Last weekend I wrote about my students performing in a love-fest of a Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale.  (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/02/terrified-adults-and-spotlight-whores/) I spent the week picking up pieces.  One of my students came to her lesson saying that she wished her best friend had been there because she would tell her The Truth about her singing.

I was almost apoplectic.  I wanted to say, “Give me her name.  I’ll take care of her.”

Contrary to what the prevailing trends suggest, singing is not done in a court of law.  But nowadays people listen to music with a clipboard and a smug attitude.  Audiences are pock-marked with critics and judges who wouldn’t dream of ridiculing a child who is learning to walk or undermining an adult preparing for a job interview, but who think nothing of ripping a singer to shreds and dispassionately examining the tatters while the performer bleeds out.

If I can borrow an expression from my painting buddy, Susan, this about sets my hair on fire.  Attempts to explain have me vomiting ashes that are trying to be words strung in a sentence. So I have been pondering this topic all week.  Yes, pondering.  Well, OK, fuming.  And dousing my head with the kitchen sink nozzle.  If this seems reactive, all I can say is that you aren’t the one having to resuscitate the victims.

So much of life is about passing exams, winning contests, and having letters after our names. It’s about how our accomplishments appear to other people.  The Experts and the Friends with The Truth have the advice we need to look and sound good.   I secretly wish that my students would not watch shows like American Idol.  They might think they are picking up useful information.  All I see is the damage it does.

I sing and I teach singing but I can’t describe how much I don’t want the pressure of being seen as The Expert.  I’m a human being.  If I attempted to play the Expert, I couldn’t sustain it.  I don’t fancy being as delusional as Popes and politicians.

A person doesn’t become a singer by having the so-called experts– or teachers– pick away at her voice until she despairs of herself and runs off the stage in tears. She would do better to embark on a course of something she already hates.  It’d be quicker.

I want to help my student build a house she actually wants to inhabit.  I view teaching as collaboration. A student wants to learn to sing, I want to learn how to help her learn to sing.  We need a dialogue.  I might have ten thoughts about a student’s technique.  I want to work with the one that is ripest.  I need a hint.  A student is sometimes reluctant to voice an opinion for fear being Wrong in front of The Expert.  There’s no Wrong.  Everything a student says gives me an idea of how we might proceed.

There are no blueprints for the house.  It’s a voice.  Maybe it’s your voice.  It’s you.  It’s your entire personality, every nook and cranny of it, in vocal sound.    I can tell you which rooms are filling up with sound.  And I can help you explore the rooms are still waiting for your breath to blow through them.  But you actually teach yourself to sing.

My biggest job, as I see it, is to foster a sense of curiosity, wonder, and pleasure at the sound of your voice filling your house. This pleasure is what will sustain you as you acquire technical skills.  It will make performance safe enough to give you a rush but also be a learning experience.  It’s what will help you mediate the ignorant pronouncements of the clipboard wienies.

The voice is a mysterious instrument. It’s like our unconscious mind: it does what it wants when it wants. The better your friendship with your voice and with all its sound colors, the less it matters what the critics say, and the more freely it will sing for you.

I’m not fuming quite so steadily. Even so, I am getting a longer hose for that kitchen sink nozzle.  When the experts and critics come around, I’ll be ready for them.

Two events from last week inspired this post:  Meryl Streep did a lovely interview on NPR where she said something that I want to put on my business card: “Voice lessons bring out the voice we already possess;” and The Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale opened its season.

The Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale, known on my calendar merely as T.A. is what I call my adult student recitals.  My students can register as Spotlight Whores with as many songs as I will let them sing, they can be audience or they can come with Ambivalence Status.  Ambivalence Status means they decide once things are underway if they want to perform.

The T.A. Musicales are not your stereotypical music recitals. I do my best to provide as relaxed an environment as I can.  To this end, I provide props, costumes, and suggestions for ways to reduce the anxiety about singing or playing in front of an audience.  And everyone gets a chance for a do-over at the end.

On Sunday I asked the performers to explain what their objective was in singing that day. Was it to sing without throwing up? With the music memorized? Without saying “Damn it!” in the middle of the song?  Without apologizing or saying that it sounded better an hour ago?  (Always including one of my objectives: Please stay focused while I finish playing the accompaniment.  It’s part of the song, too.)

Our first performer, who will go by the name of Samantha because she has suffered enough exposure for one week, said she wanted to sing her song without crying.  She immediately started to cry, seemingly from the terror of what she was setting out to accomplish.  We started over a few times before she got underway and as she sang through the verses, her voice got steadier and stronger.  She went from looking terrified to beaming and sounding confident.

