Mozart

I'm listening to Mozart's Symphony 36 in C- the Linz.

This past weekend Opera Columbus did a good job with The Marriage of Figaro. In my pre performance talks I mentioned that some productions of this work depict Count Almaviva not only as unpleasant but as violent-a wife beater. The Countess becomes an abused wife. I can't hear this at all in Mozart's music. Mozart did everything in music better than anyone else (except Bach-although Bach wrote no operas) What Mozart did not do was violence. There's no raging bloodshed in any Mozart I've ever heard, opera or otherwise. There's joy, sorrow, grief, anger, sex, love, love and more love, laughter, fear, unhappiness, even tragedy. But where is Mozart ever violent? I don't hear it. His music is all about grace and proportion, and the humanity that lives within. But blood and guts, not really. The human heart and all its joys and perils, yes.

Now, back to the Linz. What a gift on a rather dreary day!

The Listening Table

This past weekend's Columbus Symphony program was superb. I'm so pleased we got a fine live broadcast Saturday night. Larry Rachleff conducted Rachmaninoff' s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Symphony 11 of Shostakovitch, The Year 1905. Kirill Gerstein was the piano soloist in the Rachmaninoff and he was dazzling. The audience fell in love with him. Conductor Rachleff was unknown to me (where have I been?!?) Sensational. He had an immediate grasp of Shostakovitch's gripping score-and he sold it it brilliantly. I could have heard the entire concert all over again and I suspect most of the audience felt the same way.

Inspired by this, I've put away Bellini and Monteverdi and Maria Callas temporarily and am now concentrating on

Shostakovitch String Quartets
Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Dvorak Symphony 8
Liszt Piano Sonata in b minor (with Kirill Gerstein)

A wonderful journey awaits.

Greatest Composers?

A young friend recently e mailed to ask if I'd seen the New York Times series by Anthony Tommasini naming the 10 greatest composers. Here's my reply:

I saw the Times piece and the media. I imagine Tommasini was told by his editors to do something really provocative, hence this study. I never do these "best of" lists well. I can't get away from subjectivity. To me, greatness in any endeavor belongs to those who break the mold and force the rest of us to think in a different way. So my list would be something like this:

Josquin Missa Pape Marcellae
Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, L'Orfeo, Poppea
Bach Passions, Brandenburg Concerti, Cello Suites, everything
Haydn-perfecting the string quartet
Mozart everything
Beethoven symphonies, quartets, Missa Solemnis, everything
Wagner Tristan und Isolde
Mahler Symphony 3, Das Lied von der Erde
Stravinsky Rite of Spring
Schonberg Moses und Aron
Ives Concord Sonata

That's 11 , not 10-but its my blog so what the hell.

And yes, it breaks my heart to omit Verdi and Puccini. Their operas have given me more pleasure then many of the above named, but truly great in the mold breaking sense, I'm afraid. One could argue for Gershwin. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Dvorak, all magnificent (what's more exquisite than Schubert's Die Forelle?) but they don't predict what is to come.

Anybody want to list their favorite composers?

Just Kids

La boheme, with its description of student poverty and fatal illness amid the rooftops of Paris is only romantic and beautiful because of Puccini's music. It may be true that a lot of us keep a fond memory of our basement apartments and hopeless love affairs from a time gone by, but who really wants to turn back the clock? Poet-Rocker Patti Smith does just that with her book Just Kids. This was the National Book Award Winner and gave new profile to an artist I knew best from Gilda Radner's SNL riff in the '70s as "Candy Slice". ("Let's get together....and get sick!")

The center of this book is Smith's long relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. They began as nice kids from suburbia. Mapplethorpe was an altar boy from a devout Catholic family. They met and connected in New York. Patti was on a blind date that was not going well. A young man walked by and she managed to whisper, "Hey, pretend you're a friend and help me get out of here." Robert did. And for several years, the two were inseparable.

