Mara called from college today.  She desperately needs $20 so she can go see the Chicago Symphony perform Tchaikovsky's 6th tomorrow.  Who can blame her?  Just typing in the words "Tchaikovsky 6th" has me humming the march from the third movement.  In fact I was planning on playing hookey from work tomorrow afternoon to go to the concert myself.  Needless to say I was an easy touch for the $20.

 

Last week and this week's concerts are special for the CSO.  They are being led by Ricardo Muti, who hasn't conducted the CSO for thirty years.  I was at last Friday's performance of Prokoviev's 3rd Symphony and Ravel's "Bolero" and I was plesantly surprised to see that the second coming of Muti wasn't overhyped.  In fact, the performance was by turns harrowing, lithe, joyful, contemplative, and always vivacious.  Maestro Muti would stomp in the direction of the celli and they would groan in response.  He would crouch in almost a full squat and while rising twist from the violins to the violas, their sound rising in turn.  At times Muti would jump into the air, actually jump up several inches to drive a cresendo. 

 

I thought David Robertson was demonstrative with his stick, but he's no Muti.  Gustavo Dudamel last year was just as astonishing as Muti, but for the interpretation he gave of Mahler's 1st, not for his conducting.  Barenboim is an energetic conductor, but he makes it look like work.  Boulez, Haitink, and Chailly get wonderful results with a minimum of effort and motion.   I have not seen the kind of energetic focus and intensity and sheer joy as I saw in Muti in any conductor since Sir Georg Solti. 

 

After this weekend Maestro Muti will be taking the CSO to Europe over the next few weeks.  I've convinced myself.  I definitely will play hooky tomorrow...after all it's the 6th.  Tomorrow my daughter and I will be at Orchestra Hall to say bon voyage to our great band. 

 

   

Fire is so endlessly facinating.  My husband and I sat in front of the fire pit for over three hours last night and enjoyed every minute of it.  Me in my little pink hoodie and blanket, he in his just plucked from storage flannel shirt.  We talked, we drank, we stirred the embers and talked some more.  I wondered aloud how this could be so much more entertaining than anything on television.  Mike gave me one of those "Duh" looks. 

 

So we sat in the dark flamelit night and imagined ourselves on some faraway beach or by a quiet lake in the north woods.  We talked about how this is what people did for thousands of years, sat around the fire and told stories.  We talked about our plans and our past.  We recounted the events of the weekend.  We took stock and waxed rhapsodically. Mostly we just shared.  It astounds me how we can find so much to talk about after all these years together.

 

As the night grew colder and our supply of wood shrank we pushed ourselves closer to each other and to the fire pit.  The warm embers drew us in.  Each tiny flame was a mystery.  As we were drawn in, our world grew.  Our backyard became as big and open as an Illinois prairie, as starlit as the Wisconsin hills.  Our heritage grew to include those billions upon billions of people who have done this exact same thing--warmed themselves by the embers of a dying fire.  

 

For something as ephemeral as fire, there is something real and tangible in that untouchable flickering.  Kind of like the people watching it.      

 

  

I just finished re-reading my post from yesterday and I'm exhausted.  How does she do it, I wondered.  Caffein, amphetamines, no sleep?  No, just the intensive training in multitasking that comes with being a mother.

 

I snuck out of work a few hours early today.  I needed some time to myself...to decompress.  The sun is shining, a light breeze is blowing through the window and I have the house to myself.  We all need a little peace, a little pause in the headlong rush.  I'd certainly go crazy if I paused for too long, but I'd go just as crazy if I never paused.

 

So I'll pop in a CD, Bruckner, I think, get a cup of coffee, and sit down with a pile of unread book reviews.  Ahhh...languor and the illusion of accomplishment.  What a delightful combination! 

 

  

It's amazing how right after Labor Day the pace of life suddenly quickens.  Ashley is back in school, and in cello lessons, and in orchestra, and her quartet is playing a wedding on Saturday with a Friday rehersal.  She's on her own for her rehersal because we have tickets for the Chicago Symphony on Friday.  Muti's conducting the CSO in Ravel's "Bolero."  I can't wait.

 

Before the concert we'll be meeting daughter Ashley for dinner.  She's happy to be going out with us because she realizes the irony of now that she's a college student in downtown Chicago she can no longer afford the downtown Chicago restaurants.  I can't wait to see her and to check in on how she's doing.  I gather from our short telephone calls that she's doing OK, but I have to wonder just how OK she's doing socially when she was in her dorm practicing her violin last Saturday evening.  But her first concert is just three weeks away and they're playing Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.  That's pretty demanding for a brand new freshman.

 

After a lazy August, work is picking up.  All the lawyers are back from vacation and they're keeping us pretty busy.  I've been so occupied with preparing a file for trial that it's been hard to find time to blog.  I need to re-examine my priorities.  My poor blog and my Spaces friends have been so neglected lately. 

 

It will take some getting used to, but I love being busy.  Friday we have the Symphony and on this Saturday we hope to take a 20 mile bike ride in the morning and have Mike's parents over for a cookout that evening.  Wish me luck on that.  On Sunday I definitely will not go to church, I don't think my legs will be up to it, but Ashley and I will go to a Chamber Concert in the afternoon and leave manly Mike to watch the Bears game with his friends.  Next Saturday we have a church retreat (let me introduce the stewardship chair, moi) and on Sunday we'll be sailing on Lake Michigan with another couple.  During the week I'll be meeting with my book club for a little book discussion and a lot of wine, food, and gabbing. 

