into other areas of life.  My painting buddy Madelaine was disappointed at the thought of missing it.

“We’re at Susan’s house this week.”

“Oh.  I wanted to come in my pajamas.  .  . I’ll do it anyway.”

“You’re on,” I said.

But I woke up at 3:00 AM worrying that I had planned to get groceries at Ballard Market before I went to Susan’s house.  I could pull pants on over the pajama bottoms and wear a long coat, but that would spoil the effect of walking into Susan’s house in pajamas. I wasn’t going to stand at her front door in the cold, peeling off pants.  It became quite an issue at 3 in the morning.

There are lots of Susans in my life.  I asked the Sue who cleans my house once a month if she thought anyone could tell I was wearing pajamas.  She looked at the Scotty dogs billowing out of my Uggs and smirked.

“Oh, go ahead and go,” she said. “You do things like that all the time.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know. You’re sort of Out There.”

“Huh,” I thought as I drove off. “I’m sort of Out There.”

I clomped into Ballard Market trying to make eye contact with everyone I passed, trying not to check the state of affairs near the Uggs.  But really, who cared?  If I saw someone wandering around Ballard Market in their pajamas I wouldn’t even blink.

Then there’s that whole thing about people not noticing middle-aged women.  We’re supposed to be invisible.  Or as my non-Susan friend Christina said, “Oh yes, when I turned forty, I could shop-lift freely.”

OK, maybe that wasn’t the best observation to make juxtaposed a story about Ballard Market. Moving on.  .  .

In case you’re new here, Pajama Week was established mostly to cheer me through the dark days of November.  Then I decided the need for cheer was greater in January. Under consideration is a plan to have a bi-annual Pajama Week.  Students and their entourage come to lessons in their pajamas, drink hot chocolate and roast marshmallows.  It’s a good week to be a younger sibling.

More adult students came in their nightclothes than in years past, and a high school student who has forgotten for three years, remembered.  High school-aged boys endearingly sneaked their bathrobes into the house and changed in the bathroom.  Chris, the unclassifiable, didn’t make her lesson but both she and Starfire, the Chinook, are expected to be in their pajamas at the next lesson.  No one gets out of Pajama Week that easily.

For sheer exuberance, there was nothing like the girls who come on Wednesday.  Talia, aged 6, is currently my youngest piano student. She and her little sister, Lalia, spilled out of the car shrieking, “We’re in our pajamas!!” They tumbled into my house like it was Christmas morning.

I watched Talia choose a marshmallow.  “Be sure to touch them all,” I said as I handed her the roasting stick.

It was the same with the Frangos.  The two girls hovered over the bowl, their fingers delicately crinkling the paper in exquisite deliberation over which of the identical candies would be their choice.  How great to be six years old.  Everything is new, even Frangos, even those peppermint starburst candy things.

Pajama Week is a restorative.  It’s like Days of Misrule when everything is upside down.  When I dress for work, I put on PJs.  The line between work and the rest of life gets blurrier than it already is for a self-employed person as evidenced by the trip to Ballard Market.  I’ll know I am truly Out There when I wear PJs to OK Chorale rehearsals.  Pajama Rehearsal.  That may be an idea whose time has come.

Pajama Week Day 1

Lalia and Talia

A good week to be a younger sibling.

The other day was stunningly beautiful here in Seattle, a day so fresh, it smelled like both snow and spring.  I stayed in all day, feeling puny but longing to be out of doors.  Today when I feel like a walk, it’s overcast and raining. So I will imagine a walk one mile to the west of me.

First stop: Crown Hill Cemetery.  The old (1903) and privately endowed cemetery had openings 15 years ago but I believe they are currently sold out and cemeteries being what they are, will continue to be.  There aren’t any scalpers at the 11^th St entrance.  Over the years I’ve gotten used to the sound of the grave digger being hauled out of its shed, and the sight of burials in progress.  Not too long ago there was a bagpiper at a burial.  I opened a window to listen.  A burial is as good as a meditation session for focusing on the here and now.

When I first moved here, I had a gate put in my fence so I could walk in the cemetery anytime I wanted to.  I used to run a spook house every October in the cabin behind my house.  One year the tour ended with the victims being left, blindfolded, in the cemetery while the gate clicked shut.  When I walk west, I always start through my gate and into the cemetery.  Sometimes I walk straight through to 11^th, sometimes I circle the grounds, past some familiar headstones, and past the repository of dug-up dirt that we’ve sledded down during the six hours of snow we sometimes get here.

West of the cemetery I might meet up with Tamara and Callie, the Border Collie.  Tamara is another work-at-homer.  Her business, Palm Presence, includes massage, process oriented body work and retreat consultation.

Tamara and I met shortly after the book launch of 99 Girdles on the Wall.  The Secret Garden Book Shop had suggested I make a blow-up of the book cover to put in their window prior to the launch.  I had the poster made but as it turned out, it didn’t get much display time.  Because I felt disappointed and because the friggin’ thing cost $75, I put it in the front window of my house for two weeks.  Tamara saw it as she was walking Callie.  She went home and found me on the Internet.  Now I join them for a walk as often as I can.

Callie reminds me of my five-year-old self, bursting with energy and excitement about the world as it changes minute by minute, yet confident in the predictability of where the treats are.  With me, it was the home of Borghild Ringdall and her stack of Tupperware dishes to segregate five different kinds of cookies.  With Callie, it’s me.  She greets me with a leap up, and with wags so energetic they almost turn her whole body around. She sits but continues to pulsate as she nails me with her eyes until she gets her biscuit.

