We can change our looks, we can change our circumstances, we can even change our gender.  The "American Dream" is for all of us to be happy in a privately owned house with 1.5 cars in the driveway and to be grateful for the opportunity,  with a little luck and pluck, to be as rich as the thieves from Enron.  What we can't change is our IQ.  It is a twin we are born with who will be at our side our entire lives.

 

Pity the person born on the far end of the bell-shaped curve.  In a society relentlessly geared toward the middle, in politics, entertainment, education, literature, music, housing one can easily be out of touch with the vast majority.  Those unfortunate enough to have the genetic lottery cast them on the far left side of the curve are lost to a world of powerlessness, poverty, disconnectedness.  Those fortunate enough to land on the far right side of the curve often fall prey to cynicism and disconnectedness, lost in a world fashioned by and for others.

 

Our cultural, social, and political world is solidly skewed toward the center.  Our politicians have to pretend to be ordinary folks.  If they display their true intellect or the depth of their ambitions they risk alienating the voters.  We reward mediocre singers and songwriters with huge contracts.  Untalented actors foul the movie screens while superior actors can achieve large box office numbers only by appearing in inferior films.  Donald Trump is a folk hero.  Kelly Ripa is a celebrity.

 

We wonder why our schools are failing American children.  We need not look any further than at the television set that is turned on all day or at the sports hero who is glorified over the scholar.  Children need role models and this culture routinely manufactures role models who are exceptional for their beauty or their physical talent or their pluck and ambition that has placed them above all the rest.  Intellectuals are denigrated as "egg heads" or people without "common sence." 

 

Unfortunately this culture has, as with most everything else, commodified what role models we have.  Oprah, Steven King, Madonna, P Diddy, David Letterman, George Bush, Anthony Scalia, Barak Obama.  They are all "brand names" selling conservatism, horror, show biz.  You pick who is who.  Substance is lost in the search for instant name recognition.  Celebrity, notoriety, fame, adulation.  They are all indistinguishable.

 

We are the poorer for it.  Only when the best in us is encouraged by the best of us, only when we are able to let merit uplift us will we escape this muddle in which we find ourselves.          

 

 

Making up IS hard to do, especially in the rare instance where I did something wrong.  Apologies are never easy, but flowers do make it simpler.

 

I was rough on my husband the other day for no reason other than me being in a bitchy mood.  I didn't even have PMS to blame, although that hasn't stopped me from using it as an excuse in the past.  Not this time.  I'm a bigger woman now and I determined to accept the blame.  I also had all your advise that it's OK to send flowers to a guy.

 

I figured something simple, yet masculine.  Tulips!  They don't last, but they're seasonable, firm, strong. Like a bowlful of colorful jelly beans.   And baby's breath.  I always add the baby's breath.  Not too masculine, but pretty.

 

I picked Wednesday because that's the night the girls are at orchestra.  My make-up plan required a couple hours of privacy and a bed.  He got the flowers Wednesday morning with a note promising some fun later.  When he got home from work I had a light dinner ready with wine, candles, and no kids.  He got the idea.  I got him.  He got me.  We both got lucky.  It's not exactly worth having the fight, but the closeness that comes after make-up sex is pretty fantastic.    

I am such a bitch sometimes, and for no good reason.  Today I was in a hurry to get to work.  My husband seemed to always be in my way.  My daughters weren't getting ready fast enough.  Everybody and everything was irritating me.  Even the toast wouldn't pop up fast enough.  So I yelled.  I screamed my husband when he tried to hug me.  I screamed at the girls when they couldn't find pants.  I even screamed at the poor innocent toast and then savagly sliced it in two.

 

I think apologies are in order.  I find it upsetting that I take it out on others when I'm in a hurry and things aren't going well.  Today I couldn't find a clean bra, my skirt was at the cleaners, and it wasn't until I put on my third pair of pantyhose that I found one without a run.  It was a perfect storm of irritation.  And it's a rainy day to boot.

 

Of course my husband should know better than to try to defend himself when I'm in this kind of mood.  He actually tried to tell me that it was OK that he put Ashley's jeans in the closet.  Imagine!  I, on the other hand, had left her jeans right where she could find them--hanging on her closet door doorknob.  This is the nightmare that I face every morning!  Things that I brought upstairs and left in a perfectly logical place are moved to an even more logical place by my OCD husband.  No wonder I can never find anything.  Does he expect me to think logically before my third cup of coffee?

