Third leg...

Third leg...

I'm safely in Waterloo at the end of a 7 1/2 hour drive. French lessons went well.

Filling in the gaps...

Filling in the gaps...

I arrived at John's sister's place mid-afternoon Wednesday. If anyone has stretched the meaning of family, it is John and Rita. Family is anyone you get along with or have some interests in common.

People seemed to come and go all the time. Food and drink were plentiful, and the conversation bounced from politics (Canadian and US) to travel (Europe and Yukon) to art and, of course, food and drink. I got to see a few catalogs of Rita's stunning costume masterpieces.

Yesterday was a long day of driving, described below. Thanks to audio books (Maeve Binchy - Evening Classes) for keeping me awake.

This morning we went drove to MEC to buy each other's Christmas presents. Then we drove around the mountain past $6 Million homes with fantastic views and to Leena's favourite Indian restaurant. Tonight I'll install the Christmas present on her bike and then we'll probably head out to a jazz club. Other than that we're just taking it easy!

Safe arrival...

Safe arrival...

I arrived safely in Montreal after a loooong drive up from Niagara-on-the-Lake. Wednesday's drive was very fast (leave early = no traffic), but I more than made up for it today, including a lengthy section where it was a slow-moving parking lot for maybe 80km. What was rumoured to be 7 hours turned into 10. L is doing great.

Inexorable...

Inexorable...

The second movement of the Bach Double Violin Concerto (BWV1043) has this gorgeous descending melodic line that is played by one violin and then picked up and repeated by the second violin a few bars later.

When I was studying this piece with Lon years ago, he taught me to see it as one long phrase that descends inexorably through the opening bars, instead of two or three smaller phrases. The tension of that line as it descends and is woven by the two violins into a slow ('ma non tonto' - 'but not too much') fugue makes this one of the most beautiful - even profound - pieces of music in the literature.

This post brought tears to my eyes, maybe because it echoes that inexorable passage of our lives. As much as I would like to have frozen those moments, I couldn't. So many things in life - like aging and death in various forms - are uncontrollable. I think I've forgiven myself for that. Really, who would want to control them? But letting go, at least for me, isn't a "there it's done" kind of thing.

Thanks for the memories, Leena. My love to you and Ben. May your lives make beautiful music.

Calapan...

Calapan...

I woke up this morning and called 13 hours into the future. As most of you know, #1 son is 7 or 8 months into a 27 month Peace Corps assignment. He is vacationing this week in Calapan, on Mindoro Island about a 1 hour ferry ride from his home island. Phone connections are always a little ragged, so I'm not sure I heard everything. But I think he is spending Christmas with several other PC volunteers. Next weekend he'll be back visiting his first host family. He says the package arrived in Manila, and he'll pick it up next weekend. He sounded in good spirits, and glad to be on break with friends.

Church concluded today with the tradition of singing the Hallelujah Chorus. The choir led it from the front, so I stood between JohnL and Hans and belted out the bass line. What we lack in finesse and musicality we make up for with enthusiasm.

In other news...

I bought paint to cover over the faux brick in my kitchen. I'll work on that over the next few days.

Christmas day will be spent in town with family, and then Wednesday I'm driving to Montreal to visit #1 daughter. With overnight stops halfway there and back visiting friends I should be home sometime the 1st.

And the other news... Floyd asked again if he could store his bike for the winter in the Garagemahal. We had discussed it earlier and at first I didn't jump at the chance. Then I hit on the perfect payment plan: next summer teach me to ride and take me on a trip somewhere. I think he'll move it in sometime this week.

Folk tales...

Folk tales...

Had a great evening tonight swapping stories at Pete's tonight, following supper with my mother and the rest of his family. I needed some good belly laughs.

Somehow he got to wondering how Goshen College tracked him down when he was working at Rocky Mountain Camp the summer after he graduated from high school. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that at that point he hadn't applied to college yet. Somehow admissions got him the application and got him there for the fall. I told him that was a no brainer: Dad had done it. Then I told how he was the one who kept bugging Waterloo until they accepted me at the last minute in the middle of August after my senior year. At the time I was bumming around somewhere in Wyoming or Idaho. I had pretty well given up on the idea of going to UW, and though he never said it, I'm pretty sure Dad called up on my behalf while I was on the road. I was home, picked up my stuff and was in Waterloo in probably less than a week.