These years, late 60s, early 70s, were years of homelessness-sleeping on front stoops in Brooklyn, panhandling and squats. They were years when two people were struggling to create: poetry and pictures-which morphed into music and photography. The days of controversy over Mapplethorpe's photography ("Piss Christ") postdate this book. This is a memoir about becoming. Along the way they live in New York's seedy and wonderful Chelsea Hotel (Virgil Thomson upstairs and Martha Graham down the hall) and we frequent the adjacent El Quixote or Max's Kansas City. Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol and his coterie make regular appearances. But the book is about Patti and Robert, friends, soul mates (overused but there's no better word here) lovers. They are two people who can't live without each other until sucess and sexualty separate them. Both get to the top of their fields, but there is no ego in this book .The tone is of truth telling. There's nothing sensational in this writing of two lives that were, frankly sensational.

At night, after trudging through the snow I found him waiting for me in our apartment, ready to rub my hands to make them warm. He seemed always in motion, heating water on the stove, unlacing my boots, hanging up my coat, always with one eye on the drawing he was working on. He would stop for a moment if he noticed something. Most of the time, it seemed as if the piece was fully formed in his mind. He was not one for improvising. It was more a question of executing something he saw in a flash.


Patti's album Horses-for which Mapplethorpe did the photography- launched her career. Mapplethorpe found a patron and created the images that disturb many to this day. Patti Smith married in 1980 and had two children. Robert Mapplethorpe died in 1989 at the age of 43. Don't miss Just Kids. It's poignant and moving and sad and lovely.

Fathers and Sons

A new book called The Last of His Mind by John Thorndike was laying around the office. I took it home and found it was one of those books! The author spent a year caring for his father who was slowly -and agonizingly-fading away from Alzheimer's. Joseph Thorndike had a very distinguished career in journalism, including stints at LIFE magazine with Henry Luce. He was an emotionally reticent man who was deeply intellectual. John and his brother's upbringing had been complicate by his parent's divorce and his mother's alcoholism and mental illness. John Thorndike when we meet him is a man in his 60s, with his own complicated martial history, and a grown son of his own. He leaves a business and a life in Athens Ohio to move in with his Dad on Cape Cod. He writes, with humor and compassion of all of the indignities of old age: the forgetfulness, the slow fade, the incontinence. He is clearly not ashamed of his father and wants to spare him any embarrassment over these indignities. What John Thorndike has written is nothing less than a love story of a son to a father-a father who has never been emotionally available, but a beloved father nonetheless.

I picked up Thorndike's earlier memoir, Another Way Home tells of the author's life as as single parent to a toddler called Janir. Janir's mother is a Central American woman Thorndike met while in the Peace Corps. What began as a blissful relationship disintegrated quickly as Clarisa too, disintegrated into mental illness. Thorndike writes of diapers, play groups, sleep overs, kick ball, poop, and the life he builds for Janir, now a married man with a child of his own. It's another love story but this father to son. The world needs more of such stories, especially as well written as Another Way Home.

Ron Reagan has written his first book, Ronald Reagan at 100. I'm no fan of Ronald Reagan's politics. But the Reagan children have always fascinated me. There are two sets of siblings kept apart, another emotionally absent but benevolent father and a (step) mother who ran the show. Ron Reagan concentrates on unearthing his father's past going back to the Ireland of several generations ago. The book has been criticised since the author writes candidly that his father was showing signs of Alzheimer's in the White House. (This has been hotly disputed, not least by Reagan's older son, Michael.) It is clear Ron loved his father and even felt loved by him. It's another son to father love letter. I suspect if Ronald Reagan were alive today his son Ron would easily find the words to tell his father he loves him, even if the former president was abashed uncomfortable. This lovely book will have to do.

Martin Luther King Day

I'm grateful to have this day to honor Dr. King, to consider how far we've come and how far we've yet to go. Also good to remember the great contralto Marian Anderson. She sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939, at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt. Anderson had been denied the use of Washington's Constitution Hall because of her race. This after being acclaimed as an artist world wide for years. The story is told in "Marian Anderson: The Sound of Freedom" by Raymond Arsenault. Recommended.