OK, so far I’ve walked six blocks.  I’ve passed the United Indian’s Youth Home for homeless Native American boys with the great campfire area in their backyard.  I’ve passed the two great hopes of the shrinking middle class: Grocery Outlet and Value Village. I’ve crossed 15^th which takes me out of Crown Hill.  In a minute I will go back in time to enter Olympic Manor, but I have to stop and admire the tea house.

 Zen Dog Tea House  is the most flamboyant house in the neighborhood, maybe in the city.  The yard looks like the lobby of an elegant hotel in Hong Kong or Taiwan.  Huge, red Chinese lanterns hang from the trees like Christmas ornaments, and at night they are illuminated.  So the place may look at little “out there” but it oozes humanity.  Larry, the owner of the house and curator of the business within (art, tea) is a great guy.  I’ve toured the house and been served tea. I’ve been to readings there, and taken Tai Chi classes.  We need more people and more places like Larry and Zen Dog.

Finally I turn into Olympic Manor to visit Joan, my friend with the theological chops.    Olympic Manor isn’t the throwback to the 50s that it used to be but it still seems a little retro because there hasn’t been a new house built there in 60 years.  I think homeowners sign a covenant in which they agree to have no color whatsoever in their front yard, no tricycles on the sidewalk and no more than one child per house visible at any one time.  But at Christmas every house rivals the Zen Dog Tea House for flamboyance, and Halloween is a kid’s paradise.

I visited Joan one Halloween and thought I was in hell.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had walked over.  Every parent west of the freeway had driven an SUV full of kids to trick or treat in Olympic Manor.  I had to weave between rows of costumed children and squeeze past double-parked, bloated American vehicles to park a quarter of a mile from Joan.  We got no theology in that night because the doorbell was rung every 30 seconds by tiny children in ill-fitting costumes with eyeholes that didn’t line up with eyes, who didn’t know to say “Trick or Treat” and who apparently didn’t, for the life of them, know why they were being made to do this.  They looked like they were in hell, too.  Or perhaps I project.

Joan shows up in a lot in my blog.  Hey, here’s something you could do: you could read all my blog posts from the past 2 ½ years and leave comments and recommends to people who haven’t discovered Local Dilettante Studio yet.  Or you could read this early post that features Joan: https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/09/associating-with-the-bvm/

In any case, it’s lovely to have two friends, a dog, and affordable food and clothing within walking distance of my house.  I didn’t make my provisions for eternity before the cemetery filled up so in the event of my death, someone is going to have to drive me.

“Homage to Charles Adams” from a Crown Hill Cemetery scene

I was in Portland this weekend.  Oregon.  I was there just long enough to know which way to turn when I stepped out of the elevator without having to squint at the hall sign, trying to determine if 415 came before or after 428. I traveled down on the train. I had a stack of New Yorkers and NYT Book Reviews to page through.  And Ulysses.  A friend and I are reading Ulysses together, one episode a week.

“I’m taking Ulysses on the train,” I said.

“Ulysses is the book to have on that train,” her husband told me, “It’s notoriously two hours late.”

My train was not two hours late though secretly I would have loved to spend six hours on the train to Portland.  Not because of Ulysses which I actually did not get to, but because I love being en route.  I needed a long en route to unwind me from what has been an exceptionally stimulating few months.  En route is being not here, but not there.  There are no decisions to be made, just the opportunity to be.  When I think of it, en route is pretty much the human condition, and life is what we do to avoid knowing that.  We may think we are in control but something we don’t fully understand is carrying us along.  It can be a rough ride but I prefer to think that inexorable something has to do with Love.

It was cold in Portland but the sun was as bright as summer.  I took a taxi to the Mark Spencer on the corner of Stark and 11^th.  Waiting in my room was vase of yellow roses, a box of Moonstruck truffles and a Welcome to Portland card.

Wow, I thought, Very nice hotel.

But as I circled around the display, unpacking my bits and pieces, the welcome card dislodged and push around lumps and bundles in my memory.

Wait, I thought, I know that lettering and the panache of the gesture.

I read the small print on the card.  It said “Love, Anna.”

Anna.  My former singing and piano student, also formerly president of the student body of Western Washington State University.  Now she is living in Portland with her BF and working at Rubicon International.  Bright, beautiful, and funny, her mind is far ranging and I love talking with her.  I always feel better about the future of civilization after I’ve been around Anna.

We had dinner at Fish Grotto, a block from the Mark Spencer.  Anna has sampled every restaurant, bar, and coffee bar in the entire city and has a review for them all. Fish Grotto was excellent. We walked around the Pearl district, I got myself vaguely oriented, and absorbed the correct pronunciation of Couch St. (cooch). I fell into bed and to sleep early while Anna went on to do what people in their twenties do with that extra ten hour a day they have.

We met again first thing in morning and got coffee at Stumptown, a block east from the hotel on Stark.  Stumptown is attached to the Ace Hotel whose lobby looks like a Perry Mason set.  There’s even an old photo booth, but with a sign that says it can’t guarantee it will actually take a picture.  In a room full of 25 people with Smart phones, I had a longing for a strip of photos from that old photo booth.

We walked through The Pearl and crossed into Nob Hill where Anna and BF live in an old apartment building with ice box cupboards, a honeycomb bathroom floor, and claw-footed bathtub.  Taking one to these amenitites is a cage elevator, the kind Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore in Thoroughly Modern Millie had to dance in to get it started.  I say things like this to Anna and she says “Oh.”