She demonstrated something that is missing from so much singing one hears these days, something that I think makes a performance compelling: vulnerability.  She had her heart out there with no interface except raw courage.   One by one, my students got up and sang better than I have heard them sing before.  Everyone had a different objective but everyone sang with a kind of vulnerability.

Every performance surprised and moved me, and if I can be frank, that is a tall order with me.  For one, I am at the piano accompanying the singers and wrestling with pages that won’t stay flat. Secondly, I hear a lot of voices in my studio and I listen to many attempts to sing things “perfectly,” which always backfires and is often accompanied by expressions of self-loathing.  Whatever the word perfect means to one person, it means something different to everyone else.  A song or a single note is different every single time you sing or play it because it’s alive.  If you once get it “perfect,” you’ve now not only killed it, but no one else thinks you’ve done anything notable so it’s an exercise in masochism.

Terrified Adult and Spotlight Whore are two sides of the same coin, but they have to be in balance in order for the coin to spin.  When you are too enamored of the spotlight, you are up there amusing and impressing yourself alone. The word masturbate comes to mind: there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s something one usually does alone.  If you are too terrified, you don’t share yourself at all.  In the balance, in the spin, you have room to experience the wonder of your own voice and to share it at the same time.

Performing is intimacy.  There’s an intimacy with your accompanist, you trust him or her. You can’t know ahead of time what clumsy goof you’ll make that you hope your accompanist can make look like is her fault.  Or better yet that the two of you can weave into the performance itself.  There’s an intimacy with the audience.  You can’t know what any particular audience is going to feel like.  You don’t know what they expect or how flexible and open they are.

You can’t be intimate in advance, and you can’t fake vulnerability.  You begin by falling in love with your own voice and inhabiting the music.  You present yourself and your song with as much openness and courage as you have in that moment.  And then you let go.  There’s nothing more to do and you can’t control the response.

Samantha went back for a do over.  Her face was incandescent and her voice was her own.  She didn’t cry until the very last note and that mattered to her.  But she had me from the beginning of the afternoon.  I was moved by her just standing up and singing with tears in her eyes.

Last Saturday Joan, my friend with the theological chops, and I went to Seattle University’s “Search for Meaning Book Festival.” We had our tickets and were eager to attend right up to the day before it took place. Joan called on Friday night.

“Who am I kidding?” she asked.  “I can’t spend the whole day there.  I don’t have that kind of energy.”

“Yeah, neither do I.”

Earlier that day I had shoved my feet into a new pair of walking shoes to walk around Green Lake with my friend Nancy.  By evening, it wasn’t only my feet that hurt.  All those places where joints hang out with other joints were like a bunch of cars that had spun out in traffic with every one facing the wrong way.  I would have happily stayed home and watched re-runs of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Joan said,  “I really only want to hear the Jesuit.”

The Jesuit.  Joan grew up Catholic and went to Loyola so Jesuit means something to her.  I grew up in the Church of the Miserable Masochists.  I don’t know Jesuit from Dominican from Franciscan other than if one of each walks into a bar, you’ve got a joke.

“Ok,” I said.  “I’ll go hear The Jesuit with you.”

The Jesuit was Father James Martin.  He’s the chaplain of “The Colbert Report.”  I bet you didn’t know the show had a chaplain.  I wonder if “Everybody Loves Raymond” had a chaplain because the Barone family was Catholic. In any case, Joan and I agreed that if nothing else, this particular lecture would be funny.

With my unsmiling, everything-is-a-sin religious background, I am always impressed with the Catholic’s ability to laugh.  I went to “Late Nite Catechism” nine times.  I can’t imagine a Protestant counterpart.  “Wednesday Night Altar Call! Hilarious and Cleansing!”  In my experience, professional Protestants don’t laugh at all, let alone at themselves.

Father James Martin was preceded by a series of self-congratulatory introductions on the part of the festival organizers that wound their way down to introducing the man who would introduce the person who would introduce the speaker.  I occupied my time trying to figure out how far I’d have to walk to get one of the cool red festival bags everyone was carrying.  Honestly what I love best about conferences are the promotional freebies.

The Jesuit’s talk was mostly a string of  funny stories.  My favorite: He was at a conference in Africa.  At the Q and A, all the priests left for a meeting, abandoning Father James Martin to a roomful of nuns.  When he expressed some self-consciousness about being the only man in the room, one of the nuns piped up in a loud voice, “Blessed are you among women!”

On Saturday someone asked a question about women in the Catholic Church.  Father James Martin launched into a canned speech about how women were the first at the tomb, women were important to Jesus etc.  I now understand the meaning of the expression “Jesuitical clap-trap.”  One courageous voice called out frankly, “Do you think women should be priests?”