President Obama in Tucson

"At a time when our discourse has been so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those that think differently than we do, it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."--Barack Obama, January 12, 2011


The photo is of 9 year old Christian Taylor Green, killed on January 8.

Wicked slippery

I love this sign up in Massachusetts yesterday during the blizzard. I'm homesick!

Books Read in 2010

These are the books I read in 2010.
*= a book I especially enjoyed

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
*The Cello Suites by Eric Sibler

Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton
Sovereign by C.J. Ransom
A Private Family Matter by Victor Rivas Rivers

Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker

*Pops by Terry Teachout

Robert Mitchum by Lee Server
The Professional by Robert Porter
Breakable You by Brian Morton

Americans in Paris by Charles Glass
*Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Liar's Club by Mary Karr
Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman

Too Much Money by Dominic Dunne
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Then We Came to the End by Jonathan Ferris
Game Change
Last Words by George Carlin

The Politician by Andrew Young
*Short Cuts by Raymond Carver
The Lady in the Tower by Alison Weir

How to Become Stupid by Martin Page
True Compass by Edward M. Kennedy

High on Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips

Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler

The Straight Man by Richard Russo
Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow

The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

The Weismans of Westport by Catherine Schine

*Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Not My Boy-Rodney Peck
The Queen Mother by William Shawcross
Follies by Ted Chapin
Something is Out There by Richard Bausch

Blame by Michelle Hinever

Oprah by Kitty Kelly
*Hans von Bulow A Life and Times by Alan Walker

*After the Workshop by John McNally
Maybe the Moon by Armistead Maupin

*The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Tchaikovsky by Roland John Wiley

George, Wilhelm and Nicholas by Miranda Carter
One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

This Time Together by Carol Burnett
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

The Bridge (Obama) by David Remnick

One L by Scott Turow

*Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Palimpsest by Gore Vidal
*The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

*The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt
Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa
What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg
Finding Chandra

*Tinkers by Paul Harding
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

*The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Troubles by J. G. Farrell
Free for All by Joseph Papp and Kenneth Turan
Why Mahler? by Norman Lebrecht

Alfano by Konrad Dryden
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe & stories by Carson McCullers

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers
The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
February House
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Wake Up Sir by Jonathan Ames
Eye of the Red Tsar

Edward Kennedy by Burton Hersch
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
*The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Queen's Fool by Phillipa Gregory
*The Gendarme by Marc Mustian
A Thorn in my Pocket by Eustacia Cutler

Fifth Avenue Famous by Sal Basile
Speak Low When You Speak of Love, the Correspondence of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya

White House Diary by Jimmy Carter
If I Stop Talking You'll Know I'm Dead by Jerry Weintraub

Mary Tudor
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Memoir by Patti Lupone
*The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart
A Study in Scarlet by A.C. Doyle
The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Sign of Four by A.C. Doyle

*The Slap by Christos Tsioklas
The Deeds of My Father by Pope

*Nemesis by Phillip Roth
The Queen's Governess by Karen Harper

*Rogue Island by Bruce daSilva
An Uncommon Woman by Hannah Pakula

Must you Go? by Antonia Fraser
Victoria's Daughters
Joan Crawford by Donald Spoto
Running the Books by Avi Steinberg

*Why Not Say What Happened? by Ivana Lowell
True and False, Common Sense and Heresy for the Actor by David Mamet

*Sunset Park by Paul Auster
*Diaghilev a Life by Serje Schiejn

Clara Bow by David Stenn
First Family John and Abigail Adams by Joseph Ellis

Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood
Louisa May Alcott, a Personal Biography by Susan Cheever
My Nine Lives by Leon Fleisher

The Mentor by Tom Grimes
The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood
The Last of the Duchess by Caroline Blackwood

*So Much for That by Lionel Shriver
Extraordinary Rendition by Andrew Ervin
Trespass by Rose Tremain

MY FAVORITES FOR 2010:

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
The Slap by Christos Tsioklas
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Nemesis by Philip Roth
Sunset Park by Paul Auster
Why Not Say What Happened by Ivana Lowell

Wicked Pissa! I miss the lingo!

