the day of rest

we had a nice christmas. as usual I was awoken by my siblings at an ungodly 6:15 am, made coffee, admired the tableau of presents under the tree, opened said presents, donned all my new clothes at once (fuzzy socks, new sweater, the all-important fancy new compression running tights), and went out to play ball with our black lab, max, who gets a few new fetch toys in his stocking each year.


(the backyard)

after the morning's festivities there was french toast to make, and wrapping paper to clean up; the dining room table to set; toys to momentarily play with before company arrived. (we had particular fun with the remote control sumo wrestlers). then my aunt & uncle and cousins got here. there was eating, and more presents, and some sipping of ridiculous, insanely expensive, moderately good coffee. there was some dreamy browsing online for a pair of tall riding boots, subsidized by a christmas gift card. there were kids running around yelling excitedly.

there were, as always, chickens.


(chuck, charlotte, & peepers)

the rooster, by the way, has honed his intimidating death stare.





and had not crowed much in a few weeks, but did rise to the occasion when I threatened him by wearing a puffy white coat, flapping my wings, and strutting around with my beautiful red comb:



we ate dinner at my grandmother's, fourteen of us at a table crammed so tightly into her small living room that in order to get up from our chairs, we had to climb over furniture. there was pie. and ice cream. pretty much I'll probably never eat again after the last four days.

today was much more of the same: a morning spent in blankets on the couch, then a trip to western maryland to see my aunt, uncle, and cousins, whom I was very close to as a child and whom I hadn't seen in a year. we watched football, ate too much lasagna, and probably scared my cousin's new girlfriend. the next generation, ages 2 to 13, ran through the house with various toys. this is the holiday for me: messy and loud, with too much eating; lots of reminiscing, teasing each other about stories from our past. we have an ever increasing number of small children in the house, and the kids' table, once ours, gets filled with other faces. there's a lot of coffee, and everyone's tired, and on lucky years, it's snowing just enough to be pretty but not enough to be meddlesome. by the end, you're overstuffed and you've laughed too hard and you probably need a nap.

yesterday -- christmas day -- was day 101. I ran a mile and a half in my new tights. today is my first day off since september 15. if I really wanted, I still have 40 minutes to get in a run, but I'm forcing myself to stop. this, then, is where the streak ends. and I am sad. tomorrow once again is day one.

merry christmas, everyone.

100.

These journeys are quiet. They mark my days with adventure
too precious for anyone else to share, little gems
of darkness, the world going by, and my breath, and the road.

-- from run before dawn, william stafford

day 99

Our ancestors were farmers
they did their talking with their shoulder muscles
they got up at dawn and baked their brains
all day in forty-acre cornfields
they liked to listen to the singing of their bodies
blood set in motion, the hum of air
the virtues they most prized were
tenacity, endurance, raw physical energy
an unlimited capacity to absorb punishment
they could smell rain twenty miles away
they had the habit of gazing heavenward
as if what they most wanted to understand
would be coming from that direction and
what came never ceased to amaze them

-- not unlike the runner, joe david bellamy







day 99: a rough headwind, a distilled sunny sky, two dead deer on the side of the road. a stomachache. this penultimate day is bittersweet.

two years, penniless

I bought Cookie two years ago today. Unlike last year, I can't say we've been on TV or we've improved our collection; in fact, in my lesson last night, my instructor said, "Wow, I can't believe it's been two years," and I replied, "Me neither. I kind of thought we'd be better than this?"

We had a rough ride on Saturday, which was very blustery here in Portland. Horses don't like wind, because they're prey animals who rely on their sense of hearing, which wind distorts. In the absence of that sense, they rely on each other, which on Saturday meant that every time one horse spooked, everybody spooked! Good times. And since I ride #1 Spook Master, I was often the accelerant to disaster. Every time we reached the far end of the arena (which overlooks the front field of the property), either my mare or the other mare in the arena would jump 4 feet toward the inside of the arena. The other mare was slower about it and more prone to simply balking. Cookie prefers what I like to call the "Arab teleport" method. Arabians seem singularly able to travel faster than the speed of light at times of even minor distress. Keeping the horse between you and the ground can prove ... challenging. In a fit of impatience I grew tired of shying predictably in the same place and made her stand still in that place, resolving to let her move from it only when she'd relaxed. So what did she do? She stood stock still at high alert for about 45 seconds before jumping off all four feet, scaring all four horses in the arena, and causing one seven-year-old girl to fall off her horse.

