Lighting a candle, part one

 "There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle" – Robert Alden

The end of daylight savings time came as a shock to me. Perhaps I’m still not used to it coming so late: it used to end the last Sunday of October. A quick Google search informs me that the switch to the first Sunday in November happened in 2005. I guess I’m not as graceful a pivoter in my golden years.

I mentioned the shock to my therapist who reported he’s had many clients struggling with the evenings darkening sooner. It seemed like the dusk on November 6th was more than an hour earlier than the evening before.

Noticing a smattering of multicolored holiday lights springing up in mid-November, I decided to join the movement: I installed strings of lights on our shrubs soon afterwards. As always, I'll keep the lights on at least until Epiphany (Three Kings Day, Old Christmas (Amish), Little Christmas (what my mother called it): January 6th).

Light is so important to our mood. Light boxes are one aid. Lighting my living quarters certainly affects my mood. For years, in order to be energy-efficient, we had compact flourscent bulbs throughout the house. In cold weather they warm up slowly (we keep our house in the low 60s) and don’t cast full light immediately. The newer LED lights we’ve installed are more efficient and respond immediately. As the winter solstice nears, I find myself flipping every switch on in my 'new' kitchen, except for the sink disposall.

Our sun makes life on earth possible. It also makes life more bearable. (Fun fact: lowly fungi play a vital role as well. Practically unseen, their tiny tendrils transport nutrients and water from long distances to the plants’ roots. In exchange, plants share the sugars produced through photosynthesis.)

As the days continue to shorten this month, I hope you can take time to find some extra light, in as simple an action as turning on the kitchen light, enjoying the holiday displays, or walking in the sunshine.

I love the New England tradition of putting lit candles in windows. A symbol of welcome and warmth, they serve to push the darkness away.

(Another fun fact: Robert Alden (1836-1911) was a Congregationalist minister knew Laura Ingels Wilder. She used him as a character in two of her Little House on the Prairie books.)

Mount Shasta

 In 1995, I took a 10-week road trip around the country with my kids in a pop-up tent trailer. In California, my sister and I travelled from Orange County (near L.A.) to Seattle. In far northern California I discovered Mt. Shasta and fell hopelessly in love.

Mount Shasta is a majestic peak in the Cascade Range, which includes Mt. Hood in Oregon and Mount St. Helen’s and Mount Rainier in Washington State. It rises 14,179 ft in elevation and is home to several glaciers. So why had I never heard of it?

If Mt. Shasta were in Germany or Italy or France, it would be as famous as the Matterhorn. But it is only the fifth highest mountain in California and ‘only’ 11th in prominence in the United States (how high the summit rises above its surroundings).

We camped within sight of the mountain and I reluctantly left it the next morning.

As I write this, my husband and I are on a West Coast road trip. I originally planned it for 2020, but we know what happened that year. This year, we flew into Seattle and rented a car to drive through Oregon and into California to see the Pacific Northwest and visit friends and family. High on my list of ‘can’t be missed’ destinations was Mt. Shasta. I have a framed photo on my office wall and gaze at it daily. I’ve told countless people of my 1995 discovery (including you now).

When we arrived in Seattle, smoke from wildfires diminished visibility. Seattle and Portland, Oregon, were ranked first and second globally for the poorest air quality. As we entered northern California, I wondered if I would even see my beloved Mt. Shasta. Finally, I rounded a bend on Interstate 5 and there it was, looming as majestic as ever, though grey with atmospheric smoke.

A doctor friend once told me that if you take the time to get to know someone, anyone, you are likely to discover great sorrow in their life. Most of us experience sorrow, disappointment, and even tragedy. Sometimes it can feel like life has greyed us out.

Mt. Shasta offers hope. Although the smoke dimmed its visibility, it still rises triumphant from the ground, firm and steadfast, unchanged by the air around it.

The wildfires will subside and the air quality recover. Fresh snow will fall and Mt. Shasta’s glory will be fully visible to all who visit. But Mt. Shasta didn’t change. The smoke could never diminish its true nature, only hide it temporarily from our eyes.

Denial

 Looking back over my behavior, how could I fail to see that I was sick, very sick?

I’d spent two weeks feeling exhausted with intermittent high fevers and night sweats. But each day I thought I was getting better, until the fever would hit again or I’d find myself unable to forgo a nap.

Two of our grandkids spent the week with us and I played the electronic babysitter card: turn on a movie and sleep on the couch.