I never realized how much I missed the lingo from my long ago Massachusetts youth than when I picked up the new novel' Rogue Island' by Bruce DeSilva. Here are the fire fighters at an arson based scorcher in Providence, Rhode Island:

"Y doan dey spray moah wahduh awn duh ruf?"
(Why don't they spray more water on the roof?)

"Dey orda". (They ought to.)

"Ats wut I bin sayin'." (That's what I've been saying.)
"Shut up, daboatayuz". (Shut up, the both of you.)

"Jeet yet?" (Did you eat yet??)

"Gnaw". (No.)

"We kin take my cah tuh Caserduz if I kin fine my kahkis."
(We can take my car to Caserta's if I can find my car keys.)

"Wicked pissa!" (A good idea.)

p. 31 "Rogue Island" by Bruce DeSilva

And a wonderful reason to either stay home or go home, from the same novel:

"I grew up here. I know the cops and robbers, the barbers and the bartenders, the judges and the hit men, the whores and the priests. I know the state legislature and the Mafia inside out, and they're pretty much the same thing. When I write about a politic an buying votes or a cop on the pad, the jaded citizenry just chuckles and shrugs its shoulders. That used to bother me. It doesn't anymore. Rogue Island is a theme park for investigative reporters. It never closes, and I can ride the roller coaster free all day."

p. 211 "Rogue Island" by Bruce DeSilva

Leonard Bernstein and Marilyn Horne: Carmen

One of our wonderful, tatty second hand bookshops in the neighborhood yielded a $2 copy of 'The Carmen chronicle' by Harvey E. Philips. The book was published nearly forty years ago (!) and the chronicle is a play by play of rehearsals for a new staging of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera in 1973. The production was to have been by Goran Gentele, the newly named General Manager of the Met, but he and two of his daughters were killed in a car wreck in the summer of 73. Carmen and the Met had to go on without him., Bodo Igez staged the show. Cast and conductor didn't change (except for Teresa Stratas, who withdrew as Micaela and was replaced by Adriana Maliponte): James McCracken, Tom Krause and the sensational Marilyn Horne as Carmen. Leonard Bernstein conducted. The production was recorded by DGG and became a huge seller (for an opera). Critics loved or hated it. The production was a sellout at the Met and the recoding flew, really flew off the shelves. That was in the days they had record stores. Look it up if you're under twenty.

The Bernstein-Horne Met Carmen recording became favorite guilty pleasure of critics and nudniks. It was too slow. too ponderous. too German. Horne was tough. Great voice yes, but no charm. Well, I'm hear to tell you: I've been listening again after thirty years and I love this recording. It's all drama and color and flair and character. Horne's Carmen is an animal: adorable and tough. McCracken's voice is an acquired taste I acquired years ago. He's a huge, strong man reduced to mush by Carmen and hates himself forever. And any recording that has Donald Gramm, the wonderful artist as Zuniga in luxury casting is okay with me. Bernstein's tempi may be slow(er) but he makes you, compels you, to hear every note of the music, and there's no separation between 'pure' music and the drama. The entr'actes, where some separation is expected, glower with meaning. The spoken dialogue is rather arch and can be off putting (skip it if you must) The singing -and it really is SINGING with all the drama is not. I'm not throwing away my Beecham or Reiner or any other Carmens, but I'm so glad to have this one again. It's like walking into the arms of a beloved friend after many years.

A Crush on Lady Antonia Fraser

I had a crush on Lady Antonia Fraser when I was twelve years old. (Who was YOUR crush at that age?) A friend recently likened Lady Antonia, now pushing 80, to Becky Sharp. Back in 1969 I didn't know from Becky and wasn't very sharp myself. But there she was, the blond, sexy, titled author of 'Mary, Queen of Scots' and made that doomed lady a major bestseller for the first time since 1587! We come to find out that Lady Antonia-daughter of an Earl, thankyouvery much, whose mother was Queen Victoria's biographer, was married to a member of parliament and had six kids! She did the Dick Cavett-David frost route of 'chat' shows stateside and a fair amount of magazine spreads. She was hi-glam. I wrote her a fan letter. I did that too much. She wrote me back, very sweet, from a tony London address. If you grew up on Route 2A then Campden Hill Square sounded pretty posh.