 

I think apologies are in order.  Mike should apologize to me for telling me, before my third cup of coffee and during my battle with my pantyhose, that I should put the clothes in the girls' closet and not on the doorknob.  That did not go over well.  I responded like any woman battling with her hose would respond.  "You can't tell me what to do!"  This response did not calm the waters.  The good ship "Bitch" was bobbing furiously in the stormy sea and was loading another broadside to fire at the underarmed dinghy "OCD Husband."  Luckly, "OCD Husband" sailed off to work with a curt "Goodby."

 

I'm sitting at work reflecting on this shipwreck of a morning.  I eventually found a skirt and a bra and a good pair of pantyhose and I got to the office on time.  I've had four cups of coffee and some yogurt and I'm feeling so much better.  Having re-read what I've written I agree--apologies are in order.  Is it OK to send men flowers? 

 

 

 

 

I visited the public library today to try to find a book for my daughter and I had an inspiration.  Buy one less book a month and use that money to pay for gas.  I'm already paying taxes for the library anyway.   

 

It's not that I don't like going to the library.  I love it.  It's just not a habit that I have.  I'll go to Borders or Barnes and Noble and buy lots of books that I will never read.  How much more efficient it would be to store all those unread books at the library. 

 

The library attracts and repels me at the same time, and for largely the same reason.  It has too many books.  I love to browse through the stacks searching for hidden treasures.  But at the same time  I come face-to-face with the ultimate futility of trying to acquire knowledge.  There's just too much to know and not enough time to learn it.  My home library is stocked with example after example of books that I thought would be good and that I hope to read sometime.  The library is stocked with books about subjects and areas of study that I didn't even know existed.  It makes your head swim.  Library vertigo.

 

I think semantics would be fun.  Semiotics even better.  I saw a biography of Pablo Casals and a new book about the Everglades.  I browsed the Grove music encyclopedia and studied the Dewey Decimal System poster.  I didn't even make it downstairs to the fiction section. 

 

I have this fantasy about starting at one end of the shelf and reading all the books in order until the other end.  I have better fantasies than that, but that's just my book fantasy.  There's something really attractive about taking the time, just for myself, no work, no chores, to read and think.  I imagine that fantasy could get old after awhile, just like my fantasy of of running away to Paris with George Clooney, a year of George might be too much, but I would love to give it a try.

I'm sitting at my computer enjoying Bruckner's Symphony #2 and watching my neighbor's giant screen TV across the street.  He was watching a basketball game, but now he's on the weather channel.  I can see a giant green blob headed in our direction.

 

I enjoy my neighbors.  We've lived in the same house for 19 years now and I know the people in at least 15 houses around us.  Our 'hood is at least 80 years old and is laid out in an old-fashioned grid pattern.  The grid, despite its seeming rigidity, gives us an incredible variety of walks.   We can meet and say hi to a lot of people in a typical walk.  Sometimes we get waylayed early on and spend more time chatting than walking.

 

We're  lucky to have detatched garages in our neighborhood.  People have to get out of their cars and walk to their door, creating random chance encounters with neighbors.  We have to acknowledge/deal with/talk to each other.  There is no avoiding it, even when my neighbor catches me grabbing the paper in my robe and slippers and with unwashed hair and no makeup.  This need for civility is very civilizing and humbling.

 

I enjoy talking to the older people who still refer to our house by the previous owners' name and who carry with them the history of this place.  I love the little kids who have the run of the block and who sell us girl scout cookies or band candy.  And I'm thrilled by the 120 plus trick-or-treaters who come to our door every Halloween.

 

I love our large elms and maples and I especially like the purr of the screech owls as they sit outside of our bedroom window.  They live in a hole in the maple.  I'm on constant lookout for owlets now.  A few years ago we had five of them hopping and fluttering around the yard and on our outdoor table and chairs.  If any of us got too close the parents would swoop at us menacingly.  

 

I love the spring when life explodes in the neighborhood.  Green trees and bushes, the sound of children, new babies in strollers.  We sit on our front porch drinking in the activity while drinking gin and tonics with lime and waylaying neighbors from their walks.  As dusk approaches we watch the bats fly in circles before us, catching insects and barely missing our heads.  Our yard is darker and softer on summer nights when the leaves obscure the streetlights and fireflies blink in the grass.

 

What will I do for my summer vacation this year?  Visit some friends, take my daughter to music camp, ride my bike, but mostly I'll be doing what Christopher Robin said he liked doing best--nothing.  "...just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."  And drinking in all that MY enchanted place has to offer. 

 

"Sitting there they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them in Galleons Lap."  "The House at Pooh Corner," Chapter 10, An Enchanted Place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

You can learn a lot about a university by going beyond the official tour.  Talk to the students, attend a class, visit the library and browse the stacks, and definitely check out the restaurants and bars.