We parted ways mid-morning because I had an appointment at the Espresso Book Machine at Powells City of Books.  News Flash: Espresso Book Machines are sharing their files.  Since 99 Girdles on the Wall was originally created for and printed on the book machine at Third Place Press, my book is now available on all of the 500 book machines all over the world.  I made arrangements for a copy of my book to be rotated into the display of EBM books at Powells.  For us self-pubbed writers the self-promotion never ends.

I checked out of the Mark Spencer and took a cab to the Heathman, a secondary port of call on the itinerary. Up the street, past the Saturday Farmer’s Market and down half a block was an Oregon style liquor store i.e. lower prices and no sales tax.  I bought two bottles of Scotch and had a nice natter with the guy behind the counter about how Washington state residents screwed themselves by not reading the small print when we voted to hand liquor sales to Costco.  Back at the Heathman, the concierge cheerfully dug my suitcase out of storage so I could wrap the Scotch in my red flannel Scotty pajamas.

Anna took me to afternoon tea at the Heathman.  Holiday logistics made Anna, her sister Julia, and me miss our annual holiday tea for the first time in eleven years.  This one was brilliant:  The calm, the white cloths, the chandelier, the scones, (handmade) marshmallows and lemon squares.  I added my vase of yellow roses, which I had been babying since I left the Mark Spencer.  I was determined to get them home with me.

After a leisurely tea we opted to walk to the train station.  Anna was my sherpa.  She disdained—perhaps didn’t even notice—the little ramps off the sidewalks.  She just yanked the suitcase up and down as energetically as she dances in the world.   We got to Union Station a little after 4:00, thinking I had a half hour to spare.  But train elves had changed the time.  I vaguely recalled how patiently the ticket guy in Seattle had both told me about the change and had high-lighted it on my ticket, I was mentally already en route and it hadn’t registered.

“You maximized your time here!” Anna said cheerfully as we hugged goodbye, and I made it onto the train with two minutes to spare.

I had a little season of anxiety around the notion of missing the train.  Then I remembered my idea of being carried along by something inexorable that has to do with Love.  What happens is what happens.  If it happens to me in Portland, I have a sherpa.

Anna

Tea at The Heathman

I live in an area of Seattle called Crown Hill. When someone isn’t sure where that is, I say Upper Ballard.  That doesn’t really clear anything up.  So then I say Greenwood.  Greenwood sounds very Henry VIII and olde.  That appealed to me until I watched The Tudors, which was creepy. Crown Hill, which now that I think of it also sounds very Henry VIII, is a “transitional” neighborhood, which my neighbor Gwen, who knows something about just about everything, says means that there’s one place in the city where it’s cheaper to live.  She makes a little joke.  We’re good people here.

After the routine-busting pace of the over-long holidays, I appreciate the quiet pleasures of this neighborhood where I have lived for 18 years.  I do a lot of walking, but I also have A Walk which I do several times a week: I turn left at Crown Hill Cemetery and walk a mile due east into Greenwood.  I walk to my Yoga for Over 50s class at Whole Life Yoga, to my neighborhood Bartells and to the ATM where I deposit the checks that come fluttering into the Local Dilettante Studio during the first weeks of a month.  I think of this walk as purely pedestrian, double entendre intended.  The other day I decided to see if there was enough interest in this modest mile to write a whole post about it.

When I stray out of my Block Watch area and cross 8^th Ave, I am officially out of Crown Hill and into Greenwood. On the right is Jorge’s house.  When I first moved to Crown Hill, Jorge had installed a double door on the edge of his yard.  A regular door.  Like an inside-the-house door.  It stood sentinel there for years while a hedge of various plants caught up to it. I have taken a personal interest in that door over the years.  Now there’s an eight foot hedge, and Jorge and I are on a first name basis in both Spanish and English.

Squeaky lives in the next block, across the street from the Greenwood Community P-Patch garden.   She’s a small, muscular tomboy of a black cat who is remarkably social, though of course on her terms.  I look for her and she comes running, ready to endure being picked up for ten seconds.  I put her down.  Outraged, she runs a yard from me, stops and looks back seductively. She does a figure eight around my ankles and I pick her up again.  This time she wriggles, jumps down and instantly contracts a fascination with a blade of grass.  She’s done with me.  Yes, your majesty.

On 3^rd Ave, the street jogs and I turn left at the house of the guy who plays his music way too loud and continue along the backside of the monstrous Fred Meyer that’s being built.  I will never forgive them for tearing down the Greenwood Market which used to be a regular port of call for me.  I bought my groceries at Greenwood Market and everything else at Bartells.  My feeling in this age of super-stores is if Bartells doesn’t carry it, I manage to do without.

Bartells, a family owned Seattle institution that began as a drugstore in 1890, has become a mercantile of sorts.  When I was a child in Olympia, my parents made regular trips into Seattle where I was cut loose downtown to run my little errands and meet up with my dad at the soda fountain at the Bartells in the triangle building on Pine next to the new 1962 Monorail station.  My loyalties run deep.

So I plod past the construction of this new Fred Meyer silently thumbing my nose, or sometimes I take a detour so they can feel the depth of my contempt for them. In any case I end up a block from Greenwood Ave at the house of the garage sale hustler.  This family runs an on-going garage sale most of the year and I see the husband at other sales all over the city, looking for things to re-sell.  He sometimes comes to my annual yard sales and tells me all my prices are too high.

Across the street is Blind Mike, the piano tuner. I’ve known many blind piano tuners.  When one sense is inoperable, the others are heightened.  Or can be, I suppose.  I think a lot of politicians are both blind and tone-deaf and it hasn’t seemed to heighten anything but their egos.

