With Halloween appearing a full month ahead of itself, I’ve been thinking about Margaret of Clitherow’s hand.   I saw The Hand when I traveled in England in the year 2005, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that city, my father being a foreigner of Cornwall.  That’s for you English majors.

Anyway I was up in York, walking on the walls and luxuriating in the services at York Minster and availing myself of every opportunity to walk through The Shambles, the ancient butcher’s street.   In the Shambles I visited the little shrine to Saint Margaret of Clitherow where I learned her hand was at the Bar Convent.

In York, the streets are gates, the gates are bars, and the bars are pubs; they sell a lot of T-shirts that say so. The Bar Convent is a convent outside Micklegate Bar (or the gate at Mickle Street. You get used to the terminology, or after some time in a pub, you don’t have to).

Having a huge capacity for ghoulishness, I couldn’t help wondering what on earth this was all about.  Her hand?  Even more than the Micklegate Bar where they used to display severed heads did I want to see the hand of St. Margaret of Clitherow.   On the Endless Tourist Loop Bus, I asked the driver to let me off at the convent at Micklegate Bar.

“I want to see that hand,” I confided in him.

“Margaret of Clitherow’s hand?”  He asked cheerfully.

Like there might be others.

To my great disappointment, the Convent Museum was closed that day but the girl at the desk offered to show me the chapel.

“I really wanted to see The Hand,” I said wistfully.

“Oh, it’s in the chapel,” she reassured me.

I perked up.

The chapel was a bright, sun-lit, Italianate room.  Before I got to see The Hand, there was an opening act.  In a locked cupboard -a reliquary-were nine tiny items.  One was the burnt flesh of a martyr—didn’t catch the name—that looked like a cigarette butt.  Another was a stained scrap of fabric that had been wrapped around the severed finger of another martyr.  The label noted laconically, “The finger is in Bruges.”

At this I almost laughed hysterically.  I was born in the Pacific Northwest, the youngest coast of a young democracy, our native Totem poles notwithstanding.  If the U.S is adolescent, the west coast is pre-teen.  I did not yell, “Gross!” like some of my students might, but truly, I had never seen anything remotely like this.

Locked in a special cupboard in a reliquary of its own was The Hand.  The girl handed me a velvet-covered, glass-domed cake plate festooned with crosses and a little sign saying The Hand isn’t to be handled.  She removed the velvet and I had a good long look at a shriveled, but identifiably human hand.  It was grotesque, funny, and poignant.

Earlier in the day I had wandered into a church called All Saints Pavement (yes, it is) where the organist let me play the pipe organ. Afterward I sat in a pew and wrote five breathless postcards telling friends in Seattle that I had played the pipe organ in a big English church.  At the Bar Convent I sat in the bright Italianate chapel and wished I hadn’t mailed those cards because playing the organ was nothing next to seeing the appendage of St Margaret of Clitherow.

A few posts ago, I wrote Whining Helps.  I now want to announce that Groveling Doesn’t.

Genevieve came in the other night, apologizing for the second week in a row that she hadn’t practiced and would it be all right if we did sight reading again this week?  The week before she had read through some Satie, discovered she liked the Gnossiennes and wanted to learn more.  I consider it a wildly successful lesson when a student discovers something that piques her interest.

I have known Genevieve since she was three when she came to lessons with her older sister.  At three, she terrified me: she was intense.  She had a more sophisticated bullshit meter than any therapist.  She was worse than a cat whose withering stare sees through the scraps we precariously drape over our human frailty.  She was three.

Now she is a tall, gorgeous high school student who both plays the piano and sings with a voice of unearthly beauty that is as awe inspiring in its own way as her penetrating child’s gaze once was.  So it is a little odd to find her worried about what I think.  She doesn’t realize what a privilege it is for me to work with her.

Some students try to hide the fact that they haven’t looked at their music since their last lesson.  They fumble through something so badly that I can’t tell if the piece is too challenging or if they are having a bad hand day or what.

“So did you play this piece this week?”