 

We are slowly moving up the learning curve for evaluating colleges.  Visiting and evaluating schools is new to me.  I never did that with my parents.  I visited the University of Illinois once with my older sister but I was too drunk to remember anything about the school, except that I had a lot of fun and that college guys are really cute.  This formed the basis of my decision to go to school there for four years.

 

Fortunately, Mara is not that shallow.  Our visit to Illinois on Friday was entirely sober.  Mara had a one hour lesson with a violin professor who (wonder of wonders!) praised her playing and told her that she was on track for attending the UofI.  The poor girl has had a string of "character building" experiences so this positive feedback was as welcome as a spring rain.  The girl brightened up and bloomed and for the entire trip was as cheerful as I've seen her.

 

We left Champaign right after the lesson and drove to Indiana University in Bloomington.  After checking into our room Mara decided to stay inside and instant message her friends.  I had some of my own research to do.  We stayed by the courthouse square in downtown Bloomington, a delightful old square full of restaurants, bookstores and shops.  It even had a Talbot's and a Chico's.  I researched one bar.  Their house chardonnay was wonderful.  Then I walked by the student bar where Toots and the Maytals will be playing on Saturday.  I heard loud live music, the bar smelled of beer, and it was crowded with people half my age.  I give it an "A."

 

On Friday we left the car at the hotel and rode our bikes into campus.  We saw a lot of buildings on the official tour, lots of limestone, and Mara was able to chat with our guide about the violin program and the various professors.  After lunch we attended a colloquium on Queen Christina and her influence on the Arcadian Reform movement, lots of concepts, and I was happy to notice that Mara wasn't the only one out of the 30 academicians in attendence who was dozing off.  We rode our bikes around campus a little more and ended our day watching the chamber orchestra practice.  We wanted to see a practice in order to see the quality of the other musicians.  Quite excellent.  An extra bonus was that the conductor was Visiting Famous Composer John Harbison!  I was enthralled to be sitting 30 feet from him as he conducted.  And this only two weeks after seeing Famous Composer John Adams conduct the LA Phil in rehersal.

 

After the practice I introduced myself and Mara to Mr. Harbison who was a very nice man and who talked to us for ten minutes.  My daughter accused me of sucking up.  So?  Then we talked to two of the violinists who turned out to be wonderful girls and who helped us with more ideas about professors and who raved about the school. 

 

Right now Indiana is #1 on the list of schools we have visited.  Future visits will include Northwestern, Oberlin, Roosevelt University in Chicago, and the Cleveland Institute.  Road trips galore for this Thelma and Louise.  I can't wait and neither can Mara.          

 

       

I haven't been a lazy blogger, I've just been a busy blogger.  Too much to do with too little time to do it.

I paid for my week off with an extra busy work week when I returned.  This week finds me cramming five days of work into three and a half days.  The road trip starts at 12 noon on today. 

 

So why did I think that I had the time to go to the Chicago Symphony on both Saturday the 8th and Tuesday the 11th and attend a three hour violin/viola recital on Sunday?  Maybe I should trade in my cape, boots, and tights for a straight jacket.  Supergirl I am not.  Right now I'm Exhaustedwoman.

 

But my husband and I did hear an extraordinary program of Bach music on Saturday,  followed by wine and Russian delacacies at the Russian Tea Time restaurant.  He wore a suit, I wore my favorite black dress and new pair of black strappy heels.  It's springtime.  My toes can breath again!   It was a very romantic date that the two of us needed after being together as a family the entire week before. 

 

Sunday was recital day.  Mara finally got the chance to perform, from memory,  the Mendelssohn Violin concerto that she had been preparing for the last nine months.  The thirty five minute piece went beautifully, with only a few glitches in the third movement.  She even got called back to take a bow.  A first!  The recital ended with a Senior student who performed the Bartok Viola Concerto.  Mara's next piece will be Bartok's Violin Concerto #2.  

 

I took Monday off from music and on Tuesday I saw the Chicago Symphony perform "Findlandia", Smentena's "The Moldau," and Dvorak's 9th Symphony, the " New World."   Magnificent!  the only drawback was that I attended alone.  By then Mike and the girls were so burned out on music that I couldn't get anyone to go with me.  There's room in this strightjacket for only one.  

 

This weekend Mara and I are off to the Indiana and Illinois schools of music.  Tonight there's a New music ensemble featuring John Harbison's music.  And Mr Harbison will be there in person!  Be still my heart.  Tomorrow there 's a musicology colloquium on "Queen Christina: aesthetics and Italian buon gusto: L'Endimione and Arcadian reform."  I don't even know what any of that means, but I want to go.  My name is Carol Davis and I'm a musicaholic....       