Classy.

(The little girl is fine, and bravely got right back on).

Last night in my lesson Cookie had her danger ears back on, but to her credit she trusted me enough to put a lid on the spooking, and she was actually a very nice ride (although she was constantly dipping her inside shoulder, wanting to avoid the scary dark world outside the rail, and I was constantly having to hold her up/boot her back to the outside of the ring). It's exhausting to have a horse constantly on edge, but it does make for a nicer ride than she is on the days she's lazy. At least I don't have to work so hard.

Things I have taught her:
- to pick up her feet on verbal command ("foot") and likewise to hold them until I say "down"
- to stand still while mounting. finally. almost.
- peppermints = good
- how to recognize the peppermint wrapper sound
- to never ever ever be in my way while I'm cleaning her stall
- likewise to never ever ever be in my space. ever. unless invited. (pushy horses are a big pet peeve of mine)
- the verbal cue "blanket," which I say just before sticking her turnout blanket over her head. (she stops what she's doing and drops/raises her head)

Things she has taught me:
- how to sit a buck
- how it's important to have the courage to get on and stay on even on scary days
- how to ride the Arab teleport
- how to sit the world's bounciest trot
- what being a proud mama feels like. she's so pretty that I always get compliments from strangers, at home or away. just Saturday, the mom of a little girl taking lessons came over to say, "that is a very beautiful horse."

I got a big kick out of looking at her sale ad earlier today, which I saved to my computer after I bought her. Under "Activities" she's listed as "Show/Trail/Cow Horse." Cow horse! Hilarious. She probably is, but she hasn't had a Western saddle on her back since the day I bought her. Maybe some day.

what I'd like to do with her, someday:
- jump real fences
- take a dressage test
- teach her to smile (working on it)
- ride an endurance race
- hack out on more trails
- gallop
- go on a hunt (this is my lifetime bucket list goal)

so! here's to one more year of not falling off my horse.

more miscellany

things you don't often hear fron conductors
"I don't know what that instrument is, but could you play it louder?"

what all that kale looked like

(click through for notes)

for reference, those are full-size bell peppers; I had to stand on a chair to get the full shot.

more things the cats have destroyed
makeup brushes, which were somehow extracted from my zipped makeup bag and thereupon drooled all over
about 30 q-tips, pulled from a not-quite-closed bathroom drawer, drooled upon, and scattered throughout the bathroom and hallway
cotton balls, likewise
bathroom rug, repeatedly
bathroom towels, not destroyed but climbed upon and coated in cat hair
my sanity, increasingly

what I'm yearning for lately
another thanksgiving furlough

how I only partially missed halloween


I didn't dress up this year -- until the last minute, I thought I'd be working all three nights of halloween weekend -- but a certain someone and I did at least pick and carve pumpkins. I think I like his better. it's sly. plus, the face of mine (on the left) is very obviously rotting at the bottom. we can't all be beautiful all the time, I suppose.

rehearsal notes, etc.

serious issues discussed in the production meeting for hansel & gretel
the relative size and color of cuckoo feathers versus partridge feathers
bubbling sinks
the logistics of getting crew members to physically hold up a set wall mid-show

things I've discovered my cats eating, chewing, or otherwise destroying in the past week
newspapers
my bike tires
my bike pedals
thumbtacks off the wall
the carpet
the fuzzy throw on my futon

ways I was a big girl on my 30-mile bike ride yesterday, because sometimes you have to celebrate small milestones
I rode on the street
WITH CARS
I remembered how to ride no-hands
I crossed several major streets without falling off my bike or getting run over
I rode on a really big street. with cars!
I lost my way 3 times, biked off onto 3 small adventures, and then resumed my journey

oh by the way
I forgot to tell you I bought a bike back in September.



Portland is simultaneously the nicest place to bike -- because it's so bike-friendly -- and the scariest, because everybody and their grandma is a cyclist and I haven't been on a bike in 5 years. Of course there's that stupid tired old cliche about how you never forget, and while that's true in the vague sense, you sure do forget how to turn properly, steer, or angle your pelvis so your butt doesn't turn to hamburger. Fortunately I remembered how to do these things now, mostly.

excerpts from the rehearsal notes from hansel & gretel
"could the jello be taller?"

"thanks for the beads today -- they saved rehearsal. thankfully, no one tried to eat them."

"Super Maggie is the cake car driver."