“Well we’ve been pretty busy with the new—”

“Whoa!  All I want to know is if this music is too hard or if you spent your time composing a symphony. This is your life, you know. You can spend your week any way you choose.”

I can understand why this might be news to a kid, but adults are just as bad.  Hell, I am just as bad.  It can take effort to go to my voice lesson and not make excuses.  But it brings up a critical question:  who are we learning for?  Ok, not the most elegant of sentences but I believe that the confusion hovering around the answer is what is wrong with our entire education system.

Some classical vocal and piano pieces are so beautiful they will break your heart.  I love it when that music appeals my students.  But when they walk in the door, it’s not about me and what I love.  It’s not about what I think they should learn.  It’s about what musical potion will draw them to the piano because the music has gotten under their skin, giving them a reason to learn.

The British have a great expression: “Begin as you mean to go along.”  As a teacher, I want to help my students build a house they want to live in.  So I find music they like, and I try to stay with their minds even as I introduce them to notes, counts, scales, and chords.   I want their experience with me to re-assure them that their desires are important and their idiosyncratic ways of learning have power.  I want them to learn for their lives, not mine.

Music is not something anyone ever finishes.  We are used to “learning” being a matter of a teacher or lecturer feeding us information.  We get it in a lump, memorize it and then think we’ve learned something.  I am a great believer in letting a student discover what she can without any direction.  Out of a mass of experience comes the curiosity and the questions that point to a trail-head.  When it’s too late to turn back, when passion is hot, and curiosity is sizzling, a student learns there is no trail.  She gets to build it herself and she can structure it to go anywhere.  How she proceeds connects her on a deep level to what it mean to be herself.  That, to me, is Learning.

I believe this is why the Cheyenne say, “Our first teacher is our own heart.”

So please, don’t grovel.

We observe the ritual:
The washing of the feet,
The anointing with oil and salt,
The baptism into bags of hot paraffin.

She paints a second coat
of Kingfisher Blue;
Toe by toe,
my head bows, my eyes close.

How beautiful are the feet that bring me
thro the valley of incense
Into the sanctuary where
I lay me down on a table.

I hear the prayers of the potion pumps,
Feel the cool blessing upon my face,
After the rooting out of those small sins
of eyebrow and chin.

A sermon about the disciplined life
Is delivered with smooth-faced earnest,
The collection is taken,
I leave my tithe.

Tonight, under a heavy quilt,
With smarting around the eyes and chin,
Deep in the secret dark,
Wiggle my ten toes of Kingfisher Blue.

Elena Louise Richmond
December 30, 2008.

You know what I don’t like?  People who say, “Can’t complain,” and people who wear those buttons that say “No Whining.”  Of course you can complain.  And whining helps.

The British say “whinging.”  Isn’t that a great word?  It’s got the nasal irritation of the word whine, the messy soft g; and in addition, you pronounce the “h” in the “wh” so all that annoyed energy comes through on the breath before you ever phonate.

You know where whining—or whinging– helps a lot?  In singing.  Many singers and students of singing have a narrow idea of what it means to sing.  It’s a montage of what feels easy, what parts of their voices have already been developed and their ideas of singing as garnered from watching performers.  To be blunt, the result is often a nice, insipid sound, incrusted with caricatured nuances.

The actual experience of singing with our own voices is nothing like what we think it is when we daydream about being “up there” on stage, having people listening to us, or more to the point, watching and admiring us.  That’s fantasy.  When we sing we cannot escape our own voices which reflect our entire personalities, both conscious and unconscious.   To sound like who we are and to enjoy the experience of singing, we must bring our own sound and fury.

This is where the whining comes in. Almost all of us have been told since we were very young to not whine.  Some of us were also not allowed to express anger or sadness or even exuberance.  We got so good at not expressing, we finally stopped feeling and as adults we often insist that the full menu of human emotions isn’t even there.  Well, guess what?  It is.  If we can’t bring it into our singing voices, we won’t have a satisfying experience of singing, we won’t sound like ourselves, we won’t be compelling performers, and singing is going to tire us out, not energize us.

