There was an exquisite moment in church this morning.  The service was laboring toward a moment of silence.  The service leader was intoning, “Something, something, something.  .  .  that holy quiet.  .  .”

At the next in-breath, Lu upset her box of crayons all over the floor.  It sounded like a burst of hail beating against the sides of the sanctuary.  Necks rotated unapologetically, and chuckles burbled up.  This is a church where you can laugh out loud.  Everyone got clearance for a better inhalation.

The silence, when we finally settled down, was followed by the Lord’s Prayer during which Lu who had just finished gathering up her crayons, dropped them all over again.  This time they rolled around under the pews forever and forever in their glory until the “Amen.”

When I was a child in church, I prayed for moments like these.  Getting the unstoppable giggles in church was a gift from God.  Today as I sat there at the piano awaiting my cues, I was visited with a flood of associations.

At another church job—the one I was fired from because I didn’t close my eyes for prayer—there were awful “children’s sermons.” The children sat in the front of the sanctuary in a circle and pastor talked down to them, manipulating them into cute responses.  Then they left to play fiery furnace or crucifixion or whatever they did in the bowels of the church.

The children’s sermon was especially sappy one Valentine’s Day.  There was a lot of gush about love and Jesus, ending with the question, “And who wants to be your valentine?”  One straightforward young man stuck his finger down his throat and made a retching noise.  I was the only person in the hall who burst out laughing.

In a similar vein was something that happened at meeting of a “spirituality group” I was part of.   There’s a problem right there: a group that characterizes itself as “spiritual.”  Actually it had a pretentious name, Clas Myrddin, but no one used it except the man who conceived of it.  The group was made up of some people who were hoping to by-pass all the difficult feelings and situations of life by being spiritual.  Others of us (me, for example) thought we knew exactly what it meant to “be spiritual” and how to run a “spirituality” group.  The two of us who knew from spiritual were continually butting heads.  Everyone in the group was pissed off at either one or the other of us.

One night in my home, we all prepared to meditate.  Some of the group wanted to try it, some didn’t, some worried that they didn’t know how, some were suspicious that the rest of the group wouldn’t be doing it right and so on. But there we were, fifteen human beings sitting in a circle, getting quiet, trying to be “spiritual.”

My cat, Edith, came into the room, gave us all the once-over, stalked dead center into the middle of the circle and histrionically vomited.  This was also a group where one could laugh and we did.  But we were not sufficiently spiritual to recognize a numinous visitation when the numen up-chucked in front of us.

In 1971, Albert Cullum wrote, The Geranium on the Windowsill Just Died, but Teacher You Went Right On, a book that I am glad to report would not be so radical today as it was then.  The title says it all, not just for teaching but for our lives. Sometimes we get so intent on what we think needs to happen that we miss just about everything.

The late columnist Molly Ivins, said that being Canadian must feel like living next door to the Simpsons.  A lot of people have made this exact observation.  Case in point: our propensity for turning our front lawns into Hooterville and putting up for sale our private possessions is perhaps out-slummed by the phenomenon of the Free Pile.   (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/05/selling-the-vibrator/)

The Free Pile is where everything goes that hasn’t sold in a yard sale, hasn’t yet been picked up by a donation agency, and which you don’t have the energy to load into your car and take to a repository.  There was such a pile outside my house beginning on Friday afternoon.

It started with the Diamondback elliptical and its power cord.  I used the elliptical for years until I got tendonitis from pumping away for too long with my head angled unnaturally toward the television because I couldn’t stop watching the Gilmore Girls.  By the time I moved the TV to straight in front of me, the damage was done.   I couldn’t find another series I liked well enough to induce me to that amount of exercise.

An entertainment center was next.  Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, gave this to me along with her giant TV when she bought her first flat screen.  Gwen has so much more class than I do: she gives things to her friends.

“Sorry, Gwen,” I said (I wasn’t) when she noticed it on the street.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s traveling.”

I put out three boxes of stuff including a jar missing its lid, 5 new blank cassette tapes, a bath pillow, a plastic desk blotter, a large yellow plastic designer flower, 4 plastic iced tea glasses, one of them dis-colored; an empty Avon “Here’s my Heart” cream sachet jar, a packet of bamboo torch wicks, 2 eye droppers, 2 car jacks, a mouse pad, piles of T-shirts and towels, a cotton bathroom rug, a plastic faux-old wall sconce.

I had plans to take some electronics to a recycling event but these items made a pit stop at the Free Pile outside my house: an old computer monitor, keyboard, printer and speakers; also a portable oven that called itself convection because it had a fan.  It had belonged to my parents; I used it in the summer when I didn’t want to heat up the house.  I’d run it outside with an extension cord and cook fish.  But since we are never again having summer in Seattle, I thought it was time to dispose of this relic.