"The cake car makes horrible squealing sounds when rolling around."

"Could we try 2 nasal aspirators full of glitter?"

"Please ADD a child's head in a plastic bag for the Act 3 refrigerator dressing."

"One of the kids is dropped to the ground by the Witch. This explains some of the previously existing dents."

"Please give the lard some weight."

"The hand with the removable finger has broken."

maybe the best rehearsal note ever, from our 2005 Tosca:
"The main curtain was blowing upstage, hitting the writing desk at the end of act II, the desk in act III, and causing the dead Cavaradossi to come alive to pull his arm upstage before the final curtain hit."

what stress can do for you
last Thursday (day 29) I ran a 6:46 mile. (no. 16). I wasn't even trying.

bread crumbs

I walked in to this late last week.



they're the gingerbread children for hansel & gretel, which began rehearsals today. that's right -- gingerbread children. not how you used to bake them, are they? I like to just call them "the children." I love how perfectly horrifying they are.



it's been a tough time for me in opera land. the parts for the opera are in our library, but although I knew they were heavily marked and quite old, I had no idea the extent of the damage they have taken over the years. we have not done this opera since 1992, but it looks as though the parts have been rented out since then and were last used in some sort of excerpt concert.



each part had about 25 cuts marked, all of them in heavy pencil.



some of them in red pencil, which we only use when we don't want something to be easily eraseable. the edges of many parts were yellowed with age. the piccolo part had sustained water damage.

even in its original state, the music must have left much to be desired. the oboe part was clearly photocopied from an original master by the publisher:



and contrary to the norm, the parts that were in the worst shape were the wind parts. usually it's the strings you have to contend with; they are constantly marked and erased as bowings are added or modified, and so the paper takes a beating, and sometimes the ink does too. however, for no obvious reason, our wind parts were just awful. they were marked to the hilt, and in many cases -- piccolo, horn iv, trombones, timpani, & harp were the worst -- the ink job had faded to an unacceptable degree. like, the staff lines were missing.



there's no glare on that photo. the staff lines in the harp part were virtually non-existent. I could have ordered new versions of these parts (and in fact in two cases I will) but because I have no intention of keeping the set, there's no use in buying a smattering of wind parts. what do you do instead? you take a ruler and a pen -- ballpoint in this case, because all your nicer ink runs on this paper -- and you re-ink.



doesn't that look like fun.

the parts were just set out this morning, a week beyond when I normally set them out. the orchestra, accustomed to having their music three weeks before their first rehearsal, began frothing at the mouth sometime around tuesday afternoon and badgered me so persistently that I refused to answer my phone on wednesday, knowing that if I answered every call that came in I very sincerely would probably spend at least an hour on the phone. a precious hour of marking bowings and re-inking music. needless to say, they're happy to be picking their parts up today, and I am happy to have them out, although I still have 6 parts to mark: I ran out of time and opted to give two of the string sections practice parts until I could finish their "real" ones.

did you know that a very real hazard of doing nothing but pencilling and erasing parts for 2-3 weeks is that you vaguely lose feeling in your fingertips from holding the pencil for so long? I am not kidding.

turn, turn, turn

tuesday night, we had our first studio artist recital of the season, for our mezzo, who is in her second year of the program. as usual, rob, our associate music director/pianist/resident fabulous person, asked me to turn pages for him. and by "asked" I mean he knows exactly how to use flattery to his advantage. I've been doing this task for him for several years now, so it's a given that I will, but nevertheless he really heaps on the praise. "I mean, who else could I possibly get?" he will say. "there is no one better."

insert eye roll.

page turning is a funny business. in one special way, it's just like being a music librarian: if you're very good at it, no one will notice you at all. it's also incredibly terrifying. I've met very few people who've ever turned pages who aren't petrified at the task, and I've only met one person who likes doing it. why is it so awful? observe:

1. you're likely sight-reading
1a. you're likely sight-reading very difficult music, and/or music whose vocal line is in another language
1b. on rare unlucky occasions these two things collide to produce something like mussorgsky. it's next to impossible to follow the piano part at sight and when you take a panicked look at the voice line you realize it's in cyrillic. then you speak in page-turner code: you look directly down at the piano player with a veiled but stricken look on your face. this look says "IF YOU DON'T NOD VIGOROUSLY AT THE PAGE TURN WE ARE BOTH GONERS."