Many books later, from murder mysteries to nuns to royal biographies to Marie Antoinette sold to Sofia Coppola for the movies (Kirsten Dunst, yet) Lady Antonia has written a memoir of her marriage to the late Harold Pinter. It was for Pinter, playwright, master of pause and all around theater genius that Lady Antonia left MP husband and Campden Hill Square...briefly enough in the case of the latter. She lived with Pinter for over thirty years and they were married for 28, up until his death two years ago. 'Must You Go' is a poignant love story. It seems the path TO the relationship was complicated, but the marriage itself sounds blissful. Pinter liked the kids. Antonia supported his work and remained his biggest fan. Was he hers? It would appear so. Lady Antonia writes about love without whining. There are journeys throughout Europe and the States, the decline of elderly parents, and the world descending into Thacherism. I know very little about Harold Pinter save for a performance of 'Betrayal' on Broadway and an obsession with Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman. But I mourned his loss through his wife's lovely book. The changing scenery, from Scotland to Venice helped. So did Lady A's witty prose and elegant, clipped observations. The first Mrs. Pinter, actress Vivien Merchant, is given her due for acting talent, with plenty lefty unsaid. The kids are messy teenagers when that's appropriate. Lady A is fond of Pinter's only child, Daniel. She chats up Jackie O and parties and once rented her London home to the young Caroline Kennedy (I'm Caroline's age. If she's no longer young, what does that make me?) Bomb scares, actual explosions and lousy reviews from the Times of two continents are mentioned and dispatched. Get on with it. Get on with this book, Must You Go? There's more than one way to have a successful marriage, and Lady A shares hers beautifully.

Cranford

For me, the ultimate feel good TV: Masterpiece Theater's CRANFORD returned this week to PBS for an encore. What's the attraction many of us have to English country village life in the Victorian era? Me, I'm re- reading 'Nicholas Nickelby' in time for Christmas. It used to be that all the old MGM Dickens based movies aired around Christmas, even though few of them except the obvious had anything to with Christmas. And neither Dickens's nor Elizabeth Gaskell, author of the Cranford novels depict phony jollity of unrealistic dippy lives. But there's also a gentleness in the story telling, as if its understood we are all to be forgiven for our foibles by book's or TV program's end. Mistakes are made, tragedies occur but the sense that people are for one another the best they can (some better than others) is always front and center.

Case in point. Here's one of the lovliest scenes: In Cranford, Miss Matty, a beloved lady in the village, loses all her money when her bank fails. The other ladies, at times finicky, petulant, silly, wise and strong get together and decide, no nonsense now, to establish a fund for Miss Matty. She must never know of this so she "is not compromised in any way." All happily agree to give what they can. And for many it can't be much at all, but no one refuses (joyful givers all). One of the older ladies runs after Miss Matty's young protege to tearfully apologize that her own contribution must be so little "but I haven't more than one hundred pounds to live on". She would be mortified if her small contribution was seen to indicate a lack of regard for Miss Matty. Like I said, lovely. Beautful TV and beautiflly acted. CRANFORD. Go find the DVD in the library. Both volumes. Elzianeth Gaskell's novles from the 1860s are a joy to read, as well. Cuddle up.

The Slap

It's still too early to assemble a "Best of" for 2010. You never know what there is to read, see and hear over the next six weeks. I suspect however, that no book I read in 2010 will impress me more than THE SLAP by Christos Tsiolkas

A three year old boy is slapped by an adult male-not his father, not a relative-during a backyard barbecue in suburban Melbourne. Hugo, the little boy is clearly a terror. He's been given few boundaries and neither parent rushes to intervene when he begins to swing a baseball bad around in a bid for attention, coming within inches of creaming anyone in his path. So he is slapped and stopped. And then begins the consternation.