Besides, Gwen who is both classy and generous has left with me –on permanent loan—a Coleman grill.  She and I have started not a few fires in it when we’ve attempted to barbeque.  It’s also where we roasted the Peeps one April Fool’s Day. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/05/peeps-in-performance/).

Matt, my yard guy, posed a 4-foot high stuffed Santa Claus on the elliptical. During this operation, his cell phone slipped out of his pocket.  He was hunting for it when a bicyclist stopped to inspect the loot.  He called Matt’s number and they located his phone.  The bicyclist rode off with a towel.  I heard all this from where I sat at my computer.  It gave me the idea for this blog.

A young man knocked on the door to ask me if there was a power cord to the elliptical because if there was, he would take them both.  I searched through the stuff, now strewn all over the side yard.  Someone had taken the power cord to the elliptical!  It was still usable but you couldn’t vary the speed or keep track of your progress.  The only speed I was interested in was how fast I got through the Gilmore Girls episodes, but I understand that everyone isn’t like me.

I found the lid to the glass jar so I retrieved the jar. Then I took back the Avon “Here’s My Heart” cream sachet jar.

Some kids stopped to pose with the Santa Claus, taking pictures of each other on their phones.  They left the Santa working out on the elliptical.

A man with a lovely conscience was hesitant to take the T-shirts because he was going to use them for rags and someone else might need them for clothes.

“Take anything you want for any reason at all,” I noblesse obliged him.

Someone took the dis-colored iced tea glass.  The blank cassettes went one by one.  A walker took the plastic flower.  All the electrical and computer bits except the monitor disappeared. Someone took the elliptical!

I began coming home from a different direction so I could observe the progress.  I usually come via 87^th street so my car is pointed north on the parking strip.  Otherwise when it rains, I have a lake to negotiate to get into the driver’s seat.  I started driving home via 88^th because it slowly unveiled what was left of the Free Pile. It was like Christmas in reverse: instead of amassing a pile of junk, I watched it recede.

Further drama was introduced by the threat of rain which was forecasted for Tuesday, then pushed to Wednesday.  Then it doubled-back.  I covered what was left of the pile in plastic just before the first drops came.  At this writing, there is still the computer monitor, the entertainment center and three iced-tea glasses.  I have great faith in the American public that before long my only souvenir of the Free Pile will be the fact that I still have that tendonitis.

I do wish car manufacturers would stop coming up with automobile names from mythology.  It’s disturbing to those of us who are sensitive to other dimensions and Simple Green All-Purpose products.

“Would you buy a car called Saturn?” I asked an astrologer friend of mine.

“Never!” Just the thought of it provoked her to do an energy clearance whoosh.

Saturn is the planet where everything goes wrong.  I believe that when General Motors first launched the Saturn, it was full of quirks and cantankerous parts.  On the other hand, if you work through Saturn energy—and we all have it– over the course of a lifetime, you can look forward to a peaceful old age.  It’s not the most appealing advertising campaign for a car, but it’s useful advice for a human being.

Then there’s the Ford Scorpio.  A Scorpionic car would hover suspiciously in the shadows, taking back streets and side alleys, obsessed with its own inner workings.  Its advertising slogan would be “Afraid of the Open Road!”

The Dodge Aries is an interesting juxtaposition of images because Aries energy doesn’t dodge anything.  It just tanks over whatever is in its way.   Driving is dangerous enough without cars that confuse the archetypal forces.

The Leo.  No, wait.  It’s Geo. Never mind.

Jowett Cars Ltd. made a Jupiter sports car.  I don’t know anything about cars—I am only writing this because since I don’t own an i-pod, I notice parked cars when I walk in the neighborhood—but sports cars are small, no?  Jupiter is a gaseous, bombastic energy.  Whereas Aries charges over whatever is in its way, Jupiter merely expands until it has obliterated what was there before.  That doesn’t sound like a sports car.

Mercury is a good name for a car, but I would expect a car called Mercury to be fast and zippy which I don’t believe the Ford Mercury is.  Mercury is the Roman name of the Greek god Hermes.  Quick, lithe, and tricky, he travelled in and out of the underworld, shape-shifted, and made mischief.  He was a fast talker.  He’d make a good sports car or car salesman.

Taurus suggests something that is well-crafted and reliable.  The Toyota Corolla of many years ago could have been called Taurus and brought verisimilitude to its archetype.  I don’t know if Ford Tauruses are particularly reliable.  Forgive me for repeating the obvious: I don’t know anything about cars.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, knows quite a lot about cars.  Once while dining, my guests and I watched her replace a transmission in her, I don’t know, Porsche, in her side yard.  My guests knew enough to refer to it as a “tranny.”   Gwen tells me that I could not have seen a Jowett Jupiter while walking in the neighborhood.  They haven’t been made for years and if someone actually had one, it would hardly be left out on the street.  She accused me of researching cars on the Internet.  Busted.