The Jesuit answered with an eight minute long joke. That was disappointing, though not unexpected.

It is such a stupid situation: a power structure that excludes at least half its talent, intellect, courage, wisdom and imagination.  The Grande Fromages hoard their positions like dragons on their gold, deluding themselves that people actually believe it’s because of a couple of Bible verses.  But all institutionalized religions eventually lose their relevancy.  When their power starts to crumble, they fight to the death the persons they claim to serve.  It’s the nature of The Beast, so to speak.

Meanwhile the essence of spirituality quietly flows along as the subterranean stream that it is.  Here’s my idea of a conference:  You get there and there’s nothing planned and nothing to do.  This is my idea of a talk: the speaker gets up and says that everyone must find their own way.  Then he sits down.  I haven’t worked out how I would get any promotional freebies, but I rather think that if I found the meaning of life, I could forgo the totebag.

There’s a Sufi saying: There’s only one path and it’s yours.  I like that.

I love my Yoga for Over 50 class.  It’s slow and easy going and gives me time to think exactly how I am going get up from that forward bend.  Lately I’ve started having an experience with breathing which I never thought could happen outside of ingesting a Xanax.  I feel as though the breath is floating my body, moving it around so that except for that forward bend thing, I don’t have to think as much as I did in the beginning.  I only have to breathe and float.

So it was hugely irritating when a Problematic Person from my Past (P3) showed up in class.  She came in late, after the rest of us had settled into a flow.  Setting up right in the middle of the floor, it sounded like she was wearing rain pants because she swished every time she moved.  She had a special mat with her and every time she got off it, it sounded like she had fallen out of a bunk bed.

None of these impressions would be so extreme if I hadn’t seen who she was.  She was a woman who had sung with The OK Chorale for several quarters.  The last time she enrolled, she was looking ahead to hip surgery so she had some discomfort, ok, pain, going on.   We were singing at Folk Life that quarter and preceding it with a warm-up at the Queen Anne Thriftway and Bay View Retirement Center, working our way down the counter-balance, so to speak.

Before the first class P3 informed me that a new federal law required me to provide transportation for her, and what was I going to do about that?   This happened a long time ago, back when I didn’t question such assertions, when I believed that everyone in the room was a grown-up except me.  Or in the parlance of the day, I gave my power away.  I had only recently succeeded in finding a wheel-chair accessible place to offer the class per federal law and I was dismayed to learn that I also had to transport anyone who was physically challenged.

I said that I always arranged car-pools at the last rehearsal.  I made that point to her eight times.  Eight rehearsals.  Eight queries as to how I could compensate her for her pain in life. Eight re-assurances that I would arrange everything at the end of the last class.

At the seventh rehearsal, she asked me to find out if there were handicapped parking spaces at the retirement home, and she could maybe drive herself.  If this situation were to arise today, I might say something like this: “I understand your hip is a problem but is there something wrong with your dialing finger?”

At the last rehearsal P3 was the second person in the door.  She presented herself to me and asked if I had arranged her car-pool.  Today I might ask her what she did with that brain in her spare time.   But what I said was: “You know you could have taken more responsibility for this.”

P3 turned away, red in the face.  She was sitting with a friend, and chewing me to pieces when I found her and tried to repair things.  She took one look at me and erupted, spewing something along the lines of she hoped that someday I was in excruciating pain and no one, no one cared.  It was my turn to walk away.

As I tried to get the class started, she sobbed noisily in the back of the room. My friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) who is a mother and high school teacher, and has faced down priests, sat next to her, and used her teacher voice to say, “This is not the time or the place for this behavior.”

The sobs crescendoed to wails as she laid her head in the lap of her friend who was the only person on earth who cared.  She wailed all the way through the vocal warm-up.  She wailed for ten minutes.   Then she left.

The next morning, she cc’d me on the complaint she sent the Experimental College. And e-mailed me another curse, expressing her hope that I be in pain someday.  Ironically enough, one of the sopranos was chauffeuring me to and from rehearsals that quarter because I was recovering from a herniated disc.  But to mention that is almost too easy.

So this was the woman who walked into my yoga class.  After class she said to me, “You look familiar. I know you from somewhere.”

“Do you?” I concentrated on tying my shoe.

She gazed into the distance.  “It was a group of women, I think.”

“Oh. Well.”  I slipped out the door.

So there it is. I hope she doesn’t come back but she probably will.  Life does stuff like this.  I understand the equation of emotional and physical pain plus arrested development multiplied by drama queendom to the tenth power that leads one to feeling entitled to go off on other people.  And if one does it often enough, I suppose it gets difficult to keep track of the names of all the people one has abused.  There may be people who slide out the door when they see me coming.