When one of my students stops a sound, makes a face, and says, “Ugh, that sounds horrible,” I say, “Make it sound worse.”  I learned this from one of earth’s great treasures, a singer named Tommie Eckert.  She taught me to explore all the awful sounds, to go digging around in the muck and the dark to see what’s there.

Think about what’s in muck: truffles.  In tight, hidden places: pearls.  In the dark: gold.  We mine the richness in our voices when we stop interacting with images of what it means to sing.  We begin wallowing in the experience of our own sound.  We try being goofy or angry or seductive when we sing.  We push the previously forbidden to extreme in order to find its scope in our voices.

Fearlessly wallowing can be frightening.  The prohibition against whining or against being angry or sexual makes a lot of singing students uncomfortable.  Singing is supposed to be civilized; they don’t want to walk in off the street and go all regressive and primal, shrieking and wailing and feeling exposed and foolish.  But to be compelling singers, we must bring some of our underbelly into the tone.  That includes stuff we long ago stopped feeling, but which, not incidentally, is part of what it means to be human.  The very effort to avoid our shadows makes our voices small, complacent, uninspiring, and forgettable.

Those wallowing experiences in lessons or in practice open up new places for our voices to resonate; they wash more colors into our sound, and provide more stability for the weak parts of our scales.  It’s not that we go out whining in public when people have come to hear us sing any more than we take the rage we located it in a psycho-therapy session into the grocery store to buy milk (although it can be forgiven if it pops out at the pharmacy when we first learn that the generic we’ve used for years has been dropped from our insurance formulary.)

I don’t think of lessons, practices, and rehearsals as places to perfect performance. I think of them as places to play and experiment with the every kind of sound we can possibly make, especially whining; to get comfortable with the experience of being inside ourselves, with noticing the gestalt of the inhalation, the support, and the exhalation; with feeling the resonance in our bodies, and with luxuriating in the exuberance of our own voices let loose in the world.

There’s nothing like busting open the head of the Blessed Virgin Mary to remind you to slow down.  Here’s what happened:  I was having one of those mornings when I was not in the moment.  There were way too many moments trying to be represented in every in-breath.  I had a chiropractic appointment and a voice student.  And even though there was no reason why I had to cram all this into one morning, I was also going to do laundry, pay some bills, and run a bunch of errands on my bicycle: get a new watch battery, make copies at Kinkos and take her porcelain statue of the BVM to my friend Joan who had left it in my car the day before. When I got to her house, I dropped Mary on the porch and cracked her head clean off her robes.

Sunday, Joan and I had gone up to Christ the King Fall Festival which they are now regrettably calling Bite of Broadview.  I had been up there once already on Saturday with my neighbor, Gwen, the one who knows something about just about everything. I love this little festival; I’ve been going to it since the 1980’s.  It’s a slice of childhood summer carnivals; I’m certain the rides are older than I am.  They have raffles and bake sales; if you get there early enough, you can get some fudge.

There’s the usual plethora of craft booths, including Catholic ones which seem so exotic to me.  At one table I fingered all the rosary beads and learned how to use them.  Another table, Steps Against Domestic Violence, breaks my heart.  It’s run by the family of a young woman who was murdered by her fiancé.  For a donation, you could pick from a table full of small religious statues.  Joan and I chatted with the family; each of us made a donation and we each took one of the two statues of Mary.

I was raised in the Church of the Miserable Masochists.  We were Pentecostal, evangelical, fundamental, in-errantistical –pretty much everything you see and hear on those shameless religious television channels.  I have tramped through a dozen belief systems since my mother chased me around the house screaming that God was going to punish me; and finally found a home hanging out in the intersection of psycho-analysis, Buddhism and Christianity, trying to not get hit.

Joan, my friend with the theological chops, was raised Catholic, and she can tell you what she believes these days when she gets her own blog.  I enjoy talking religion and theology with her.  We were having lunch one day when she said something that I loved so much I put it in my book, 99 Girdles on the Wall, which is currently sitting in the in-box of an editor at St Martin’s Press. We were talking about Jesus Christ who I never had anything against; it was the hermeneutics people who made it impossible for me to believe what Christians say they believe.