I do know that cars carry us and our stuff around.  Words do much the same thing.  Meanings and usage change as our world changes and as more and more students graduate from high school without knowing how to write a sentence.  Then again, what I think is the bastardization of our language could be Mercury at work.

I grew up with a religious education that pretty much killed religion for me so of course, I ended up being a church musician.  I fought against it and actually got fired from a church job once because I didn’t have the outward behavior they expected of staff.  One of the many complaints against me was that I had my eyes open during prayer.

There were years when I never expected to enter a church again.  But it’s difficult making a living as a musician if you don’t teach or if you turn down church jobs.  As it turned out, I loved teaching and much to my surprise, I found a home for myself in a liberal Protestant church, so liberal that I actually miss some of the gruesome hymn texts because at least they scanned.

I don’t believe we can expunge anything from our pasts.  We have to come to terms with all our experiences.  But patterns can be unraveled and knit into something new.  It’s important for me to keep track of the original threads.  At least that’s what I sometimes tell myself in the middle of a church sermon.

I have learned to translate a lot of what I hear in church services into a language that has more meaning for me.  When I hear something particularly fundamentalist, I –and people who know me well can attest to what an achievement this is—am able to smile and nod and think to myself, “Don’t get excited, they are expressing their own experience of the divine.”

The divine.  What a frightening concept this is for us.  Uncontrollable, unruly, roaming, surprising.  It makes sense that there’s been an attempt to funnel it into one person—not even a Being, but a person more or less as small as we all are, and usually male—and make “him” be “out there.”

The Force, The Universe, Great Spirit –these are worthy attempts at expressing the ineffable.   Cultures that have many gods and goddesses understand that to claim only one god is an invitation for shrinkage.   But in Protestant Christianity, there is only one God.  “He”–or as the gender neutral hymnbooks try to cram into one beat “He, She, Father, Mother” is “out there.”

This past Sunday in the church service, I played a hymn while everyone sang “God, my God, why do you feel so far from me?  I then sat down with Marvin the Magnificent and fed him Paul Newman organic dog treats, peanut butter flavor.  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/04/choir-dogs/

The minister said something about what to do when you feel that God is far away: Pray. Meditate. Read the Bible. All the usual. “Don’t get excited,” I thought. “She is speaking from her own experience of the divine.”  I fed Marvin another biscuit.

I never hear it suggested that we consult our own desires.  This is what I believe we do anyway.  Protestant theology distances itself from desire by calling it “the will of God.”  I will say about desire what I said earlier about the divine: What a frightening concept this is for us.  Uncontrollable, unruly, roaming, surprising.

What might happen if we all were able to say, “This is what I want.  This is my passion?”  For one thing, there would be a lot fewer people sneaking around getting what they wanted covertly.  There would be a lot less judgment about what other people were doing and why.  And there would be no moral high ground, that fictional piece of real estate that no one has actually seen, let alone inhabited.

No one knows what it feels like to be me.  I only approximate understanding what it feels like to be you.  All we have to go on are the hints and guesses we give each other, and the assumptions we make.  “The kingdom of God is within you.”  I believe the divine is a huge unknowable energy that we can only apprehend by our desire.  That so many religious people want to call it God makes it no less human. That we feel it intensely inside ourselves makes it no less divine.

I don’t suppose we can agree that our desire is divine, cut out the middlemen, and call it a day.

The annual Greenwood Garage Sale day was this past Saturday.  I didn’t get to see much of it because I participated in a Garden Mart sale –all things for (or from) the garden—at Broadview Church.  I got together some garden-themed gifts (probably purchased at past yard sales), my watercolor cards (some of which are of gardens), and the last of my raspberry liqueur (the bottles that didn’t sell at the Dibble House Christmas Sale).  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/11/bazaar-and-beautiful/

I dug up some hollyhock and Canterbury bells, and potted some of my Peruvian scillas.  My neighbors helped me load the car and I took off, stopping at the rummage sale at Christ the King Church on the way.  I thought about selling my rummage sale purchases at the Garden Mart but I love Pre de Provence soap.