But splat into my great yoga experience?  It would indeed be ironic if I needed a Xanax to get me to yoga.

When my brother and I played Scrabble as kids, it was a triumph to spell a word at all, never mind scoring.  Even the high scoring letters didn’t improve our games because our vocabulary wasn’t up to our aspirations.  The only words with an x that we knew were ax and ox and we’d argue about the plurals.  The only viable z word we knew was zoo.  It was too much to hope that we’d get a z and a b in the same hand, let alone the other accoutrements for spelling zebra, the only other z word we knew.  We didn’t know about qi.

But it was a start.  As an adult, I had Sylvia, a bi-monthly Scrabble partner who was worlds better than me.  I know of no better way to improve one’s game than to play with someone who is 1) more advanced, 2) doesn’t care whether she wins or not, just enjoys the company and the game, and 3) is patient.  I hit the trifecta with Sylvia and I learned a lot.

When my mother was in her dotage, Scrabble was something we could do without fighting.  She was a fierce cheater, but I didn’t care what she did as long as she didn’t talk religion or ask me if I went to church.  She played with nine tiles –Why waste the room on the tray?– and if she didn’t like her hand, she traded tiles during my turn.

“Mom, you can’t just change your tiles!”

“Well, I can’t use these letters.”

She could never just put tiles on the board.  She had to make an announcement.  If her word was dance, she arranged the tiles saying, “I’ll just do a little dance.”  If her word was dame, she said, “I guess I’ll be a little dame.”

Fast forward to the age of Computer Scrabble.  When I decided I was spending too much time playing Free Cell Solitaire, ( https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/09/on-justifying-hours-of-free-cell-solitaire/) I moved to Scrabble.  I started on the Veteran level and moved quickly to Smart and Elite by virtue of using the Hints and Best Play menus i.e. by cheating.  In this I was my mother’s daughter.  I won 2500 games and lost 111, and picked up some skills, though as it has turned out, not as many as I thought.   I moved on to Facebook Scrabble with Chris, the Unclassifiable.  I won most of our games so Chris was an easy transition to playing in a system where I couldn’t cheat.

I discovered a seductive little feature on Facebook called “Stats.”  I started watching my rank rise.  I was second in line when I friended two people who play with greater skill and it knocked me all the way to No. 4.  Both of them invited me to play and it has been almost unbearably frustrating for me, the little cheater.   In two moves, they are already 150 points ahead of me and this with just commonplace letters.  They aren’t even working with x, z and q.  I told Chris about it.

“Welcome to my world,” she said.

“But do you just want to cry?” I asked her.  “So frustrated that you want to cry?”

“No,” she said. “I get mad.”  Then she laughed.  She didn’t sound mad.

Every morning I play my game with Chris, and she goes off to work.  The two Facebook Aces are in a position to play Scrabble all day long.  Unfortunately I am, too.  If I thought “Stats” was seductive, it’s nothing compared to the thought that if that so and so doesn’t block me, I can hang all my tiles off the word Rhamnus in my next turn.  And by the way, how does someone even know that word?

My friend Nancy introduced me to Lexulous which is like Scrabble only the scoring is inflated.  In addition, Nancy has bunches of degrees in English and has been teaching it for 30 years.  She can soar 250 points ahead of me before the board even downloads.  It’s so terrifying there almost isn’t time to cry.  The first time I won a Lexulous game with Nancy, I thought she was off her feed.

“I just did the best I could with the tiles I had,” she said graciously.  She says that even when she wins.

See, this is what cheating has done:  set me up with the illusion that I can always win.  I am finding it hard to play with such congenial company.  Chris laughs no matter who wins and Nancy says she finds the game relaxing.  Meanwhile I’m crunching hard candy and obsessing, with time-outs to meditate on the idea that cheaters never prosper.  My ignominy, in all its definitions, is complete.

Ignominy.  Eight letters.  I can hear my mother: “I’ll just have a little ignominy.”

Meal time is an exciting event in the lives of my cats.  When they were kittens, they engaged in extended periods of play, exploration, and swinging on curtains followed by restorative naps, and eating for growth and strength.  Now that they are cats, they engage in extended naps, brief periods of play if I play with them, and extended whining for food followed by my caving in and giving them something to eat.

I’ve got one grazer (Artemis) and two gobblers (Winston and Freud).  In order to accommodate their conflicting styles of dining and to appease their whining, I dribble snacks out to them over the course of a day.  It’s a kind of enforced grazing which led my friend Debi (aka Putzer, the attorney) to ask in incredulous tones, “How many times a day do you feed them?”