2. you have to constantly get up and down and you hope that nobody notices you.
2b. you have to do this without touching the piano or getting in the way of the pianist.
2c. you have to time your getting-up so that you're not poised over the music for an excruciating length of time, hovering over the pianist for the next five minutes.

3. you have to turn the pages.
3a. just one page at a time (most of the time).
3b. at the right time.
3c. quietly.
3d. without the music then folding back to the previous page.

anatomy of a page turn
you glance at the tempo marking. hopefully it's in a language you read. and by that I mean hopefully it just says "allegro non troppo" or "lentement" and not something ridiculously long-winded and absurdly poetic. the french are terrible about this. the tempo marking is a sentence. by the time I've read the whole thing, I've probably missed the turn. and I speak french.

the pianist begins playing, and you corroborate what you thought the tempo would be with what it actually is. hopefully you have some semblance of an idea where the beat is. you don't always know. otherwise you wait for the singer, hope s/he comes in at the appropriate time, and figure it out from there. if that fails (or there's no voice on the first page) you stand up and prepare your turn and then just hope for a clear head nod.

important: you look to see if the music goes past one page. sometimes you don't even need to turn! those pages are great. but few and far between.

the moment arrives. if you're me, unless the music is very slow, you stand up a staff above the last staff of the page, so that you can make sure you get the music in your hand and have time to turn. this also reassures the pianist that you're ready, you know where you are in the music, and you are GONNA turn that page, damnit.

you turn the page. but wait! I have a little secret. rob taught it to me years ago, as the differentiating factor between passable page turners and truly great page turners. at the beginning of the last staff, you carefully fold over the top corner of the page you're about to turn, so that the pianist can peek ahead and remind himself what's there. I try to do this without casting a shadow on the music, which is hard.

now you turn the page. just one page. you sit down, hopefully with a modicum of grace. then you sit very, very still. you clasp your hands in your lap, both to keep yourself from fidgeting and also because you're terribly nervous and they're probably shaking. you continue to follow the music, and as you do you begin to wonder, is my head cocked at a funny angle? you're no longer convinced you understand the mechanisms of your body. do I usually sit like this? is my neck jutting out? is everyone looking at me and saying, why is her face turned unnaturally to the right like that? you have absolutely no idea what's right anymore.

you get up and turn another page. maybe this time you turn a little earlier than you think you should have and then once you've sat down, you quietly berate yourself for not getting it exactly right, although you're not actually sure it was too early, and after all rob probably has it all memorized anyway, even if he thinks he doesn't. and you have a terrible itch on your nose but you can't touch it until the end of the piece, or at least until the next turn.

god help you if you have to sneeze.

A surprising thing: the return of evening rehearsals has given me, unexpectedly, the time I was hoping to have all summer. In the mornings I often putter around the kitchen, making food for the week and listening to the radio. I can opt to work a long day -- a normal 9-5 plus rehearsal, and then have a second whole day to myself (in addition to the one day I get off a week during production times). I can go for a run and then drive out to the garden, to sigh sadly over my eternally green tomatoes. I had been in many ways dreading the return of opera season; summer felt too short and too cold, and I already didn't have enough time for everything, without the inclusion of rehearsals. It turns out I've gotten so used to this schedule that I've grown to prefer it.

This time of year -- you know, it pains me to say it, but I love it. Memory plays a large part: I moved here at the beginning of October, five years ago. Every year these last few weeks of September and first few of October enchant me. It's cooler, and raining, but the world hasn't quite shaken off the last fine filaments of summer. The air smells like leaves. Mid-morning runs through the woods are damp and earthy, and afterwards there's mud up and down your legs.

Pagliacci/Carmina Burana opens on Friday. Contrary to tradition, I have not yet bought myself a new opening night dress. (I buy one new one at the start of every opera season). Partially this is because I have at least 15 suitable dresses in my closet; but mostly it's because I'd like to save my prettiest dress-wearing moments for when a certain someone comes back from the other side of the planet, which he'll do in two weeks exactly. Not that I'm counting.

"Song," Frank O'Hara

Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian's
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now

#19

the vaux's swifts at chapman elementary school, number #19. they are a little bit impossible to capture, being so tiny, flying at dusk.







they gather in number for awhile, swooping in great arcs and spirals before descending in a whirl down into the chimney. occasionally a bird of prey waits in hopes of dinner.

pretty night for it, huh?


(what happens if I complete my list with half a year to spare? I worry about these things.)