So yes, I am somewhat of a Yard Sale junkie.  When my British cousins were here, I pointed out a few yard sales as we were on our way to Snoqualmie Falls.  I thought they would be interested but I think they actually looked the other way, as though I had suggested they watch someone use the toilet.  The British have their Jumble Sales and their Bring and Buy sales so I don’t know what my cousins found so distasteful.  It could be that displaying one’s private possessions on their front lawn is carrying it a bit too far.  At the Jumble Sales in small parishes or villages, everyone knows who brought what, but they pretend not to.  That can hardly be the case when the lady of the house is haggling over the price of her own underwear.

I, myself, have held annual yards sales since 1986.  I have managed to have enough merchandise by virtue of having a lot of storage space and by having parents who were pack-rats.  They’ve both been gone for years, but I still have some of the residual from the 2008 Shock and Awe estate sale of their house.

My original yard sale took place because of a little girl named Jessie, who was a shooting star that flashed across my sky every summer for five years.  She had been my little companion when I lived in France, a four year old blonde child with big blue eyes, delicate features and the spirit of a little imp.  She was nine the first summer she stayed with me in Seattle.   I was used to kids but I only had them for a half hour at a time.  Having one for 24 hours a day was a new experience for me.

That first visit, I tried to out-fun her.  Big mistake as any parent could have told me.  Yard sales were something we both enjoyed, and since Jessie had worn me out with going to sales on her first visit, when she came the second summer it was with the understanding that we would hold a sale of our own. The beauty of this arrangement was that there was a lot of sitting down time once we had hauled everything out, and that counted for me as time to rest.

Jessie brought an extra suitcase of stuff to sell.  The next year, she bought a box and a suitcase of already priced items for the second annual sale.  The third year, one of my piano students, Maddy, came with her mother, Joanie, to help with the sale.

That was the year I sold the vibrator.

I don’t need to recount how said vibrator came into my possession.  It vibrated fine.  It just wasn’t big enough for the requirements of the person who purchased it.  So there it stood, tall and phallic, amongst the tumblers, the purple feather boa, and the game of Boggle.

When I was eleven, I wouldn’t have known a vibrator from an electric drill but the girls crowded around it, giggling.  They christened it the “Happy Finger.”  Its life trajectory became the great speculation of the morning.  Every time someone picked it up, both girls were stuck dumb.

Around noon and buzzing like a couple of human vibrators themselves, they rushed over to where Joanie and I were chatting.

“Look,” Matty whispered. “That old guy is looking at the happy finger.”

“Do you think he knows what it is?” Jessie asked.

“Oh, I expect he does,” I said.

“Eww,” they said.

They watched in fascinated silence until the man who was perhaps in his 70’s, stood the vibrator back on the table, and moved on.

Thirsty and hungry after this spasm of excitement, the girls went off to the now de-funct Art’s Food Center on Holman Road to buy snacks and sodas.  A few minutes later, the old gentlemen paid me five dollars for the vibrator and walked with slow dignity to his car.

When the girls returned from Arts and reeking of grape soda, the first thing they noticed was the absence of the vibrator.

“Someone bought the happy finger?!!”

“Who was it?  When did it sell?”

“It was that man,” I said. “He bought it after you left.”

“The old guy?” they shrieked.  “What’s he gonna do with it?”

“Maybe he’s got a young wife that he wants to keep happy,” said Joanie.

“Ewww,” they chorused, making gagging gestures in case their point wasn’t clear.

This is only one of the things I enjoy about yard sales:  there is so much more on display than the stuff people want to get rid of.  There is more human drama amongst the crime fiction and cracked china than can be dreamt of in any other philosophy.

This blog is not for the squeamish:

Recently Freud, the cat, got into some kind of altercation with his analysand across the alley.  It may be time to terminate their professional relationship as it seems to have taken a new direction. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/09/the-post-freudian-cat/)

In any case, Freud came in with a bump the size of a filbert on his left cheek.  By evening, the bump had become so enlarged it looked like he was growing a second head.  I traced a streak of blood to its source: a pinhole of a puncture wound.   I wrestled him down and treated the area with alcohol and Neosporin.

Freud leaped out of my hold, raced twice around the house, and ended up at his dish, demanding food.  In other words, he wasn’t about to let two heads slow him or his appetite down.

I have been through so many puncture wound scares that even a two-headed cat makes me only slightly uneasy.   How many times have I said: “OK, if it’s not any better by Friday (Saturday, Monday), I’ll take him to the vet”?  How many times has the vet said, “It doesn’t look infected.  Just keep it dry.  That’ll be $60 ($80, $95)”?

By the next day, there was a bump the size of a chestnut but just the one head.  For the next week the fur on the left side of Freud’s face was wet and matted and Winston was continually licking it.  Finally the fur looked dry and normal, the bump was the size of a sunflower seed and Winston had to find some other interesting discharge to lick.