Then we went on our annual ward campout at Camp Joseph, the Church-owned campground at the Joseph Smith birthplace in Sharon, Vermont. I had planned it to be as low-stress as possible. My son Sam had agreed to handle all the food. We rented cabins so we didn’t have to set up tents and sleep on the ground. But it wasn’t enough.

Camp Joseph is a lovely, well-groomed campground. It has rolling lawns and copses of trees. Very easy camping. But just walking less than a city block to the bathhouse wore me out. And I fell three times. Jim was standing next to me during one. I told him that it was my gardening sneakers. Not wanting to take my new sneakers camping, I had donned my gardening sneakers. After the second fall I looked at the soles: they were slippery smooth with no tread. (I tossed them as soon as I had a chance.)

Besides the falls and exhaustion (I carried a collapsible camp chair and sat down any time I wasn’t moving from place to place.) I had mental confusion. I couldn’t remember the date: I was confident it lay somewhere between August 14 and 30 but could get no closer. I’d been planning this campout with all four grandkids, Jim, and Sam and Savannah for months. But the date was not accessible in my brain.

All of that and I blamed the falls on my no-tread sneakers.

How often do we see ourselves clearly? Do we blame our circumstances on no-tread sneakers?

After the campout, my doctor discovered a kidney infection and with a simple course of antibiotics (Thank you, Alexander Fleming!) I recovered. In August I slept ten hours out of every twenty four. Now I’m back to eight and have two more hours in my day.

Is this a harbinger of old age? I know a woman, older than me, who had to use a walker. Then she embarked in some serious physical therapy. Now she is walker-free. We all run down eventually, if we’re blessed to live long enough. This time I recovered.

Grape Jelly

 I love jam and jelly. My mom taught me to make jam (jelly always seemed so much more work and besides, I like fruit pulp.) We specialized in tomato jam (seasoned with cinnamon and cloves). These days I make cranberry-rhubarb and blueberry.

One day, I wanted a snack, something small and light. I opened the fridge and got out the jar of Welch’s grape jelly. I never buy the stuff: I’ve graduated to Trappist brand. The Welch’s probably entered the house during a family reunion last summer (and is still unfinished a year later). I took a spoonful and had such a feeling of wellbeing: I thought it was the sugar.

But the next time I craved a spoonful, a memory came to mind: a bitter penicillin pill tucked in a spoonful of grape jelly and offered by my mom. I realized that grape jelly, which nowadays I regularly eschew, is a comfort food for me.

I had an odd relationship with pills as a young girl. It was an ordeal for me to swallow pills. I still have trouble, even though I have plenty of practice. Between vitamins and psych meds, I swallow ten pills a day. And I still occasionally gag.

One day my mom and I came upon a solution (when the jelly wasn’t sufficient). I kneaded some white bread into a mass of goo and wrapped the pill completely. Without the bitter taste I was able to swallow it. Mom pointed out that the wrapped pill was larger and should be harder to swallow, but for me the wrapping was just what I needed to get the pill down.

I probably won’t make a habit of buying a large jar of Welch’s grape jelly. My homemade cranberry-rhubarb jam and Trappist’s blueberry, cherry, and ginger, hold charms Welch’s can’t match. But the grape jelly warms something in the deep recesses of my heart.

Mozart's Clarinet

 Our Danube River cruise was magical, gliding effortlessly through Central Europe. We spent a day at Gottweig Abbey, high above the Danube in Austria, and that evening we attended a concert in Vienna. It was a small ensemble: three violins, a viola, 'cello, flute, clarinet, string bass, and percussion, with Pierre Pichler conducting. The overture to The Marriage of Figaro opened the program, followed by other familiar Mozart pieces, including A Little Night Music.

After the applause, the first violinist unexpectedly called out, “Maestro, would you like to play the violin?” Pichler took her proffered violin, made a dramatic motion with the bow and produced an abominable sound. He handed the instrument back and started towards the bassist, who shook his head vehemently. Then the clarinetist offered. He stood next to the conductor and gave instructions while continuing to hold the instrument. “Blow…No, blow harder. Now move your hands.” Pichler extended his arms out to the side and vigorously waggled his hands at the wrists. “No, put your hands on the clarinet.” The conductor placed his fingers on the clarinet, took a breath, and the opening glissando of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue filled the air, followed by the adagio second movement of Mozart's clarinet concerto. (start at minute 12:55 for Anngunnir Arnadottir’s performance.)

Amadeus is largely fiction, but Salieri's love of Mozart's music engendered a deep appreciation in me when I first saw it in Bloomington, Indiana, (home of the world-class Indian University School of Music) in 1984. As the adagio swept over me in Vienna, I could hear Salieri's description of a Mozart serenade:

The beginning…like a rusty sequeezebox…And then, suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight…

This was a music I’d never heard, filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.