That led to the story of that first move to Waterloo. Dad and I left home about 6:30am, and got about 45 minutes down the road before I realized I had left my guitar sitting in the house. I made a U turn on 131 and went right back to pick it up. To say Dad was miffed is an understatement. Still we made it to Waterloo by 1 or 2. He dropped me off, jumped in the car and headed home. Later he loved to tell the story about picking up a hitchhiker somewhere around London. The talk to turned to Canadian beer and Dad reported that he and his new hitchhiker friend pulled over at the Tavistock hotel and had his first Labatt's Blue right then and there. He still made it back that night, which led us to some well worn conclusions about how fast everyone - and especially Dad - drove 35 years ago. Which led Pete to tell of the time he drove me up to Waterloo and got back home so fast that he stopped to visit some friends for a couple hours so he wouldn't have to explain why he was home so early. Which reminded me of another time that I hitchhiked from Detroit to Waterloo. That trip included a ride over the Detroit bridge with a guy who stuffed his bag of dope under his dashboard when we got pulled over at customs. We/he didn't get caught. Then the next ride out of Windsor was with some guy in a Volvo doing at least 120mph en route to Montreal. We made it all the way to Waterloo in a little under 2 hours. Some trip.

What a great way to pass an evening.

Christmas Cards...

Christmas Cards...

I'm not a big writer of Christmas Cards. If you want one from me, you probably have to send one first. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but it is true.

I remember the huge pile of cards my parents used to get. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that they overflowed the big wooden butter bowl that now sits on top of my fridge. That's a lot of cards.

I get maybe half a dozen.

I hope this is a generational thing - a sign of the times - and not a reflection of any social failing on my part. But rereading that first paragraph it probably is a little of both.

So tonight I walked up to CVS and found the least ugly box I could find (I really should have bought the Chad Friesen sets Willard was selling at the Market on Saturday) and sat down and wrote a bunch. I'm afraid I wrote them by hand - meaning the recipients will have to decipher my hand writing.

The good side of that is that when you write them out by hand you really cut the bragging crap out. I do my best to make them personal and informative, but as I told my cousin Charles who already reads this blog: everything that is fit to print is already posted here - and the rest you just have to imagine.

So if you'd like a card, let me know. I'll be happy to oblige. I'll even brag, but you have to ask for that special.

Carroled...

Carroled...

Tonight I was minding my own business in my kitchen when I thought I heard singing. Then my doorbell rang.

They were a crowd of maybe 15 or 20 upper elementary or middle-school kids from the church down the street, along with their sponsors. They finished one song, asked for my choice for a second, invited me to their church and gave me a little bag with a dvd and candy in it. Then they were off to the next house with a rousing "We wish you a Merry Christmas..."

It was kind of fun. But it was also a little weird to sit on my steps while they all faced me and sang. I sang along as best as I could.

Not proud. ANGRY!!!

Not proud. ANGRY!!!

I tuned into NPR tonight just in time to hear Former CIA officer John Kiriakou talk about waterboarding.

At first I was impressed with his comments that

"In 2002, I believed that desperate times called for desperate measures. And we were so convinced that al-Qaida was planning another massive attack that we really felt that we needed to do anything to get the information to disrupt it.

"In the meantime, we've had five years to develop new sources of information, to improve relations with other countries who could provide us additional information. And I've come to the belief that not only is it unnecessary, but that as Americans, we're better than that and we shouldn't be engaging in a practice like waterboarding."

But at the end of the story he says that waterboarding worked, and that it is a real agency success story. He said we should be proud of the CIA.

God help us all.

News scan...

News scan...

Today during a short drive to meet a friend for dinner in Bristol, I heard Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism. In his testimony he refused to agree that waterboarding is torture.

Doublespeak! Later in the report a Seton Hall political science prof pointed out that the US prosecuted war criminals for practicing waterboarding in the past, but that no one is willing to go on record today because it opens the door that people who permitted it are guilty of war crimes. And just who are these people? They are guilty of war crimes, and no amount of doublespeak relieves them of their guilt.

Then while flipping through the Truth on line I ran into this little tidbit of new data that says we may have already reached an important tipping point in global warming: an acceleration of the loss of sea ice in the artic. Most computer models didn't have this occurring until 2040.

Note of optimism in the final inches of the story:

NASA scientist James Hansen, the lone-wolf researcher often called the godfather of global warming, on Thursday was to tell scientists and others at the American Geophysical Union scientific in San Francisco that in some ways Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points, based on Greenland melt data.