Joan shoved aside her plate and said, “Look.  For Jesus to continue the road he was on, he was going to run into trouble.  He could have avoided it.  He could have gone to Greece.  But to be the person he believed himself to be, he had to do what he did.”

So here’s what I believe:  It’s no different for any of us.  We all either stay on our road, or we escape ourselves and go to Greece.  We are here to be who we are, not to imitate someone else, not to co-opt his vision, reduce it to concrete and bludgeon the rest of the world with it.  I find fundamentalism in any form pretty un-interesting; it kills conversation.  It can also be quite terrifying; it kills people.

If I have any absolutes, it is that I can believe anything I want to believe.  No person alive knows what happens after death.  However I am the only person alive who knows what it feels like to be me on earth right now.

So: frantic morning, broken BVM, Joan, religion, my book (which is in the in-box of an editor at St Martin’s Press, did I say that already?), what I believe, what matters most in life, take a deep breath, slow down.  That was the trail of associations.

I gave my BVM statue to Joan.  She had made the larger donation.

One of my students (Jackson) recently inspired me to learn Brahms’ Intermezzo Opus 118 No. 2 in A.  It’s one of the most difficult pieces I have worked on in some time.  In recent years, I have done more sight reading than I have dug into juicy classical pieces.

Another of my students (Jenni) singlehandedly improved my sight reading skills by about 300% simply because she came in week after week with new Broadway music she had already learned; she didn’t need me to go over and over the vocal line with her, a process which allows me to pick up the accompaniment more or less at my leisure.  She had already saddled up and was ready to ride.  I read through piles of music with her and got to where I was no longer intimidated by any musical comedy composer except Stephen Sondheim.

This Brahms Intermezzo was compelling.  It has achingly beautiful melodic lines.  I got lost in them, happily playing the first two pages slowly over and over for weeks before I moved on to the middle section which featured one of those patches that snorts at whatever technique one brings to the music: in this case, massive chords that change with every beat and handfuls of accidental sharps including the annoying ones that fall on white keys.

In playing the piano, there is a compulsion to keep looking at the fingers as though we aren’t sure they are in the same place they were one beat ago.  Sometimes they’re not: after all there are 88 keys and we have only ten fingers and they do have a way of migrating. With some students, the hands spasm, as though the brain tells them a move is imminent, updated information to follow.  Some students hover over the keys, staying in perpetual motion so they are ready to move to wherever they eventually want to be.

In the Brahms, it was hard to move from chord to chord without looking at my fingers to remind myself where they were even though I knew they hadn’t moved anywhere in the last half a second.  It was humbling to watch me fumble through those eight measures because it reminded me of my students whose tiny pieces are a full eight measures long but who do the same thing.  This is how it feels, Teacher.

One of the reasons the piano is such a good first instrument is because the keys stay where they are. If the notes sound out of tune, it’s not your problem; it’s your piano tuner’s problem.  Neither the piano keys nor my fingers had gone anywhere when I was working on the Brahms but for a while, my mind couldn’t rest in that.  It was disorienting to feel over and over and over that I didn’t know where I was.  I worked at moving one finger at a time without looking at my hands; gradually my mind was able to let my fingers think as I moved through the chords and I was free to listen to what Brahms was up to.

My experience in psychoanalysis and in meditation has taught me to slow down and to pay attention to every moment; to let the moments unfold, one finger at a time.  I am not suggesting that I do this all the time even though it’s always an option.  Occasionally something compels me to this state. The glory of a complex piece like the Brahms where the melodies ache and the harmonies heave with passion is that if you pay attention, it’s a pleasure to play slowly and laboriously as much as to master it entirely.  One can get happily lost in it, one note at a time.