Freud’s prodigious drainage reminded me of a time Winston got an abscess on his forehead –also from a puncture wound.  It appeared like the beginnings of a unicorn horn.  When I pushed on it, something alive appeared to move inside the bump.  I put a warm, damp towel on it for as long as Winston would let me.  A great gush of foul-smelling pus poured out like an underground spring come unblocked.  “Winston of the Spring.”  It came in rolling waves.  While I’d have liked to pass out from the stench, Artemis went for it like a gourmand.  She licked it for days and kept it clean and dry.

Here’s another odor anecdote:   I came home to find a storm of bird feathers settled all over the entrance to the front room.  Now this is far more unpleasant than popping cat zits.  I especially don’t like finding little bird feet and other spare parts among the feathers.  But it’s even worse when I don’t find them at all which was the case on this occasion.  All I found were feathers.  A day passed.  I looked everywhere.  I vacuumed everywhere.

Just when I stopped thinking about it, I began to smell something funky.  Tracing the odor to its source, I found under the wood stove, a festive pile of cat puke, festooned with bits of fur and grass.  Perched on top, at a jaunty angle like a bizarro Martha Stewart project, sat a whole and complete bird head.

I decided this was Freud’s doing, judging by the pitiful look that had been on his face for the previous 24 hours.  Otherwise I would have bet on Winston who will eat anything.  When he was still a small kitten, Winston threw up an entire shoelace, complete with the aglets on the tips. (I won’t tell you how I discovered he loves the taste of human ear wax.)

I picked up the puke cupcake with gloves and two thicknesses of plastic bag without actually looking at it. This is also how I deal with dead rats if my neighbor isn’t home. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/08/rodent-incident-report-1/) (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/08/rodent-incident-report-2/)

I would rather explode pockets of putrid cat pus any day than cope with rodents of any size, dead or alive.  Now that’s love.

Snow Day, watercolor by Elena Louise Richmond. Clockwise from back: Winston, Artemis, Freud

There was a regular rodeo at the OK Chorale last week when a TV crew filmed a rehearsal.  Joe Fryer from King-TV and I had been in negotiations for a week about a story on the Chorale.  A week ago Tuesday he asked if they could film us the next day. Up until then I hadn’t given any dates to the Chorale; I didn’t want them to waste their makeovers.  Now I had to act fast so they would at least wash their hair that morning.

I sent an email: “If you are in the witness protection program or are calling in sick, you’d best wear a wig because you may be on TV tonight.”  That was my little joke and I was proud of it.  No one responded.  Usually I get some wisecrack response especially when I have gone to the trouble to be funny.

“Damn,” I thought.  “A wasted piece of clever-ness.”

I sent the e-mail again.  Still no response.   After the third time I got a few laconic replies informing me they now had 3 e-mails from me sitting in their in-box.

“Oh great,” I thought. “Now they’ll think I’m excited about this.”  I wanted to be cool.

I was anything but cool.  None of us were.  That’s part of our charm.  I asked Nina (rhymes with Dinah) if she wanted to come early to chauffeur me to the rehearsal because Joe wanted to do interviews.

“You bet!” she said. “I want to be a TV star!”

The TV piece begins with Mari Huff, a ten year old piano student of mine.   If you watch the video at the end of this blog, her piano playing opens the piece and she was thrilled about that.   I wish we had seen more of her face in the final edit, however her graceful fingers are lovely to watch.  There’s value in those old Edna Mae Burnham Dozen a Day books still.

The OK Chorale rehearsal happened to be one of our quarterly potluck-rehearsals. We were at the home of Gail (alto) of the Boar’s Head fame: https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/12/a-boars-head-in-the-hand/.   I think the potlucks help people feel more comfortable with each other and thus they sing better.  Also, I get a chance to do more than ask the sopranos to stop talking, ignore the altos because they rarely make a fuss, suck up to the basses because we could use more of them, and try to hide my terror of the tenors.

The Chorale really puts out for the potlucks, even mid-week.  Gail had roasted a turkey and we all brought side dishes.  It was like Thanksgiving only without the annoying relatives.  Eileen (tenor) of Juramento fame (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/03/makin-time-with-the-ok-chorale/ brought a corn pudding to die for and Don (bass) made two strawberry pies.

Jeff Christian, the cameraman, had a huge contraption—like a Sony on steroids with a goiter –hoisted on one shoulder.  He leapt around the room like a kangaroo, shooting from all angles, even from outside the house; shooting the food, the rehearsal, the music, my fingers on the keys.  The camera came right into our faces for interviews with Jim (bass), Nina (soprano), Gail (alto), Maxine (alto) and me (Squadron Leader).