I’ve gotten to know many of the people who walk past my house: the dog walkers, the lady down the street who is close to 90 and is still out every day, the really skinny woman, the Canadian from Montreal, Tamara and Callie, the border collie, who I walk with once a week –or did before the holidays crashed in on me– the Samoan who walks like a dancer while he listens to his ipod, the woman who cancer aged twenty-five years and who is accompanied by different friends.  They inch by my house, turn at the corner and come past again.  Sometimes former students walk by and wave.  Sometimes they ring the doorbell, shy, but tickled to say hello.

Other than Jorge and Squeaky’s people I wonder if anyone recognizes me as That Woman Who Always Walks By.  I wonder on a scale of one to ten how eccentric I seem.  I know I sing to myself sometimes.  I talk to myself a lot. I expect I gesticulate more than I like to think I do.  I took notes the last time I walked in preparation for writing this post.  But these musing are for another time.   I’m done here.

Gifts are the most fun and the most fraught devices in the American Christmas season which begins the day after Labor Day with the first sighting of the little drummer boy and ends with the breaking of New Year’s resolution at about 12:01 AM New Year’s Day.

Let me digress for a rant here about New Year’s resolutions being almost as stupid as that business of the president pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving.  Seriously, does anyone else think that is about the most moronic thing anyone ever dreamed up?  Think about it: pardoning a turkey.  A turkey.  Pardoning.  What the hell is that about?  I grind my teeth every Thanksgiving over it but I don’t want to spend a whole post on it when it’s beneath my dignity to even mention it.

Ok, so New Year’s resolutions are stupid.  Every day is a new beginning.  Every holiday is a mile marker where we can let go of what’s no longer serving us, and make room for something new.  The whole pagan calendar is based on that.  The Wheel of the Year: It’s about the seasons.  Build an altar and move on.

So I have a little—or a lot of—venom to spew in regards the holidays we have just come through.  But I want to send up a gentle and fragrant spray for gifts.  I love thinking about them, choosing them, making them, wrapping them, getting them, opening them.  It’s the child in me, partly, and the thrill of being surprised.  And it’s partly Machiavellian machinations which I am no further above than I am my obsession about the stupidity of the president pardoning a turkey.

Gifts are about power.  Not necessarily about power over others.  They are about power over and the dance around the recalcitrant characters with uncontrollable motives who populate my mind.  This would be a worthwhile idea to explore in a blog.  Maybe next year. Or at my birthday.  I want to write something lighthearted for this last day of 2012.

My friend Lucy and I have worked out a great little system where we just tell each other what we want.  I give her a little list complete with labels (Laphroaig, Fiber Gallery) and she does the same only she gives me more scope: “I love the things you knit or paint or make with chocolate and liquor.”

Last year I said, “OK, I know exactly what I’ll make for you.”

“I like pink,” she added.

I found some bright pink, variegated wool and knitted a cravat scarf to which I added a polished wooden button with rounds like an old tree trunk, one of them matching one of the pinks in the scarf.  Lucy opened her Christmas present and said, “Oh. . . what a cool button.”

A week went by.  “You didn’t like the scarf, “I said.

“It’s more pink than I was thinking,” she said.  “But I love the button.”

“Ok, look, would you go up to the yarn store and buy the color you like and I’ll make you another one.”

“And could it be a bit longer?”

“I want to give something you actually want,” I said “Not something you put in a drawer.”

“I’ll see if my daughter will wear the pink one,” she offered.

“Go to the yarn store,” I said.

A month went by.

I knew she wasn’t going to go to the yarn store.  So I had several of my paintings made into cards and gave them to Lucy.

“Oh, these are wonderful!  This is my Christmas present!”  she said.

A year went by.

Lucy gave the pink scarf back to me this Christmas with the report that her daughter had looked at it and said “What a cool button.”

I’ve been wearing the scarf.  I love its pinkness.

Then there’s Nina (rhymes with Dinah).  Typically Nina and I don’t exchange Christmas gifts.  It’s one of our many endearing traditions.  Nina likes to buy gifts for people when she sees something that strikes her as a good gift for someone in particular. She buys it and gives it.  This Christmas just happened to coincide with a gift she thought I would like.  Such is her sense of the momentousness of gift giving, she made a special trip to my house with said gift even though we see each other several times a week.  It was a book she just knew I would like. The last book Nina just knew I would like was okay.  I liked it about as much as Lucy liked the pink scarf with the cool button.

Nina came with the gift and a lively story of her day of shopping which turned out to have a salt and pepper theme.  She described in detail a salt and pepper shaker and a salt and pepper grinder she had found.

“I need a salt and pepper grinder,” I commented.  “I keep breaking those self-grinders from Trader Joes.  I have boxes of coarse salt.

“You know you can buy ground salt and pepper.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Doesn’t help me now.”

A week passed.

Nina called. “I am such a Christmas nitwit,” she said.  “I gave you the wrong gift.”

“Does this mean I get the salt and pepper shaker?” I asked.

“Ha ha.  No, I gave you the same book I gave you two years ago—the one you didn’t like all that much.”

“I never said I didn’t like it,” I protested.

“You never said you did.  Anyway I’m coming over.”

The exchange was made.

So here’s where things stand now:  The book Nina gave me is Sherman Alexie’s latest book Face and I love it.  Lucy swooped in and intercepted my credit card for some expensive face serum at a holiday bazaar.  She wrapped it up and gave it to me for Christmas.  Though there’s no particular story I want to tell about them, Joan, my friend with the theological chops, made me the cast of characters from Three Bags Full, a sheep detective story by Leonie Swann.  Here they are trying to solve the mystery of the gorgeous glass ball given to me by Chris, the unclassifiable.