Is there any more welcome word than "roadtrip?"  The one word says it all;  independence and escape, freedom Thelma and Louise style.

 

OK, so I'm being overly dramatic for a two night trip to the University of Illinois and Indiana University with my daughter Mara.  But I'm looking forward to some serious mother/daughter bonding this weekend.  Mara has her I-pod full of new music for me--White Stripes, The Strokes, and god knows who else.  I bought two new operas from BMG recently.  I will bring Janacek's "Jenufa," but I don't think that Strauss's "Elektra" would do for this weekend.

 

The purpose of the trip is for Mara to take a lesson with a professor at Illinois.  I hope he's kinder to her than the last one.  And as long as we're "down there" we're going to check out Indiana which, believe it or not, has one of the best music schools in the entire nation.  Indiana also has both "Carmen" and "Mama Mia" playing on Friday night, and also a screening of Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," a film that I have missed seeing somehow.

 

I do need to remember that this trip is for Mara.  It's not for her mother to relive her days as a co-ed and it's not for me to live vicariously through Mara.  I forget this sometimes.  I let the lines between myself and my daughter blur to the point that Mara has to ask me to back off.  At the last lesson she asked me if I would please not sit in on any future lessons. I'll respect that, but I'll certainly be listening outside of the door.

 

     

Last year Mike, Ashley and I made what we thought would be our last of many pilgrimages to Disneyworld.  After all, Ashley was 13 and we didn't see her wanting to pose for any more pictures with Chip and Dale.  So we went out in style.  We purchased park hopper passes and spent the morning at MGM, the afternoon at the Magic Kingdom, the late afternoon at Epcot for dinner in Italy, and back to the Magic Kingdom for fireworks, and finally to our car at MGM at 11:30 PM, wet and exhausted.

 

When I learned that we were going to Southern California, I suggested to Ashley that it might be fun (from a purely sociological view) to visit Disneyland and compare the two parks.  To my surprise she enthusiastically said yes.  Mike's reaction was a groaned grudging acceptance of the fact that these women would be subjecting him to yet another hellish day in the happiest place on earth.

 

Our first stop was the Peter Pan ride, followed by It's a Small World and the Haunted Mansion.  We "fast passed" Buzz Lightyear and rode that and Star Tours before leaving the park to go to the adjacent Califonia Adventure on our park-hopper pass.  My first impression of Disneyland was how small and compact it was.  The castle is tiny compared to Disneyworld's and the walk from one end of the park to the other is much shorter.  The biggest difference was the Small World ride.  At Disneyworld it is tucked away in a nondescript building across from Peter Pan.  At Disneyworld is occupies a moated pavillion with its own topiary and moving gizmos and animated marching soldiers who perform every hour on the hour.  It's magnificent!  The ride itself was as cloyingly saccharine as the Orlando version, but in a good way.  And that song...it's still stuck in my head.

 

I think Mike was ready to explode after Small World, so thank goodness the California Adventure park had Tower of Terror, the California Screamin' rollercoaster, and a brand new ride called Soarin'.   Manly rides.  The strangest experience for me came after exiting the Tower of Terror.  I've ridden it many times at MGM and when I left the attraction I was absolutely totally disoriented.  Everything was familiar, but strange.  I expected to be in Florida.  in fact for a few moments I actually thought I was in Florida.  It took a few wrong turns after the exit for me to finally realize where I was--in California.  When I shared this with Ashley later she told me that she had the same experience after exiting the Muppetvision attraction about an hour later.  What a wierd feeling.

 

We ended the evening with fireworks and the Indiana Jones ride.  That's it for Disney for now.  That is, until next year when the girls' high school orchestra will go to Disneyworld over spring break.  Oh Mike..."It's a small world after all."    

 

 

 

 

Here it is Wednesday and I'm still trying to adjust to Central Daylight Savings Time.  Or maybe I'm having trouble adjusting to this land without hills or palm trees.  This morning I walked on a Lake Michigan beach.  The largest wave was about six inches high, no roar, no ocean smell, and definitely no dolphins. 

 

Our main reason for going to LA was for daughter Mara to visit the University of Southern California and to have a lesson with one of their professors.  Our first full day there was a comedy of errors, but with a happy ending. 

 

We had rented a "premier" car, which turned out to be a Ford Crown Victoria.  We all took an immediate dislike to this enormous beast of a vehicle.  The abomination must have sensed our enmity beacuse bright and early on Monday, just hours before we were to be at USC, it refused to start.  Time for plan B, which we had to formulate on the spot.