A week later, last Tuesday night, the story aired.  All evening long, I got bulletins from friends that The OK Chorale was the teaser for the early news and for Oprah.  Mari, my piano student, stayed up until 10:00 to see it live.  I didn’t see it until the following morning on the web.  It was lovely, a beautiful job of editing and of capturing the character of The OK Chorale.  And they pronounced my name correctly!

The Chorale met last night for a regular rehearsal.  I thought we would all be flying high but we were a little subdued.   Hal (tenor) wasn’t there so that explains some of it.   It sounded like Nina and Gail practically got assemblies called at their schools to show the TV clip so they were exhausted from their turn as celebrities.

I didn’t need to inform anyone that a blog was in process but I wanted them to do something memorable to help me finish it.  There were some funny moments last night but you had to be there to get them.  Mostly we just worked hard at the music.

We cleared up the mystery of where to go for the repeat and the 2^nd ending of “The Theme from Peter Gunn,” and the tenors discovered that there was a page six that they did not remember singing in the previous rehearsals.  That’s the sort of thing a choir director loves to hear mid-quarter.

This is what it’s like being TV stars.  There are the rushes of excitement and then it’s back to work.  You can see us right here; after you click play, you have to wait just a bit:

Every few months, my adult students get together for the Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicales.  These could easily last all day what with my more confident students wanting to pull out another and another piece.  “And now for my fourteenth song.  .  . .

I schedule the recitals for my young students around holidays so we have an anxiety-reducing theme.  The Sunday before Halloween, anyone can come in a costume.  For years, I ran a Spook House in conjunction with the Halloween recital.  It was so much work that sometimes I couldn’t face taking it down until April.  It turned out that everyone was just as happy with a chocolate fountain, although the clean-up from that sometimes lasts until April when I am still finding streaks of chocolate on the walls.

The April Fools recital with its attendant jokes and tricks is always fun. But I still had to stop and think what she was referring to when I asked Michiko if she wanted to play in the May Day recital and she asked,

“Is this the one where we roast the Peeps?”

Now there’s a question for a deconstructionist.

After one Aprils Fool’s recital, I had a little campfire going in my yard.  I had cut sticks for roasting but instead of Kraft’s white marshmallows, we impaled marshmallow Peeps and watched their little faces crumple and melt.

We did not roast Peeps at this past May Day recital.  I lobbied for a May Day theme— Green Men and Queens of the May– but no one got excited about it.  I was counting on something wacky happening so I could write a blog about it, but it was a quiet, intimate affair.  Something quirky usually happens, like the time Bar-Chord Judy acquired her nickname.

Judy had a knack for playing camp songs on her guitar and getting people to sing along.  She had launched into a song when a bar chord came up.  Standing at an uncomfortable angle rather than sitting, she lunged for the bar chord, but her fingers didn’t get there in time.  She stopped and announced, “There’s a bar chord there,” and carried on.  Or tried to.  The room exploded with laughter.

“A bar chord is really just a big fuck-you,” she said.

Then there was the time “Tim’s” girlfriend wasn’t able to attend the recital but sent flowers with instructions for them to be delivered when her man sang.  At first appearance Tim seemed a gruff old guy, but after years of working with him, I found him to be softhearted and sweet on the inside.

When he stood up to sing “Misty,” he said, “I was going to dedicate this song to my girlfriend, but we aren’t together anymore.”

Enter the flowers and an awkward silence.

Tim was struck dumb, standing there with the flowers and his music.   He read the “care instructions” out loud.  That got a laugh, and bought us all time, but did none of us any good.  My mind had gone into lockdown.

“Tim, are you sure you aren’t still together?”  I asked him in a low voice.  I got weekly bulletins about his girlfriend at Tim’s lesson.  They had been together five days previously.

“I broke up with her last week,” he finally announced to the audience.  Because something more seemed to be called for, and because the feelings were apparently still raw, he added, “She shouldn’t have hacked at my rhododendrons!”

Tim said he’d rather sing later, after he recovered himself.  As he sat down, a new student, visiting for the first time, leaned over to her neighbor and whispered– except that we all heard– “Does this sort of thing happen every time?”

Something happens, but not usually something so bursting with human interest.

I said nothing wacky happened on May Day but something important happened. Nina –rhymes with Dinah (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/01/dining-with-nina/) had made it her project to memorize the songs she sings for recitals.

As she put it, “You can’t really sing it until it’s memorized.”

She’s right.  You interact differently with the words and the tones when you are free of the written music.

Nina didn’t bring her music or cheat sheet for “Weep, You No More, Sad Fountains” and “Blue Bayou.”  She came vocally naked, as it were.  I played the introduction; she forgot the first word of the piece.  I fed her the line and we started over.  Every so often, she stopped and thought for an extra beat.  A few times, she looked at me and I prompted her.