Let me elucidate the finer points of this.  Then you can decide if I’m as nuts as this will sound:

Winston was given a name to aspire to; but he chooses instead to spend his time sleeping, eating, going to the neighbors to watch football and having a nightly cigarette on the front porch.  He’s the whiner.  When Joan, my friend with the theological chops comes over, she always asks me to make him talk.

“Winston,” I say

“Weaaew.”

“Winston!”

“Weaaew.”

“Such a noise!”  Joan always says the same thing. “He’s singing to you!”

“Yeah, no he’s not.”

Anyway, Winston’s whine is the reason he weighs 18 pounds.  At mealtime, I scatter his kibble down the length of the kitchen floor so he has to work a little bit to eat.  It slows him down so he isn’t able to bother Artemis who likes peace and quiet with her meal over behind the Lazy-Boy chair.  Winston used to wolf down the food in his dish and then loom up over Artemis until she abdicated her meal to him.  If you’re keeping up with the math, that meant Winston got two meals and Artemis didn’t get any.

Freud, on the other hand, will only eat out of a bowl, and his bowl at that.  When he was a kitten and heard kitchen noises, he came running onto the scene and bumped anyone already eating, usurping her food.  As a kitten he learned that he had a bowl and it was always in a certain place and this arrangement was inviolate.   Now that he is a grown, gobbling cat, I would like to scatter food for him like I do for Winston, but he won’t eat anything unless it’s in his bowl.  In addition, his bowl has to be on the same square foot of floor.  Once I tried to move it a few feet out so I could see it while I was teaching, the better to keep Winston from getting into it later.  Freud gave me such a look as could make the tin man grow a heart without the wizard.

“How could you betray me like this?  I do nothing but purr on your lap, chase the laser pointer in delightful ways and burrow adorably under throw rugs and afghans purely for your pleasure, and then you refuse me food.”

I moved the bowl back onto his designated square foot of kitchen floor.  He pounced on it like it was his last meal which considering my perfidy, it might have been.

Freud has a meal station and Winston has the kitchen floor, but Artemis’ nosebag is pretty much wherever I am.  When I work at the computer, there’s a dish of kibble on a nearby book shelf.  When I’m working on music, the dish is on the top of the piano, awaiting her royal highness’s pleasure.  When I’m tucked up in bed, it’s in a drawer of the nightstand.  When she comes up and nails me with her gimlet eye that could bore through cement walls, I reach for her food without turning from my work.

So that is the everyday routine around here.  Holidays on the cat calendar come every other month and are observed by The Opening of New Bags of Cat Food.  It’s a Saturnalia and a year of Jubilee compressed into five minutes.  When I buy 17 pound bags of (expensive) cat food from the Vet, I decant it into restaurant size jars with tight lids so the stuff stays fresh.   I spill rather a lot of it in the process and all three cats are on the spot to hoover up the pieces.

The celebration is usually in the back of the house where I store the jars. But we’ve been having a cold snap and I didn’t much care for the idea of hanging out back there, so the other day I brought the bag of food and the big jars into the kitchen.  When the cats heard the Rustle of The Bag, they raced out to the laundry room.

I heard them milling around in the back.

“Where is she?”

“I think she went into the kitchen.”

“You said you heard The Bag.”

“I did.”

“Where is it?”

“I think she took it with her to the kitchen.”

“But this is where it happens.”

Presently, they all tumbled into the kitchen saying, “What the hell?”

“That’s not holiday language,” I said.

The three of them stood uncertainly as I made preparations for deploying the food into jars in the kitchen.  I think Freud re-checked the laundry room to make sure food wasn’t being served back there in some alternate universe.  I got ready to pour.  I looked at Winston.

“Sing the Cat Food Carol,” I said. “Winston!”

“Weaaew.”

From left clockwise: Winston,Freud, Artemis

The subject is women’s bodies.  I had a moment the other day that would have been welcome 45 years ago, and I have been thinking about it ever since.  The prep work for the moment began as I was reading Tina Fey’s book Bossypants which was as funny and lively as I expected it to be.  In the midst of the snarky fun, she has some serious things to say to say about bodies.

For example, in a list of points on what it felt like when she was thin, she begins not with feeling sexy or being able to wear cool clothes.  She says she was cold all the time.  I don’t often hear anyone say there is a down side to being thin.

She has a section where she flat out announces that yeah, yeah we all think there’s something wrong with our bodies, and here’s a list.  I started reading through the list.  I gave the book back (thanks, Julia) or I would quote from it but if you are a woman, you already know the list: things are too big, too small, too curly, too straight; and I understand men rarely have this complaint: too long.