 

Call rental company, arrange for a tow, husband Mike and tow driver push the car out of the basement lot into which the truck couldn't fit while I steer so that the wreched piece of machinery so it could be hooked up and dragged back to the airport.  Time was short and only two people could fit into the truck with the driver, so Mike and Mara rode in the truck with the driver to get a substitute (and hopefully functional) car and then go to USC.  Meanwhile Plan B called for Ashley and me to get a cab, go to the Amtrak station in San Juan Capistrano (just down the street from the mission with the swallows), take the train to LA and then the subway and bus to USC.

 

Mike and Mara arrived at USC in their upgraded Cadillac STS just in time to miss what they gathered was a boring and uninformative tour of the campus.  Ashley and I, aided by the miracle that is the cell phone met them on campus two hours later and just in time for Mara's lesson.  Her lesson with the professor became yet another exercize in humility for the poor girl as the professor, who is the principal second violinist of the LA Philharmonic, lectured Mara on how she was behind in her training, how difficult and competitive is the world of professional musicians, and how it was "not impossible" that she could be accepted to USC's music school.  Mara, feeling stunned, didn't cry but got out of that room as quickly as she could, leaving behind her binder of music.

 

That evening we discovered that Mara had left her music behind about the same time that we discovered the E-Mail from the professor inviting her to come to his house to pick up the music or to meet him at Disney Concert Hall before LA Phil practice.  He also invited us to stay for the practice, if we wished.  We wished and our wish was granted and on Wednesday, after a backstage tour, the four of us were the only spectators in the 2500 seat brand new state of the art auditorium as John Adams rehearsed the Philharmonic in a piece that Adams wrote.  John Adams is one of he preeminent American composers of our time and our very fortunate family was absolutely thrilled by this private concert.

 

Resiliant Mara practiced at least three hours a day in the condo for the rest of the trip.  On Friday she stayed at the condo while the rest of us went to Disneyland.  She practiced eight hours that day and eight more on Saturday.  I think the professor was right.  With her talent and determination, Mara can make it in music.  It's not impossible.   

 

         

The beach is a feast for all the senses.  The breeze on the skin and the cool touch of water on bare legs.  The fishy salt smell that screams ocean blocks away from the shore.  The bright sunlight and the deep blues, greens, and greys of the water.  And the roaring of the waves, the whistling of the wind, and the gentle chime of rock upon rock as seafoam water flows over the pebbly beach.

 

Every beach is different.  In Michigan the fresh-water beaches climb to gigantic dunes hundreds of feet high.  In Maine the beaches are narrow and cold and rocky.  Cape Hattaras beaches are soft and windy and wild while South Florida's Atlantic coast is quite pacific.  Sanibel Island's beaches are covered with marine treasures and dolphins swim in bathtub-warm water just yards from the shore.  The Pacific beaches in central Mexico are warm and inviting to swimmers and snorkelers. 

 

Like Mexico's beaches, I found our beach by San Juan Capistrano to be breathtakingly beautiful,  framed by foothills and rocky outcroppings, not dull and flat like the east coast beaches.  The water and air were bracingly cool and I can close my eyes and imagine the feeling of the firm sand between my bare toes.  We experienced some thrilling things on our trip to California--the LA Opera,  the Getty Center and the LA county Art Museum's Japanese pavillion, Disneyland, the awesome cactus garden in Blboa Park in San Diego, the LA Philharmonic--but not one of those experiences could approach the simple elemental majesty of standing amongst the waves and listening to the rhythmic clattering of tiny pebbles all around me. 

 

That was the highlight of my trip to California.  Like the sublime septet that I heard in "The Marriage of Figaro,"  the waves of sound washed over and delighted me.  I closed my eyes and I could hear in the clattering of each rock something as timeless as the Earth.  And in that extatic moment I was connected with everything that preceeded me and all that is a part of me and I knew that I was inhabiting the happiest place on earth.          

 

    

We're back safe and sound and tired from SoCal.  Ashley commented that with the time change and loss of two hours on the flight back we experienced a 21 hour day yesterday.  I'm certainly feeling those lost 3 hours right now.

 

All I have time for right now is the short list, details to follow.  Walking on beach, trade hated and malfunctioning Crown Victoria for a Cadillac, visit USC, San Diego, Getty Center, rehersal of LA Phil with John Adams conducting, LACMA, Sunset Avenue, "The Marriage of figaro," Disneyland, bike riding on beach, watching sunset over beach by fire, whale watching where we saw five grey whales, hummingbirds, birds of paradise, and the sound of pebbles on the beach.

 

It was a glorious and exhausting week.  EVERYBODY had a great time, even my jaded sixteen-year-old and my hard-to-please husband.  More about that later.