She wasn’t nervous.  She was comfortable in her own skin, going about her life.  She sang from memory.  Problems presented themselves which she solved without signaling that she thought she had “messed up.”

Performing is like Life: we go along, things come up and we make decisions. We do what we do when we’re alone–except that people are watching.  The performer’s comfort with whatever happens is what makes for a compelling performance.  We start with being comfortable with forgetting the words or with missing the bar chord.  We start where we are.   We can’t wait until we’re perfect to start being at home with ourselves.

Here’s a cheap trick: I’ve learned that traffic on my blog shoots up when I have a titillating title.   Now you’re here, you might as well hear what I have to say about Sigmund Freud because his birthday was May 6, 1856.  He no longer has that much to do with the way analysis is practiced today.  It’s just that he started it.  He was a courageous and original thinker.  He named and characterized the unconscious.  He was the first person to analyze anyone and he, himself, was the first person he analyzed.  This is how psycho-therapy, as we know it today, started.

Psycho-analysis is a vexed subject.  The image of a stern Freud smoking his cigar behind a patient who is lying on a couch with dream balloons over her head is an out-dated joke, like Aunt Maud singing “O Promise Me” at a wedding.  If you read Freud’s letters or the stories of people who were analyzed by him, he comes across as a kind, warm man and a loving, attentive father.

But analysis has come a long way since Freud, just like the theory of evolution has traveled since Darwin.

Here’s W.H. Auden: “In Memory of Sigmund Freud:

“.  .  . if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

to us he is no more a person

now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:

Like weather he can only hinder or help .  .  .”

Freud’s ideas have so permeated Western thinking that no one is free of them.   Not even those who think a joke like the following both sums him up and dismisses him completely: “A Freudian slip is when you say one thing and mean your mother.”

Psycho-analysis and psycho-analytic therapy have been declared dead over and over. Studies come out periodically that say it “doesn’t work.”  Within the field itself, there are schools of thought, factions, and in-fighting just like in religion –Freud would love that comparison.  People can get quite fierce about their patches.

An exchange from a Law and Order Criminal Intent episode goes like this:

“You know why battles in academia are so vicious?”

“Because the stakes are so low.”

The analysis that I went through was called “relational.”  There are schools which say that if you use the word relational at all, it’s not analysis.  Winning that debate is a low stake.

The word psycho-analysis makes it sound as though the process is sterile and scientific but it’s quite the opposite.  It’s one of the most intuitive modalities out there.  There is a mysterious exchange of unconscious thought and energies that goes on.  When I was going four times a week, those four days were like inhabiting a long poem; they were a stream I floated in with four conversations at 24 hour intervals.

After years in that stream of images and associations, en-livened by a good fight or two, came the punch-line of the joke, the last lines of a sonnet, the sigh at the end of an aria.  My life had a form like a song that could be sung over and over but was different every time.  That’s what it feels like to be me. That’s what it feels like to be alive.

You know who psycho-analysis “works” for?  The people for whom it works.  And those are the people who get to decide what it means that it “works.”

My style as a teacher was psycho-analytic before I understood what the word meant.  And my teaching has always been about the relationship.  I think our most cherished learning takes place in the context of close relationships with other people.   I think of my students’ minds as maps showing places I haven’t been, with tentative new roads we will attempt to travel together.  I know enough about the general terrain to get us started, but the student unfolds his own map.

So there’s vulnerability on both our parts.  My student is nervous because maybe he’s a little kid and this is a new experience.  Or maybe she’s an adult who wants to sing but is terrified of the feeling of exposure that comes with singing.  Or maybe he is a busy man who hasn’t practiced and suddenly feels ashamed like a kid who hasn’t done his homework.

I feel vulnerable because for all my expertise, I don’t know this particular person beside me who wants me to teach him what he wants to learn.  I am not in his mind.  I don’t know what circuitous route he needs to take to learn piano or to find his voice.   I need him to trust me enough to give me hints so I can help him find his way.

I am often told that as a teacher, I am “too easy.”  I used to be called “wishy-washy” which sounds even worse.  I laugh about it sometimes, mostly with like-minded teachers.  Initially it would be a whole lot easier for my students if I just told them what to do.  But I have too much respect for them.  It’s their life, not mine.

It’s the hardest thing in the world to sift through all the shoulds and oughts, all the cultural messages, and all the thoughtless advice, to find what it is we most want for ourselves.  And then there’s the courage it takes to face the sadness of realizing that it’s too late for some things;  and to assess what is realizable now, given our arthritic joints, our menopausal status, our dead parents, our CRS (Can’t Remember Shit) .