Gifts are also about love.

Anyone remember my Boar’s Head? The short version is that two years ago The OK Chorale sang “The Boar’s Head Carol” and the kindergarten class of Gail, alto, made a Boar’s Head of paper maché and fabric to use in a processional.  We processed our Boar’s Head laden with cookies instead of “bedecked with bay and rosemary” like they do at Christ Church, Oxford.  Here’s the full story: A Boar’s Head in the Hand.

The week before Christmas, two years ago, I made a pilgrimage with the Boar’s Head to the place of its birth: Gail’s classroom.  She and I paraded it around the room, singing the carol, letting the children each take a fortune-teller fish of which I had 50 or so from Archee McPhees.  I use them for prizes in my music studio.  Except my students have all gotten so many of them they don’t have much currency any more.

Then I packed the head as carefully as the most fragile Christmas ornament.  For the past two Christmases, the Official OK Chorale Boar’s Head has sat in my holiday window and joined The Chorale for cookies after our concerts.

This year I arranged with Gail to make another pilgrimage.  Again I wanted an offering for each child. Otherwise I think it would be quite strange to parade a paper maché pig’s head around a kindergarten classroom and ask them if they had ever heard of England.

I also wanted to avoid going into a store.  Ideally I stay out of stores from Thanksgiving until New Years except to buy food and Valium. I had a bunch of little yellow ducky candles that I bought at a yard sale a few years ago and have been doling out for various occasions ever since.  It was the only thing in my house besides the fortune teller fish that I had in bulk.  I counted them quickly. Twenty.

“Gail, how many kids in your class?”

“Twenty Four”

“Damn.”

I remembered that I had given a handful of the candles to my painting buddy Susan.

“Susan, do you have any of those candles left?”

She rummaged in a drawer. “I have three.”

“Damn.”

I took Susan’s remaining ducks.  Surely there would be children absent from Gail’s class on the last afternoon before winter break.

The last day before winter break arrived.  Gail and I e-mailed that morning.

“What’s your head count today?”

“All twenty-four are present.”

Oh great.  Twenty three little duckys, and twenty-four kindergarteners.  If you think I could have gone to the Dollar Store and bought 24 trashy Christmas tchotchkes, you are right, but you are not fully appreciating the drama of my internal world by the weekend before Christmas.  I was bordering the State of Frenzy due to my inability to say No to anything the season had thus far asked of me.  I had become heartily sick of Christmas by umm, about Dec 16 but I was wound up and couldn’t stop.  Couldn’t stop baking, couldn’t stop wrapping, couldn’t stop writing cards, couldn’t stop combing my files for people I have never sent a Christmas card to in my life, couldn’t stop being cheerful to students and choirs, or having holiday teas with my friends who I see every week year round, could stop doing what I set out to do with a focus as narrow as a toilet paper tube.

I feverishly counted my 20 duckys again—this is something we do at Frenzy State: the same thing over and over.  But lo, there were actually 21 duckies.  I must have originally counted them like I sometimes “balance” my checkbook.  There were sort of 20ish duckys the first time I counted. Or it might have been a Christmas miracle.

The Duckies

Getting the Boar’s Head and the duckys ready I remembered that I had a tin of tootsie rolls, the remnant of an earlier party.  The hostess had begged me to take them off her hands and I figured I could unload them on my students or the neighbors or some holiday function where I know there’s going to be too much of everything but still hate to go empty-handed.  God knows I didn’t want them.  I grabbed the tin and was out the door. At the North Beach Elementary School office where I was outfitted with a visitor’s badge, I dumped out the duckies and the tootsie rolls to the delight of the two children being timed out in the office. Gail came into the office looking frayed and ready for her vacation to start.

“I don’t know what we’re going to sing,” she said. “And I forgot my music.”

I wanted to suggest we pelt the duckies and tootsie rolls at the class and not sing anything.  “O Christmas Tree” was the least complicated song The Chorale had sung that quarter.

Full on Boar’s Head with dreaded tootsie rolls

“Here, take my music. I can la la the parts I don’t remember.”

Off we went. Gail’s class was admirably restrained. Each child took one tootsie roll and one ducky candle, except for one tiny girl who looked at me in terror.

“I don’t want to have to take one of those,” she whispered, pointing to a tootsie roll.  “I don’t like them.”

“Nobody does,” I thought. “That’s what they’re doing here.”

Admirable Restraint

If you would like to rent my Boar’s Head for your Christmas party, the contact information is below.  This year it comes with a free tootsie roll.

Let’s review all the reasons “Good King Wenceslas” is a great carol. From a piano teacher’s point of view, it’s an easy one for beginners, especially small children who have just started learning piano in September.  By December, “Good King Wenceslas” is a good teaching piece.  That’s about it.  Or that’s what I thought two months ago when I asked The OK Chorale which traditional carols they wanted to sing this quarter and Hal The Baritone suggested “Good King Wenceslas.”

I couldn’t imagine anything more boring.  Melodically two of the lines in each of the five verses are exactly the same.  Rhythmically the song is 75% quarter notes which means it yaps along like an annoying small dog.

“It’s boring,” I said

“It’s a dialogue,” he said

I looked at it again.  This time I read the verses.  “It’s a little play,” I thought, “Hmmm.”