'We have passed that and some other tipping points in the way that I will define them,' Hansen said in an e-mail. 'We have not passed a point of no return. We can still roll things back in time - but it is going to require a quick turn in direction.'

Which brings me to my second note of optimism. Instead of reading my blog, you should be reading about my hero the walker. Did anyone hear about the new optimism at the Bali environmental conference: everyone is feeling like the world can progress on these issues because bush has just 1 year left! Maybe we can hurry things along.

This and that...

This and that...

I spent today recuperating from my trip to Boston, followed by a Schmaltzentruber performance Friday night and MCCO concert Saturday night. It's all good, but by noon today I was happy to be home with nothing much on my mind besides the laundry, paying a few bills and cooking ahead a little for next week. Plus an ice storm made staying inside for the day trendy and wise.

While cooking this afternoon I listened to downloaded segments from This American Life. This one includes a short segment on mapping sounds. One of the comments is that the medieval church attached great meaning to intervals between notes. I had heard this before. Actually, this has carried forward to today: music with a major third is usually thought of as happier music, whereas a minor third is generally thought to be sadder or more melancholy. Anyhow, the radio story mentions that the church thought of an Augmented 4th as the sound of Diabolus in Musica, or the devil in music. This is really interesting given that gypsy music is full of Augmented 4ths. For example, I'm working on a traditional gypsy tune now that has a scale in it that goes C - D - D# - F# -G - Bb - C# - D. That C - F# is the augmented 4th and it really leaps out of the run.

I think it is a pretty safe guess that that gypsy scale goes back at least to the middle-ages. So did the church identify the interval with the devil because it was so common in gypsy music?

In other news, I've been following more of the links on John Niremberg's blog, and chasing down Naomi Wolf's 10 easy steps to fascism. If you don't have time to listen to her video, read this article from last spring. Ok, maybe I'm bordering on paranoia, but are you comfortable with what Bush and Cheney have been doing? Support impeachment!

I have no travel plans for the next two weeks. Then the day after Christmas I'm heading to Montreal to visit ma petite fille. Ok, so she isn't so little any more.

Still walking...

Still walking...

I've been following John Niremberg's blog all week. I find it heartening to hear of the support he is getting along the way, and to see the local press is picking up the story and framing it in a positive light.

Then right now I'm listening to Naomi Wolf. Alarming. I urge you to watch this.

Connections...

Connections...

I arrived home a few minutes ago from an intense four days on the road. I walked in the house about 11:15, but since I was too wired to crawl into bed I checked email.

The first was a note my ex forwarded that Garth's twin babies were born at 28 weeks. The simple version of the news is that they are as healthy as 2lb 5oz (and 2lb 7oz) babies can be. The accompanying photos underlined Garth's adjective: vulnerable. They are so tiny. Maybe I'm just over tired, but I just about started crying.

Then I opened the second email to the news that my old friend Erick died. I suppose I should feel relief that his brilliant, compassionate mind was released from his slowly deteriorating (MS?) body. And I did start crying.

There is some kind of symmetry to these emails, especially since both have their roots in Winnipeg, but I felt both scared and sad at the news.

On a lighter note: my trip was good. It was four very long days. Every flight was actually on time, in spite of winter weather. Tonight I was hoping I'd have time to catch up with the impeach bush/cheney walker. Yesterday he walked right past the Providence airport, so I just missed him by 24 hours. I planned to drive down Hwy 1 to see if I could meet him, but I had barely enough time to return my rental car and get through security before my plane boarded.

Give 'em hell...

Give 'em hell...

I just found out about John Niremberg's "March in My Name" call to impeach Bush.

Lets give him all the support we can!

Up coming...

Up coming...

This afternoon I'm resting up for the coming week. I leave home tomorrow at 4:25 am to catch an early morning flight to Providence. The week pivots on on a two-day conference, with customer visits in the area on each side of it. I'll fly home late Thursday.

Friday night the Schmaltzentrubers will perform for Marvin Bartel's opening at Art Matters. Come on down between 7 and 8.

If that isn't enough, Saturday evening is the MCCO Christmas Concert. My favorite piece of the evening will be the Corelli Christmas Concerto. That concert is at 7 at Sauder Hall, and it's free.

Whew!

Right now I gotta get packed, water the plants, tidy up the house, practice...

You heard it first here...

You heard it first here...

The local press is just catching up on a story I broke way last spring.

Which in no way diminishes how impressive Steve's accomplishment is.

Congrats Steve. Your entire community is behind you.