I thought I might need to throw up.  Though my parents long ago made Unhelpful Remarks about my body, I still carry on the tradition in ways I wish I didn’t.  As exhausting a tradition as it is to keep afloat, it’s still hard to scuttle.

That’s the background, now we’re up to the day of My Moment. I went to my Yoga for Over 50s class which I have now attended 20 times.  I know this because I am keeping my class pass cards like they were trophies.  (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/10/squadron-leader-over-50/.)I usually position myself in the front so I don’t get distracted with what other people are doing.  When we do the balancing postures, I get distracted by anyone who looks like she might fall backwards into me.

But the teacher had us turn to the side to do wide-legged forward bends which gave me, who I describe as ‘peasant stock,’ a view of everyone in the class.  Ahead of me was a large, rumply rump in black sweat pants, to its side was a slight body with hardly a bump in her white T-shirt.  Ahead of her was a large, angular body with narrow shoulders and broad hips.  That was the one.  That was the unlikely body that brought tears to my eyes.  I thought, “Majestic, dignified, beautiful.”

I looked around at all the bodies in the class.  “We’re all beautiful!”  I thought.  I looked at the rumply rump again just to test my new hypothesis.  “Yep,” I decided. “Every body in here is beautiful.”

If anything, the variety itself is just dazzling.  Why are women’s bodies the only thing in creation that aren’t generally celebrated for their variety?   Song collectors, rock hounds, horticulturalists, oenophiles, foodies, philatelists and See’s Candy all thrive on the concept of assortment.

It’s common to blame men for unrealistic, not to say inhuman standards of female beauty.  But we do it to ourselves.  We do it by envying or flaunting the ability to come close to fitting the template. We do it by rebelling or by complying rather than sinking into ourselves, befriending what we find there, and living the life we desire.

Some of us take a long time to pull out of the imitative world of adolescence, that small campus where our safety is provided either by looking like everyone else or by staking ourselves as someone who disdains to look like everyone else.  We have to go off-campus to find a home in the body that expresses who we are.

Those beautiful bodies in the Yoga for Over 50 class.  I expect everyone one of us has had some experience of humiliation around our appearance which then in turn informs who we are still becoming.  I think it’s all part of being alive and in the world.  And that’s hard to swallow because even if we look like nuts and chews, human beings all have soft centers.

New Years Day I went to church without being paid.  Usually I trade off with another pianist who I will not name because he is famously shy.  January 1st wasn’t one of my Sundays, but I had had a quiet, relaxing week after the tumble of Christmas.  I thought I would enjoy the luxury of not having to be there early to rehearse the choir, and not even having to be on time. In addition, it was Pajama Sunday.

I stopped for coffee at a drive-in and didn’t think dark thoughts about having to wait for the unorganized person ahead of me to collect his order, and spend two minutes getting his money back in his wallet or whatever he was doing.  I didn’t screech out of line and tear up the road like I often do when I imagine I will be too late to set an example for the choir who tends to wander in ten minutes late to run through the anthem.

I got to church in time for the pastor to thank God that he wasn’t the only one in pajamas.  When I have pajama week in my music studio, everyone says how much fun it is but they mostly come in street clothes and say, oops they forgot.  So I know how it feels to be the only fool in the room.  Pastor Dan was wearing dark blue satiny pajamas and moon boots.  I wore my red Scottie dog PJs and sat with Kay who was dressed in flannel leopard skins.  The three of us pretty much held down the pajama contingency since Jane came ambivalently dressed in what could double as gardening attire.

We sang one of my favorite hymns, “How Beautiful the March of Days,” and had a brief discussion about changing seasons. We were asked to name various things to which there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven, turn, turn, turn.

I said, “There’s a time to stop eating Christmas cookies.”

Kay said, “Who let her in?”

Someone introduced herself as a visitor and glad she had walked in the front door. Kay, who is one of those folks who does a lion’s share of work in a small church, looked across at the new face and murmured “Sign her up.”

That gave me the giggles. I gave them back to Kay and her partner Jerry.  The three of us made the row of seats shake.

So I can’t sit with Kay again.

Instead of the sermon, there was a “hymn sing” where we could choose the songs.  This is not the time to complain about how much I dislike what UCC has done to hymns.  Well, maybe just a little.  They’ve taken out the gruesome “blood of the lamb” images which is a good thing.  But they’ve tried to disguise the historical fact that Jesus was a man by taking out gender references.  So instead of the word he you’ve got the word Christ.  Like the word Christ is going to conjure up hermaphroditic images.  And try spitting out the word Christ on an eighth note.