I was on my way to Traffic Court this morning when I thought, “I feel a blog coming on.”  When I got the speeding ticket, I didn’t get to talk enough about it because everyone had a story about their own ticket.  My friend Joan, the one with the theological chops, was 8 months pregnant; she asked the officer if he would time her contraction when he finished writing the ticket.  He tore it up.  Joan’s sister, Terry, had a hilarious ticket story involving an upset beet truck.  Other people’s stories were so much more interesting than mine.  But I have a blog, they don’t.

The first thing I have to say is that I got the ticket on my birthday, and two days after I had switched insurance companies. So that was awful.  The ticket was for $154.  That was a shock.  I was busted while zipping along Aurora on the east side of Queen Anne Hill.  That was just plain stupid since I see the speed traps every time I drive that road.  I was going 14 mph over the limit.  That’s full disclosure.  Never mind that a quarter of a mile later, I would have been only 4 mph over the speed limit.  That’s dissembling.

I pulled up the hill on Ward Street.  The policeman threw the ticket at me.  I was in enough shock to feel a little sorry for him.  What a job.  Everyone hates him.  “When constabulary duty’s to be done (to be done), a police man’s lot is not an happy one (nappy one).”

By the time I was back on the road, driving down the viaduct, I was sobbing.  I have been self-employed for 28 years.  I like to forget there is such a thing as Authority or that I would ever be subject to it.  I can’t remember what it feels like to have a supervisor.

I have gotten 4 tickets in my life.  Except for the time I was caught speeding through the Hanford nuclear site on my way to Walla Walla, I have gone to court.  My court date was this morning, three months after the incident.  I was coached by someone whose visits to Traffic Court are as routine as visits to the dry cleaners but who has never seen his insurance go up: dress well, don’t wear pity clothes; don’t make excuses, they have heard them all and they don’t care; be contrite, they never see contrition.

I said I didn’t think I could pull off contrition.  I could say I was ashamed with verisimilitude, not because I was, particularly, but because I am so familiar with that state that I can reproduce it easily.  I flush Shame Red when I get a notice for an overdue library book.  He suggested I apologize for wasting the court’s time.  That struck me as fatuous.  If  I felt apologetic for wasting the court’s time, I wouldn’t be there at all.

In the end, I dressed well.   Since I tend to blather away and make inappropriate jokes when I am nervous, I wrote the following on a piece of paper and practiced saying it: “I was going too fast.  I was not paying attention.  I have been driving carefully since the ticket and will continue to do so.”  I was going to write it on my hand but I thought that might look teenagery and we all know what kind of drivers they are.  When my name was called, I read it one last time and crammed it in my purse.

The Authority Figure was polite and easy-going.  I got a “deferred finding for infraction,” which means I did not have to pay the $154 for the ticket and my insurance company does not need to hear about it unless I get another ticket in the next year.  Then there will be hell to pay.  I did have to pay the “court fee” which he upped to $122.  The Court colludes with citizens to get insurance companies to pay city expenses.  That works for me.

I love getting comments on this web site but please don’t tell me your ticket stories.  This is my blog.

People always comment on how huge my cats are.  They are rescue cats, mutts, hefty survivors.  Since I work at home, they know how to work me for food and I am the first to admit that I am intimidated by them.  While my cats may be the size of farm animals, there’s a hint of jungle law in our domestic arrangements.

Freud chooses the menu. He has a urinary tract situation and needs special food; so in order to avoid fatal ingestions, everyone eats the same PH balanced, low magnesium food.   Freud sits at his bowl and looks piteous while his classic meow gets more insistent.  “I am ravenous.  How can you starve me like this?”  He asks.  I remember how he almost died from a blocked urethra, I look at his sweet face, and I give him a few more bites.

Winston, whose whine is loud and demanding, eats most of the food.  For the first eight weeks of his life, he was interested in only two things: nursing and sleeping.  He was the first of his litter to find Mom’s food dish and help himself. His little kitten stomach was so tight he could hardly toddle to bed where he fell over like, Liberty, the wooden dog.  Neutering didn’t help with these proclivities.  I mean, really, what else does a neutered male have? Winston still spends his life sleeping, eating, and instead of watching football, he watches for food.