(hear the entire serenade that Salieri describes)

Yes, "such unfulfillable longing."

Terezin, Czechia

On our second day in Prague we took a bus tour through the lovely Czech countryside to the small town of Terezin. It was built in 1780 as a military fortress by Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II and named for his mother, Empress Maria Theresa. In German it is known as Theresienstadt (Theresa's City).

It was never attacked by the Prussians and later became a camp for political prisoners.

In 1940 the Nazis converted it into a Gestapo prison and in 1941 a Jewish ‘ghetto’ was established there. Although it wasn’t an extermination camp, over 33,000 people died there from horrible overcrowding, disease, and starvation. In all, 150,000 people were sent there, including 15,000 children. About 88,000 were later transported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.

Our guide emphasized that although it wasn’t a ‘death camp,’ it was full of unspeakable misery and terror. I was touched by a display of children’s drawings. Some were stark depictions of the camp, others hopeful, happy drawings of their lives before imprisonment. The adults in the camp worked tirelessly to make the children’s lives as normal as possible in a grotesquely abnormal setting. They would teach school, prepared to stop in an instant if a guard appeared.

Sobering is too weak a word to describe the feelings while visiting Terezin. When I was in high school, we would glibly parrot, “Man’s inhumanity to man” as the most likely theme of any serious work of literature. Can such horror be adequately described?

The Moldau in Prague

23 Jun 2022

 

I love “The Moldau” by Bedrich Smetana. It’s a symphonic poem, the second movement of Má Vlast and a rich depiction of the river from its source in the Bohemian forest to the city of Prague. Moldau is the German name: in Czech it’s the Vltava.

I’ve played the piece in two different orchestras over the years.

Years ago I went to Education Week at Brigham Young University. It’s a week of free college courses for grownups. Michael Ballam, a professional musician and celebrity from Logan, Utah, gave an inspirational talk in the huge Marriott Center. He spoke of the immense power of music and recommended that we all make a musical first aid kit on an audio cassette. (yeah, this was 1993). I’ve never done it, but in case you are around when I fall into a coma, "The Moldau" and Gustav Holst’s "Jupiter" from The Planets are my top two choices. I guess at this point you could just pull them up on YouTube. (I just did.)

Michael Ballam told a moving story about an elderly German woman in a nursing home in Utah. He came to play the piano and lead a Christmas carol sing-along. The woman typically sat huddled in her wheelchair, mute and unresponsive. As Ballam sang a carol in German, someone noticed the woman’s lips moving: she was softly singing: her first words in years. Music can reach into our depths.

We left Boston Wednesday evening and arrived in Frankfurt, Germany around 7 a.m. Thursday. Since we lost 6 hours in the time zone adjustment, I only got 3 hours of sleep, sitting upright in economy. It’s now 8 p.m. and we’re at our hotel in Prague. I’m not sleepy. That would be great news for most normal humans but for me, it’s okay to feel good, but not too good. I monitor my sleep daily to avoid hypomania.

Nothing to do right now but hope I can sleep tonight.

In the meanwhile, I’ll savor our day. When we arrived in Prague, I realized that I was woefully unprepared. Our introductory walking tour wasn’t until Friday. We got a map and directions to the downtown shopping mall. But Prague streets are not at all at right angles, even less than Boston. We eventually found the mall, but then what’s the word for bookstore? There was Gap and Armani, Puma and Foot Locker. No Barnes & Noble. We did find it (Luxor) and bought a tour book (in English).

Back out on the streets and sidewalks of diminutive square paving stones, we happened upon the Municipal Hall. The clerk at the box office was skeptical that we would enjoy the concert of singing in Czech. Turned out it was sold out anyway.

We ate delicious borscht at Pekny Bistro, charming and quiet at two in the afternoon. We walked along the Moldau. I seemed to hear the woodwinds burble upstream in the Bohemian forest and the ‘cellos pound out the country beat of the exuberant wedding festivities.

24 June 2022

This evening I sat in St. Salvador Church near Charles Bridge in Prague, listening to the opening notes of "The Moldau." Satisfying, even though it was just a six-piece string orchestra.

After the concert we sat outside to eat traditional Czech food (dumplings are featured prominently). It began to rain and we were grateful for the restaurant's awning. I had bought a black umbrella decorated with sheet music at the Lobkowicz Palace. A great investment for our half-hour walk back to the hotel.

By the way, I slept 10 hours last night, a total of 13 over two nights. That will do.