I passed out copies of the song with a little note attached: “I am only agreeing to do this on the condition that we come up with a way to break the musical monotony.  So start designing those costumes and figuring out a way to make snow.”  Who was I kidding?  I was the one who’d have to make snow.  The Snowmaker, that’s me.  I made a list of all the nouns in the song and put out a request for props.  I asked Hal if his granddaughters who have yearly enjoyed the OK Chorale Christmas concerts would want to participate.

He reported back the next week. “They’re in,” he said. “We’re arguing over who gets to be king.”

Hal was crowned king.  I brought him my crown from The Great Dalmuti.

“That’s a little girlie for me,” he said

He replaced it with one of those “Flavor so good it makes you feel like a king” crowns and a yellow T-shirt that said KING on it.

Wenceslas was not actually a king. He was just a duke.  And really, Hal is just a baritone.  Wenceslas was a tenth century Czech nobleman who was assassinated by his own brother, Boleslav the Cruel.  Such a binary family.  St Stephen’s Day is Dec 26 or 27 depending on which side you take in the War on Christmas.

The carol says that the Good King looks out his window at the moonlit snow on St Stephen’s Day.  He sees a Poor Man gathering wood for a fire. He gets the neighborhood scuttlebutt on the Poor Man from his Page.  The two of them set out with bread, wine, and meat, plodding through the wind and snow to the Poor Man’s dwelling.  By verse four the Rude Wind has kicked up and the Page says he can’t continue. The Good King tells him to walk in his footsteps and so they continue.  The song ends with the mild suggestion that when we bless the poor, we ourselves are blessed.

By mid-quarter we had assembled our props and the Dramatis Personae had been decided.  Hal was the King, Kelsey would play The Poor Man, and Brianna would be The Page.

“How much rehearsal time is this going to eat up?” Nina (rhymes with Dinah) asked gloomily as we drove to the church.  Nina is a high school teacher.  She knows about trying to get anything done with large exuberant groups of people who don’t listen.

“Probably the whole evening,” I said thinking about all the music we still had to learn: the Latin song, the Ladino song and the Ethiopian song with words that that no one understood.

It was worth the time. Good King Wenceslas turned out to be my favorite part of the OK Chorale show this quarter:

Good King Wenceslas, a Treatment:

Five white sheets cover an area in front of the stage, not deep and crisp, just white.  Strewn about are sticks and small logs from this year’s supply of wood for my wood stove.  Anne (alto) holds a fan with crepe paper streaming from it in the direction of the audience so they can appreciate the ambiance.  Nina (soprano) cuts most of the hall lights.

the rude wind

Verse One: At first mention of the moon, a powerful flashlight from Hal’s glove compartment is turned upon the side wall by Kathleen in the soprano section.  The Good King sees The Poor Man gathering up sticks.

The page and Good King Wenceslas

Verse Two: The Page appears dressed in a Robin Hood hat supplied by Chris (tenor) and wearing an outfit made of magazine pages designed by the girls’ mother, Monika.

Verse Three: The Page and the Good King get together a wine bottle supplied by Anne, and the rubber chicken supplied by Sandi (alto) that doubles as one of the French hens for “The Twelve Days After Christmas.” At first mention of the wind, Jody (soprano) Eileen and Chris ( tenors) and Kristin ( alto) fan the air (mostly in the direction of the director at the piano.)

Verse Four: The Wind becomes Rude. Jody, Eileen, Chris and Kristin fan more furiously.

Verse Five: The Page clomps across the snow in a pair of Hal’s shoes, trodding in The Master’s footsteps.

King, page, poor man

Jody, Chris, Eileen, and Kristin, having transubstantiated the fans into instruments of blessing, pronounce one.

I told Hal that Kelsey and Brianna were welcome to do something with us every Christmas until they start adolescing. I love this group.  Something wonderful always happens and I always feel blessed with them.  The transubstantiated fans just put the crown on it.

r

The fussy, self-important and over-committed woman is not one of the more attractive stock characters in our society but she likes to infiltrate her archetype throughout our ranks during the holidays.  This year, she got a toe-hold in me and was meddling with my nervous and digestive systems in no time at all.  It started last fall when I got on the fundraising committee at the church where I run the choir.  In my position as a self-employed artistic type, I never go to meetings or get on committees of any kind so it was a novel experience.  I said yes to every idea that was floated, an alarming number of them having to do with Christmas.

Once when I was a young piano teacher, a mother marched into her daughter’s 30 minute piano lesson with several boxes the size of small filing cabinets panting that 500 of her Christmas cards had to go out that night.  I looked at her hair hanging down the front of her face right between her eyes that were rotating in an ellipse and said, “No, they don’t,” trying to be wise and above it all.

“Yes, they do!” She shouted.

I told myself I would never be like that.  Surprise!

This year I did one too many holiday bazaars where I sold my book, my watercolor cards, my raspberry liqueur, and various other handcrafted items that I thought it was a good idea to start making in the middle of November.   Still on the calendar is the shepherding of the church choir through their rehearsals and performances and the cattle ranching of The OK Choralethrough theirs.  Then I had agreed to lead a caroling party, which in my frame of mind would probably turn into a horse whipping.  After my second bout of schedule-hysteria, I canceled the caroling party.

Getting all wound up is not predicated upon the number of activities cluttering up the month.  People survive being busy.  Some people like it.  I don’t, which makes it all the more puzzling why I ever say Yes to anything.  I need spacious, do nothing, day-dream time.  Those times are actually quite full and productive times for me. When I’m too busy I contract a fussy self-importance that sucks the joy out of everything.