Artemis, whose little “freep” sound becomes a scream any time her will is crossed, determines the nosebag schedule in the household.  Freud and Winston are fierce and fast eaters, well able to guard their bowls from each other.  But Artemis won’t eat with Neanderthals at her back, inching closer, hoping to score from her bowl.  She runs away and leaves them to it.

Artemis is a grazer.  She likes a little bit now, a little bit later.  Her food bowl travels around the house with me all day so it’s close to hand whenever she wants a nosh.  When I read in the morning, the bowl hides underneath a book where the other two can’t smell it if I leave my post for a minute.  There’s an eating station on the floor next to the computer.  There’s another next to my chair at the piano.  At 3:30, daily, Artemis appears next to the piano when I am teaching.

“You have a customer.”  One of my students said one day.  There was Artemis, her eyes boring through me, daring me to ignore her.

Sometimes I feel those eyes boring through walls.  I can be sitting quietly, minding my own business, when I feel unaccountably uncomfortable; feel something gnaw at me.  A small reconnaissance through the house will reveal Artemis sitting reproachfully where at this time yesterday, I gave her something to eat.  She says, “What the hell? Do we have to keep going over this?”

She likes to go outside after her late afternoon nibble and not come in until my bedtime.  Then she wants to eat.  She rattles the kibble as she extracts one piece after another, crunching them.  I put a pillow over my ears and then fall sleep before she finishes.   Winston and Freud are both onto the fact that there’s often food to be had on the east side of the bed.  Sometimes in the morning Artemis seems suspiciously hungry and Winston not hungry enough.

I go to elaborate lengths to make sure Artemis gets enough to eat.  She knows the drill: I close myself into the bathroom, turn on the fan, run some water, and flush the toilet.  Undercover of all the noise, I pop open a can of food.  (If you aren’t a cat owner, you might not know that cats can hear from two blocks away a can being opened in their kitchen.) When I emerge from the bathroom, she nails me with eyes that do not thank me for going to such great lengths on her behalf.  “I’ll eat that now,” she says. “But I would have liked it earlier.”

I worried about how another person would negotiate the politics of the family when I traveled for six weeks one summer.   I was two weeks into the trip, and checking my e-mail at Sterling Memorial Library on the Yale University Campus, right under a Research Only sign, when I read an e-mail from Barb, the live-in cat sitter.  “All is well,” she re-assured me.  “But the cats certainly seem to be hungry all the time.”

I sat back, laughing and relieved. “They aren’t hungry.”  I wrote back.  “They’ve gotten comfortable with, and are now ruthlessly exploiting you.”  I scarcely thought about the cats for the rest of the trip.  When I got home, they looked at me and said, “You’re home.  What’s there to eat?”

I’m on my second hour of Free Cell solitaire.  Ok, my third, maybe.  I really don’t keep track.  But here’s the thing: there are Life Lessons in Free Cell solitaire.  I’m not saying I play it to find them;  but I do think about brain wiring when I play, especially since I figured out that you can backtrack by hitting Control Z and take another path.

So there’s that Life Lesson: we can always try things differently even if we can’t delete life choices by backtracking.  Wouldn’t that be something?  Actually I think there are belief systems that say this is possible and I know people who think they have deleted their choices by pretending that they never did the things they did, and expect me to play along.  I suppose we all function that way to a degree.  Some modalities call it denial.  (Reference the first three sentences of this post.)

It may be more fruitful to recognize mistakes and disappointments; regret them and cry with vexation; then work our way down to the bottom of the box and scoop out the hope.  Did you ever think about why hope is at the bottom of Pandora’s Box?  All the difficult things in life fly right out in your face, there’s no need to mine for them.   Hope just lays there at the bottom.  It doesn’t pressure you.  It’s there waiting once you get quiet enough to allow it in.

In Free Cell Solitaire, I get intrigued by the way the most counter-intuitive routes seem to be what win the game.  All the aces and most of the two’s are up one column but the way through this game is to dismantle the column over to the side which is packed with a bunch of middle cards.