I believe that as long as we are taking in air, we have the capacity to experience our own lives.  We’ve never had less than that and we’ll never have more.

Mai La was 18 years old when she got off the plane at SeaTac wearing her little Chinese pajamas.  I was 27 and waiting with Nghiep, a Chinese friend, and a photograph of Mai, courtesy of World Relief Refugee Services.

It was 1981.  The “boat people” from Viet Nam were flooding the U.S. west coast. Resettlement was a huge problem that wasn’t handled well.  Large families were dumped into small apartments and left to figure out the city, language, buses, schools, medical services, and DSHS with very little help.  I was living in a house in the U District with three other women.  I had the largest room; there was plenty of room for another bed and chest of drawers.

I told World Relief that I wanted to sponsor a single woman or a single woman with a baby.  They told me that single refugee women never happened.  Whole families came over together.  I filled out the form requesting a single woman anyway.

“It won’t happen,” they said.

“Ok,” I said.

Three months later, there was Mai.  During the ages that American girls are going to proms and applying to colleges, Mai escaped from Saigon and spent a year and a half in a resettlement camp in Malaysia.

Nghiep spoke Mandarin and Mai spoke Cantonese, but they managed to communicate in Vietnamese.  Nghiep made us dinner at his house.  I listened to them talk.  I hoped he was allaying some of her fears because she had a little worry- pucker between her eyebrows.

It was dark when Mai and I drove along Lake Washington Blvd and through the arboretum on the way to her new home.  She finally spoke to me.

She said in slow, careful English, “What is your name?”

Mai and I shared a room for a year.  Then I moved into the small bedroom in the back of the house and she had the big room all to herself for another year.  She finished high school at Roosevelt High and found a job removing pimples and wrinkles from face portraits at Yuen Lui photography studio.  She got married and had a baby, Tara.

One by one Mai sponsored two brothers and a sister to Seattle; they got married, and had children.   We all get together for Dim Sum at Chinese New Year, for some kind of outing in the summer, and for Christmas.  I showed them how to do a bloated American Christmas and regretted it.  We all just about smothered ourselves in the wrapping paper.  When she grew up, it was Tara who put a stop to the gifts and we were all relieved to just get together for dinner.  I still slip a gift to Mai.

The Chinese aren’t so big on individual birthdays but every March 31^st, I send flowers to Mai for her “second birthday.”  Her first birthday is February 22nd.  I can’t remember if this discrepancy came about because there were some mistakes on her immigration papers or if Feb 22 on the western calendar is March 31 on a Chinese calendar.  In any case, I routinely forget Mai’s birthday on Feb 22, and am always relieved when mid-March I remember I have another chance.  I order flowers with a card that says “Happy Second Birthday.”

When Ballard Blossoms picked up on my routine they began sending me reminder notices.  The next time I ordered flowers for Mai, the florist said, “You said Happy Second Birthday” last year.  Don’t you want it to say “Happy Third Birthday” this year?”

One of my all-time favorite stories about my Chinese family stars the daughter of Mai’s brother, Tom.  Tom went to China for a traditional wedding with Fei Fei but they gave their two daughters staunch American names: Donna and Leslie.   Donna was five the summer we all went to the King County Fair in Enumclaw.

We spent half an hour in the petting zoo.  We fed goats, sheep, chickens, and geese.   There was even a baby wallaby.

We advanced next door to a facsimile of a longhouse.  A huge native American man was carving away at a canoe.  Various native crafts were on display.  On the walls hung pelts and skins from foxes, deer, and beavers.

Donna looked soberly at the skins on the walls.  She stalked up to the big native American and nailed him with her eyes,

“Did you get those skins from the petting zoo?” she demanded.

He stared at her, shocked.  Then his shoulders started to shake.  He put down his tools and laughed.  By the time we left the longhouse, he was wiping his eyes.

Fast forward to last weekend.  There are fourteen of us now.  Donna and Leslie are in high school.  Tara is finishing college.  Mai still works at Yuen Lui studio.  I went to a baby shower for one of the brothers and his wife who are expecting their second baby.  Their first, Christina, is 14 months and she was the star.  A baby in the room makes a party come alive.

I guess I am the matriarch.  For someone who never had much of a family to begin with and who doesn’t have a traditional family at all anymore, I treasure this one.  Even though I was the one who started it, I feel like they took me in. Yesterday I watched the faces, laughed at the jokes and ate the wonderful food.  I thought of Mai coming over  here all by herself, me with my deficiency of family, and the words to a song from Miss Saigon:

“A song
played on a solo saxophone
A crazy sound, a lonely sound
A cry that tells us love goes on and on.”

It does, indeed. Pretty much anywhere you look for it.