 

I'm off to a meeting right now that I'll be late for.  No rest for the wicked.

 

           

I've think I've recovered from the trauma of my last post.  Ouch...It still hurts to think about what happened, in more ways than one.

 

Today I'm thinking about "doomsday scenerios."  A B-52 mistakenly laden with nuclear cruise missles flies over half the US and my first reaction is "so what, nothing happened, why even bother to tell us?"  The Illinois legislature can't pass a budget that funds mass transit and the governor gutlessly refuses to OK any tax increases (except on cigarettes)  and I chalk that up to politics as usual.  The disastrous war in Iraq slogs on and the globe just gets warmer and I shrug and go to the next page of the newspaper.  But when Steve Fossett disappears I'm all worried about this guy.  What's wrong with this picture?  What should bother me doesn't, what's irrelevent does. 

 

There must be something comforting about the "little picture."  We can empathize with another person's bad situation, even Lindsay Lohan's.  But when it comes to a problem that's statewide, or national, or, god forbid, global the blinders go on.  Unless you're a conspiracy theorist or horror movie addict the problems are too big, too scary, too potentially disastrous to even contemplate.  And we're too tiny and powerless to even bother to try to change things. 

 

So I read my New York Times and my Chicago Tribune and my New York Review of Books and try to tell myself that I'm well informed and that I care when the real truth is that I allow myself to understand and care more about Steve Fossett than Darfur.  To my shame, I've discussed the plight of Paris Hilton with friends while I rarely share my thoughts about the suffering of Mexican immigrants or the Palistinian people.  The issues are too big, too complicated, and it's too scary to contemplate the inhuman things of which people are capable. 

 

What doomsday scenerio?  I think doomsday has already come and gone.  It came when we bargained with the devil to get "free" entertainment from commercial TV.  It came when we allowed the government to scrap the equal time doctrine in broadcasting and to allow merger after merger of media conglomerates.  It came when we greedily accepted tax cuts, and it comes each day we refuse to pay our fair share for the good things that our government provides...education, transportation, security, health care, the list is endless. 

 

I hope that together we can prevent tomorrow's doomsday. 

 

 

 

Nooner just wrote a post about his most embarassing moment.  Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I'll accept his invitation to use this idea.

 

I could write about those times I've left the ladies room with the back of my skirt tucked into my underwear, but that has happened way too often to be truly embarassing.  There was the time I was taking pictures of a bank for a church slide show and later got a call from the police who were wondering just what was I doing...too private to be embarassing.  Once in high school another cheerleader and I hid in the boys' locker room on a dare...more stupid and dangerous (what were we thinking?) than embarassing.  I could also write about all those times I've been way overdressed or way underdressed for an occasion...again way too frequent to be embarassing.

 

No, my most embarassing moment had to be when I tore my ACL in the shower.  Thet one event combined stupidness, clumsiness, nakedness, and lots of witnesses...and a twenty-nine year old me with a poor body image...a perfect storm of embarassment. 

 

I had just finished an aerobics class at the health club and I went to the locker room to shower and change.  This wasn't one of those fancy health clubs with private showers, but a YMCA with a shared shower and room for a dozen women or so.  The class was crowded that day so there were already at least six women showering when I started.  Usually I would wear flip flops in the shower, the floors were pretty nasty, but that day I padded in on my bare feet. 

 

We would usually bring our own soap and shampoo and place them on the metal tray next to the showerhead.  I washed myself and rinsed and then started to wash my hair.  When I grabbed my shampoo I must have knocked my bar of soap off the tray.  I didn't notice the deadly soap on the floor because I had my eyes closed while shampooing.  I was rinsing my hair when I stepped to the side and felt my right foot hit hit soap bar.  Woosh, my right leg went out from under me.  Bam, I collided into the girl showering next to me, who hit the girl next to her.  Wham, my left foot slipped on the wet floor and down I went.  I distinctly remember hearing a "pop" in my right knee as I went down and I knew right away that my aerobics days were done for awhile.

 

I laid on the wet floor crying with my shower sprinkling on my head.  The girl I had bumped into was screaming sympathetically with me.  Finally, one of the other girls turned off the shower and a nurse from the class directed the other girls in carrying me from the shower, dripping wet, to a bench in the locker area.  I was so embarassed.  The nurse had me lay flat while four girls, two on the right, two on the left, crooked their arms under my back and legs and carry me.  They were naked, I was naked, the nurse was naked, but we all kind of forgot about that as we dealt with the emergency.  To this day I remember them carrying me while I kept repeating, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry."  My florist bill was so high that month with all the thank you flowers that I sent. 

 

I was in shock and I barely remembered my girlfriend helping me dress (back into my sweaty aerobics outfit, not into my work dress and heels) and driving me to the hospital emergency room.  The x-rays were negative, the later MRI wasn't, and my doctor said that while I didn't need surgery, I wouldn't be running, skiing, doing aerobics, or even walking for awhile.  Husband Mike had the joy of carrying around one year old Mara for awhile; he threw his back out at least twice.  During my convelescence I found other ways to be physically active.  I soon became pregnant with Ashley and by the time my belly got really big my knee was pretty well healed up.  Everything worked out just fine.