In any case, wearing pajamas in church tends to blur more than standards of dress. When we got to “Go Tell it On the Mountain,” I got up and danced with Jane for a verse.  Then I danced with the new person who I found out later was a retired pastor.  Then I thought, “My god, like you need any more attention after this past month.” So I sat down.

We progressed through the service to Communion.  There’s the pastor holding up the Challah (nice touch, I like Challah; and there’s another basket of whole wheat bread in case you don’t want the eggs or sugar, UCC is so inclusive) and ceremoniously breaking the loaf in half.

Kay gets up first.  She is going to assist. Jerry takes a photo of Kay assisting.

“Is that for next year’s Christmas card?” I whisper to him.

People begin to file up the center aisle. Jane crosses the room to maneuver Mary Ann’s wheelchair to the front.  Jerry puts down his camera and assists Miriam, a fragile older woman.  My shy colleague plays a lovely melody I have never heard before.  He plays with such sweetness, I almost can’t bear it.  The sun breaks through the stained glass window, flooding the room with light and warmth.  Jane looks up, her smile is illuminated.

Sitting alone, watching people helping other people, my eyes fill with tears that run down my cheeks.  Jane is now crying, too.  I hear a sniff and look behind me to see Tom and Thea both wiping their eyes.  Sam tears up and holds out his hand to invite me into line.  It might have been a Saturday Night Live sketch which is certainly one way to go when you can’t bear the intensity.

I bore it. I loved it. I was happy to be included in this sunlit group that welcomed and helped each other up the aisle to that good-looking loaf of Challah.  I always liked that line, “Let us keep the feast.” The original idea was to keep the feast with unleavened bread which was what, purer than yeasted bread?  Please don’t any exegetes kill the magic. If you’ve read many of my blogs, you’ll know I don’t care.  I feel happy to know I started the new year with love, and as to all the old leavened crud squatting where it found a roof, I am learning to make friends with what I can’t let go of.

The Christmas cards have given way to thank you notes.  The transition is easy when one uses blank cards.  Now I am on to the subject of gifts which I described to my friend Nancy who can tell every time I have deconstructed a thought, as fraught.   Gifts can be a mine-field and I’m sure it has something to do with the trafficking of women in ancient tribal societies, but I don’t want to research this in Wikipedia or even examine this cavalier statement.  The truth is: I love gifts.  I love choosing them, wrapping them, giving them, getting them, unwrapping them, and standing them all around in a glorious glut.  I hate to ruin the moment by thinking about why that is.  I’ve read Unplug the Christmas Machine, thank you.

As a teacher, I get lots of fun things to unwrap.  A student comes in the week before Christmas, face beaming, and proprietorially hands me a wrapped gift.

“Ooh, can I open it now?”

“Sure, I want to see what it is.”

Certain traditions develop.  Genevieve of the unearthly beautiful voice, bakes something every year.  Last year it was an orange layer cake, thick with frosting; this year the most piquant gingerbread I’ve ever tasted.  For the ten years the Banobi kids were my students, I got a delivery of homemade sticky buns every Christmas Eve.  This is my second year of blackberry jam from berries handpicked on the Olympic Peninsula and cooked by Travis of the creamy baritone voice.  Max’s mother, Carla makes cards and I look forward to seeing what her imagination brings forth every year.  Michiko’s dad makes springerli, all puffy and smooth along the edges, unlike mine.

The gifts from across the pond and continent come with those little custom declarations which I find so exotic.  This year it said “confectionary.”  There’s always candy of some kind–this year it was chocolate Tiddly Penguins– in the gifts from England so that’s not exactly a surprise.  It’s the word itself.  Confectionary.  To someone who lives in the wild west, it just sounds so Dickens. (I am not going to continue in this vein because I think the reason readers of my blog who live in Germany outnumber those in England three to one is because the British don’t really care to be slobbered all over the way anglophiles will do.  Americans just say “do,” not “will do.”  Did you ever notice that?  OK, I’ll stop now.)

There’s a bitter sweetness in the confectionary this year because Mervyn, one of my British family, died last summer.  It was a completely unexpected death and a great shock to everyone.  For years Mervyn had written me long, long letters, full of news, English idioms, and stuff to savor.   In person he was just as loquacious.  He once asked me the old, old riddle, “What’s worse than finding a worm in an apple?”

I smiled patiently, “Half a worm?”

It was as if I hadn’t spoken.  “Half a worm,” he said. “You see, it’s because if you see half a worm, it’s because the other half is in the piece of apple in your mouth!”

“Yeah, I get it.”

He liked to extend his enjoyment verbally.  Much like I do.