So many things fall into place when we stop insisting things have to work a certain way.  When we imagine we know how it’s supposed to be.  Does anyone remember the days before there were self-help books?  However did we manage before there were human beings just like ourselves, grubbing along just like we were, who decided they were experts?  One of Adam Phillip’s titles is Terrors and Experts. The title is almost all you need.  Where there are “experts,” there is terror that you might be living your own life wrong;  and that out there is someone who can give you the correct answers.

You are reading the writing of someone who filled in all the blanks and thought through all the questions of Finding a Job You Can Love, closed the book, decided to be a private music teacher and never looked back in 28 years except for the occasional fantasy of working in a used book store with no children’s section and no sound system. Aside from the anomaly of that one book, I have found that self-help books miss the point.

As did William F Buckley in a little quibble with me that made my Republican father proud.   Buckley had some kind of eye-hand visual difficulty that made reading music challenging so he devised a little system of colors, codes and symbols that helped him when he played the piano.  I read about it in an issue of Sheet Music magazine and thought it clever.  He ended his article by asking music teachers if they thought his was a viable method that we might want to use in teaching.

I responded by saying no.  If his method were to be published, it would languish amongst all the other methods that are out there.   The important thing, I wrote, was his ingenuity in custom designing a method for his own particular learning patterns.  I suggested that its value was its congruency with his own mind although I regret to say I actually used the phrase “in touch with yourself.”  The notion of students creating their own peculiar methods that followed their own idiosyncratic ways of conceptualizing music was what needed to be promoted.  Now that would be different.

So Buckley sent me a private note saying that he wished to quibble with me over my comment about being in touch with himself.  Rather than understand his own mind better, he said his method helped him “know the mind of Bach.”  Hmmm.  If you say so.

So in conclusion, the Queens and Kings are never going to line up logically, this little essay does not justify all the Free Cell Solitaire I play, and a while back, I saw Buckley’s piano method book languishing on a shelf at Capitol Music.

When did everyone start talking about Core Muscles?  Was it around the same time everything we put on our bodies became Product?  I only ask because my back problems became intolerable in the late1980’s, but it was twenty years before someone told me that I needed to suck up my gut—only the terminology was “engage your core.”   By then everyone I knew had been raving for some time about Pilates and I had only just gotten clear that Product referred to pretty much anything for the hair or face that was expensive.   Suave is still just shampoo.

An earnest young beauty operator once told me in all sincerity that the Product she had put in my hair had Memory.  I thought that was rather a weighty concept to ascribe to hair gel.  But I don’t argue with the girls at the beauty school or at the spa.   I already feel like the Pity Client because I wash my face with soap and water.

Another young woman asked me if I had been on the pill when I was younger because her aunt was about my age, she had used the pill; and she had that same fuzz on her cheeks.  I was alarmed because I had never noticed fuzz on my face.

“How old is your aunt?”

“Oh like you—in her 30’s.”

“Is it that obvious, this. . . fuzz?”

“Oh no, not really, It’s not like you can see it at all from far away.”

That was a relief.  But the larger point she was trying to make is that she could recommend Product.  Not a product.  Product.  It sounds like there is only one Product, like those belief systems that tell you there is only one God.  And Product purports to do just about anything God can do on top of which, it probably smells better.

I rather enjoy being older.  The more interesting aspects of life now are the ones that Product can’t fix.  And I wouldn’t want to.  I love the wrinkles and crinkles around my eyes; they remind me that through a lot of difficult times, I have never forgotten how to laugh.

There’s a richness to life I was too busy to notice back when I first bought a Lady Schick.  And nowadays there isn’t much leg hair to shave anymore.  Of course some of the leg hair seems to have gravitated to my face and I am not talking about fuzz.  They are what my friend with the theological chops, Joan, calls stray eyebrows.  Or as she might put it, except of course she didn’t, I did:  Hair that strayed from the flock of the perfectly coiffed eyebrow devoid of the one true Product.