The day after the last bazaar I packed gifts to mail to cousins in England and Wisconsin.  Waiting in line at the Post Office does not count as Do Nothing time.  When I have to do something soul-destroying like getting stuck behind someone with three small children who is sending ten large packages to Mumbai but doesn’t understand what a customs declaration is, well, OK, sometimes I try to help.  I’ve been terrorized in foreign post offices myself.  But when there’s nothing to do but wait, I read a book.  I know: Hahahahahahaha.  A book!  Everyone else is posting on Facebook and playing with their apps.

The book I had with me the day after the bazaars was a relic from the 60s, The Book by Alan Watts. Full title: The Book on the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are.  I hadn’t read it since college.  In line at the post office, my stack of packages beside me, I lost track of where I was when I read:

 “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”

I no longer cared how long the woman from Mumbai spent with the only postal worker at our branch.  When I got home I pulled out another relic from the 60s, another book, yes: Carl Sandburg’s Honey and Salt  because the line from Alan Watts reminded me of this:

 .  .  .forget everything you ever heard about love.  .  .

it comes as weather comes and you can’t change it:

It comes like your face came to you, like your legs came

And the way you walk, talk, hold your head and hands—

And nothing can be done about it.  .  .

There it was!  “Nothing can be done about it. . .” These few lines pulled me into Do Nothing space and reminded me why that space is so rich and why I need it.  It’s the space of nothingness and everything.  I’m alone yet I’m with everyone.  I feel safe letting go of classifications and boundaries because I feel intact.  The fussy self-important archtype has left the building.

What do you know, someone else appeared to pick up the reins of the caroling party.  As I go off tonight to The OK Chorale’s dress rehearsal, I’m leaving the horse whip at home.  If you are in the Seattle area, you can hear the Chorale this weekend at:

Friday, Dec 7, 7:30 Broadview UCC (325 N 125th St)

Saturday, Dec 8– 4:30 University House, Wallingford –4400 Stone Way N

Saturday, Dec 8 — 6:10 Green Lake Pathway of Lights, aqua theatre

Ballard is a Seattle neighborhood.  A former student of mine has a riff where she describes the two faces of Ballard:  There’s the old Scandinavian community, the fishing boats, brick houses, and the Nordic Heritage Museum.  And the new Ballard that sits at Cupcake Royale with their Macs, looking important and saying, “I am so much better dressed than you.”

In a hidden dimension of Ballard live the writers.  A year ago, as far as I knew, there was a Yahoo group of Ballard writers who occasionally got together at the public library. Then along came literary provocateur, Peggy Sturdivant, who has so much energy, I feel tired just typing her name.  Simultaneous with the publication of my memoir, 99 Girdles on the Wall, was the birth of the Ballard Writer’s Collective–time coincident but not causal, as my physicist friends would say.  The Collective  had an immediate presence, thanks to the Secret Garden Book Shop, Ballard’s local independent book store, and Peggy.  She immediately organized a Writer’s Jam at Sunset Hills Community Center.  A week after my book came out, I was on a stage reading to a packed house.  It was a delirious moment for a brand new author.

A year later, the Ballard Writer’s Collective has a website http://ballardwriters.org/ and a Facebook page.  We read each others’ books, help publicize each others’ individual events and participate in our own, that is to say, Peggy’s Big Ideas.  There are a lot of writers in Ballard.  I think it must breed.  Here are some I have gotten to know:

Rita Bresnahan.  She read my book, lavished praise on it and invited me out for coffee.  She herself has written a book about her mother’s final years of Alzheimer’s with the touching title, Walking One Another Home.

Jay Craig describes himself as “more fun than the Dalai Lama and not nearly as creepy as the pope.” He wrote The Scottish Buddhist Cookbook.  I loved it.  It told him it was borderline obscene and he wanted to know what he could do to make it full blown obscene.

Joshua McNichols is a “freelance journalist obsessed with finding food outside the grocery store system.” Besides co-authoring The Urban Farm Handbook with Annette Cottrell, Joshua is a presence on KUOW, Seattle’s  NPR station.  Joshua did the story about me that made me a radio star.

I had the pleasure of interviewing and writing an article about Nancy Schatz Alton whose lovely blog is http://www.withinthewords.com/.   She is the author of The Healthy Back Book and The Healthy Knee Book.

I think of Jennifer D. Monroe (The Erotica Writer’s Husband and other stories), Alison Krupnick (Ruminations From a Mini-Van) and Christina Meyer Wilsdon (articles about science for kids) as three funny ladies.  I get on a Facebook thread with one of them and my day is shot.  Alison also writes a blog http://sliceofmidlife.com/ and Christina writes http://www.piccalillipie.com/, a blog about a little of this and a little of that.  If you ever get a chance to hear Jennifer read, she is double funny in person.

This past weekend, the Ballard Writer’s Collective had The Big Event on the anniversary of last year’s Writer’s Jam.  It was an all-day book and gift fair with raffle baskets, tasting events, and demonstrations.  In the evening a bunch of us read 3-minutes pieces we had written.  We had been given the task of using the words slump, jingle and interlude in some way in our pieces.  Because creating all these live links is really tedious, you can read what everyone else wrote on the group’s website.  You can read what I wrote right here.  The words in bold print were to help me when I read the piece aloud.  They are in no way meant to insult your knowledge of current events or to expose your (or my) preoccupation with titillating details of the past election campaign.  If you are of a different political bent than I am, please don’t write me off.  I’m a good person.