I wish he were still here to repeat a story I’ve heard at least twice: During The War (that would be WW II) Mervyn was a boy in Cornwall, not sure how old, but old enough to play in the road with the other children.  When the Americans went over in 1942, the word got round that when their vehicles came through the village the men threw candy.

“Candy,” Mervyn relished the word fifty years later. “We wondered what this candy was.  We were so excited to see the candy.  But when the Americans came and threw us candy, we were so disappointed.  ‘It’s just sweets,’ we said.”

So gifts can be fraught.  In this dark time of year, we get frantic with the activities, the gifts, and the food because the dark is such a reminder that life can be fraught. Our lives are finite and will one day go dark.  Traditions end. This year I’ve missed getting my long chatty Christmas letter from Mervyn.  He was a sweet man.

I sealed up the last Christmas card this afternoon to be delivered at tonight’s Lessons and Carols service which begins an hour past my bed-time.  I voted against this schedule because not only do I have to be there, I have to be alert.  I direct the choir for one song and I play the organ on all the noisy carols. I need to not fall asleep and trod on the pedals in the middle of the readings. But I digress.

I love the idea of Christmas cards, at least in theory.  It isn’t de rigueur for my generation.  When I was growing up my mother commandeered half the dining room table for her Christmas card operation.  For a month and a half we ate off TV trays and listened to how onerous it all was.

My mother always sent religious cards.  Once she sent me out to buy a Christmas card for my teacher and I came back with one that referenced Tom and Jerry which I thought were cartoon mice.  She wouldn’t let it out of the house because a Tom and Jerry is *alcohol.* I found that card 50 years later in my mother’s estate.  There it was all unused and looking like the 1950’s.  I gave it this year to Nina (rhymes with Dinah).

My mother disapproved of Christmas cards made of family photos.  Christmas was about Jesus.  It was conceited to put your family on a Christmas card.  She also disapproved of family newsletters; they were impersonal.  This was before Xerox when you had to have your letters printed at a print shop at great expense so there was that –the expense–as well.  She always wrote little notes in her cards.

Now people do e-cards.  Or no card.  But there’s a world of Christmas card senders: a little community, like the Facebook community.  If you like Facebook, you enjoy the world of other people who like Facebook and connect with everyone else some other way.  If you like to exchange Christmas cards, you have your Christmas card list and a roll of stamps.

When I say I like Christmas cards in theory, it’s because I always start out with great ambitions.  The day after Thanksgiving I make a long list of everyone I would send a card to if there were world enough and time. I put the list under the stack of everything that I know will realistically take precedence over writing cards.

When I finally get to the cards in mid December, the first thing I do is cross off half the names.  At least.  Good, that’s done.  Then I divide the list into my first tier people and my second tier people.  The first tier includes the aforementioned little community of avid Christmas card senders.  I usually manage to send those cards.   I send a card made from my newest watercolor to all the regulars who got last year’s watercolor card.  To new people who have recently entered my Christmas card community, I send “Artemis Among the Packages,” because everyone seems to like it, including me.

Like my mother, I prefer to write a little note, even if it is the same note written over and over.  By the time I have done a half a dozen cards, I have usually hit on a clever and succinct paragraph or two which I don’t mind writing 25 more times.  Sometimes if I am still writing Christmas cards in January, I turn them into New Years cards or thank you notes for cards or gifts that got to me on time.

I save my favorite cards.  They go through a rigorous screening and are subject to an annual review.  Here are some that have made the cut for the last 25 years:

First of all, a whole caroling village of pop-up cards from my British family.

A card from a college friend and fellow English major pictures a snowman smiling and smoking a pipe; and reads:

The trees are lovely, tall and svelte,

But I have snow beneath my belt,

And weeks to go before I melt,

And weeks to go before I melt.

Another is a Glen Baxter cartoon featuring a family bundled into an open air roadster.  One member is tossing the head of the driver out the back.  The caption reads: “The holiday began with another petty family squabble.”

And finally there is a Christmas table with a centerpiece made of olives.  A Botticellian looking toddler wears an olive on each fingertip.  Inside the card it says: “The Christ Child at the Olive Platter.”

One friend sends me the same card every year.  She bought a box of cards at Bartells some years ago, and has been slowly depleting her supply long enough for me to have caught on.   Considering what an ordeal it was to choose the cards in the first place, I think she has found quite a sensible routine for sending them.  We all make these decisions in our own way. Nothing is de rigueur.

In that spirit, I wish to say that it’s Christmas Eve in my corner of the world which is turning and tilting toward the light.  Whatever your beliefs and traditions, may we all know we are loved!

Artemis Among the Packages