Post-Election Re-set

I spent the night before the 2012 election fretting about the Florida voting machines but by Wednesday morning, I was over the moon about the election results.  In the interlude between the election and the following weekend, I stopped gloating and my sleep stabilized.  By Sunday morning, I was finally focusing on other concerns, such as my little church choir, which was singing “On Eagles’ Wings” in a few hours. The election was forgotten, a thing of the past.

So—that Sunday morning I got a call from our lone but capable alto that two of the three sopranos were sick.  The third, healthy, soprano warbles an indeterminate part–she takes a breath but the notes don’t come out of her mouth the right way.  The lone alto wondered if I wanted to cancel the anthem since we would have not just one, but two empty chairs.  “No, “I told her. “I’ll sing soprano. We have binders full of tenors, and one of them can sing the melody an octave lower. We’ll have 47% of the choir there.”

“We can win this thing,” I thought as I walked up the church steps. “Arithmetic.”

I enjoy walking into a quiet church on the Sundays that the choir sings. Thanks to the church ladies, it’s warm and smells of flowers. But on this Sunday when I pulled open the door, I was greeted with a blare of nasty piped-in, electronic, illegitimate music. Gahh! 

The sound originated in the back of the church and from an imposing black box with knobs and carbuncles on it.  When I turned its largest knob, that musicky thing stopped. But apparently I had just hit the re-set button because as I hung up my coat, the poopy, jingling started again as though God intended it to happen. I took off my glasses to squint at all the buttons and levers before I finally found the way to shut that whole thing down. They say women have a way to do things like that.

The choir showed up for a short rehearsal. In the middle of the first run-through I stopped playing the piano in order to check the balance of voices.  The tempo fell into a bit of a slump, but the harmonies were lovely. And though I had not asked for a stimulus, a church member who knew the song offered to sing soprano with me.  With good heartedness and generosity from others, “On Eagles Wings” soared.

Hey–Choirs are people, my friend.

It’s so good to have my mind cleared of the presidential campaign, and to be thinking of other things.  If they get those damn voting machines in Florida fixed before the next election, it’ll only be 16 years late.

It’s been a dispiriting November, but the sun managed to bogart the sky for a few days last week.  Long enough for me to remember another November, five years ago, when the sun shone in a cloudless sky for the entire month.  I remember it because I spent much of that month driving the I-5 corridor from Seattle to Olympia where my mother was in hospice.  Except for the brief dip into the Nisqually Valley, the stretch of road is like a long day after a sleepless night; but that November all my trips were enlivened by warm sun and the voice of Jane Monheit.

My mother died the day before Thanksgiving five years ago.  I’ve written at length about her craziness and its effect on me in 99 Girdles on the Wall (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/99-girdles/) which was published a year ago this month.  When I was in the process of editing the book, I visited my mother’s grave.  I had picked out roses for her head stone, by-passing the crosses and praying hands that she would surely have preferred.  She was Bulgarian, Bulgaria is famous for its attar of roses, and she left the choice of headstone up to me.

“I’ve written a tell-all about growing up with you,” I said to the grave.

Her voice floated into me, “You aren’t saying anything about menstruation, are you?”

By now my mother feels like one of those vacations that at the time was horrible but as the years go by, one starts remembering the beauty and the fun.  It’s safe to have the good memories now.

She was a remarkably talented woman.  Though she disparaged each ability as it came along, I know she found her accomplishments satisfying.  She had been an occupational therapist during World War II.  In those days OTs knew how to do things like ceramics, leather work, and weaving.  For the first eight years of my life, a bedroom in our house was set aside for my mother’s full size loom.  She once showed me how to put eyelets in leather and when I cleaned out the basement of her house I found stacks of ceramic molds.

On the domestic front she was a good cook, a gardener, a seamstress and needle worker.  She did it all: knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, crewel, quilting, dress-making.  If it could be bought, my mother tried to make it more economically: candles, Halloween costumes, underwear, greeting cards, ice cream.  Near the end of her life, she learned to paint in watercolors, showed some talent for it, and then decided she had more important things to do.  I think she enjoyed it too much.

Women in my mother’s generation tended to pursue domestic arts with the same determination they pursued dirt in their wall to wall carpeting. It was what you did if you were to be a respected middle class wife and mother.  The child of immigrants, my mother felt she had to work twice as hard to stay ahead of what she perceived as her own deficit.  So she did everything.

I shook off my own sense of inferiority at around my 18^th year in therapy.  These days I thoroughly enjoy my particular cache of interests and I sometimes feel myself infused with the best of my mother’s energy.  It’s this legacy I am most grateful for.

My mother had moments that made me proud of her.  She was feisty and had a kind of instinctual common sense.  Always battling a sense of social inferiority, she once took on the Music Specialist in the Olympia school district.  My mother’s first grade class was learning a song that was clearly too high for them and the M.A. in Music wanted to ditch the piece altogether because transposing it down a few steps was too much trouble.   She tried to explain in pitying tones how complicated a process transposition was.

“But don’t you just move everything down the same degree for each note?”  My mother didn’t know much about music but she had, as I said, a stubborn sort of common sense.

“Well, Mary,” Mrs. Agnew looked down from her height of two music degrees and three instruments.  “It’s more complicated than that.”

“I don’t see why.” My mother said.

She asked me later, “Is it more complicated than that?”

“Not really,” I smiled. “You got it right.”

My mother did the transposition herself.  It was a Christmas song called “Gifts for the Child,” and I found a few copies of it in one of her piles of Billy Graham magazines and 8 x 10 glossies of the Nixon family.  It’s become part of my holiday ritual to sing it to myself, and to my mother, wherever she is.