Sides have to be chosen. Fractured marriages are examined, healed and perhaps fractured again. Teen age angst is seen to be dangerous and pervasive. Older generations of the Greek-Australian community profiled in this novel are seen as both concerned and intolerant. Hugo's parents need to live in rage to make sense their crumbling lives. Dad is underachieving, angry, and alcoholic. Mom hasn't a clue. Both contribute to the sense of entitlement wrecking kids today. Trust me, back in the day if I or any of my little friends misbehaved more than one adult neighbor would be there to wack us into line. Nobody said a word abut it. It was a way of looking out for one another's children. And Hugo is by no means beaten or abused. He is slapped, once. And he stops with the baseball bat.

Hector, at whose home the slap is delivered by his cousin, Harry, is a successful businessman married to a ravishing veterinarian-and they too live a life pasted together. In the novel's second sentence Hector rolls over in bed and emits "a victorious fart" thus alerting the reader to pages of raw language. Bodily functions, sex, sexuality, drug use, you name it, the authors views and depictions are unsparing. This book is not for the squeamish. But as you blow through you are never (or I wasn't) temped to yell TMI! (too much information!) It's a "can't put it down" book and I was very sorry to see it end. Many novels lose the thread and limp toward the finish. My God, not here. Young Richie has an encounter with Hector a few pages before the end that is moving and gripping and never descends to vulgarity or falsehood. In fact, there's not a false note anywhere in this book. You may dislike these people and you may be repelled by lifestyles and conversations (a dose of racism) but unless you are locked away in a convent this book will ring true. In Ohio, in Boston, in Australia and on top of Mt Everest.

Don't miss The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.

A new favorite quote

SB is a talented young radio journalist who is coming back to Columbus. Here's a quote from his FB page. I wish I had thoughts this up, but SB has quite the way with words:

"I witness things and then ramble into a microphone about them. That's right, physics majors. Who's stupid now?"

Beautiful. I relate on so many levels...

I hope this kid publishes!

John Lennon

It's been widely discussed that John Lennon would have turned 70 on October 10. Soon we'll be remembering the 30th anniversary of his death. I lived in New York back in 1980 (thirty years ago! MY God!)He was killed late at night. But it was all over the early morning news radio. No internet, no facebook, no cyber stuff then. You had to listen to the radio or watch TV. That morning I set off from E. 78 St. where I was living and took my usual walk to work in the Fisk building at 57th St and 8th Avenue. Believe me, it was easier to walk than to take a convoluted subway route(s) at the height of rush hour. And walking is how you really got to see New York. Especially late at night or early in the morning. I walked across the park at 79th St. and came out at Central Park West to head South. And there as the Dakota at CPW and 72nd St. And there was a huge crowd, standing west as far as you could see...spreading south to Columbus cirlce. It was 7 a.m. and there was not a sound. The crowd stood in silence. People were blocks away form the scene but it was one huge group in silence. Some were crying and some held candles and some had pictures held up but here was not a sound. In the middle of New York City at 7 a.m. on a work day. I had been in new york when Presidents and Popes died, but I never saw a crowd like that, before or since. I stood there too. I don't know for how long.

Dame Joan Sutherland

I've shared some thoughts and some memories about the great soprano Joan Sutherland who died yesterday at the age of 83. Check out the classical music blog

www.wosu.org/blogs/classical.

She was incredible. The greatest voice and the greatest talent I was privileged to encounter. And I had quite a view of her when I was thirteen. on the classical music blog.

What I told a friend

A friend of mine has shared a crisis in confidence while beginning a new career. There are plenty of low self esteem issues,which I think can be a little self indulgent when one gets into one's fifties. So I said, look: when you are feeling low think of Maria Callas, who demanded a separate Rolls Royce just for the luggage! Keep that picture in your mind. Just for the luggage! For the bags! and trot on....

Uncle Jack

John J. Duddy, my mother's brother.
July 23, 1923-August 16, 2010
retired firefighter, Arlington MA

I'm not able to attend Uncle Jack's funeral. I saw him twice over the summer. I'm so grateful for a bonus visit I had with him in his home (Grammie and Grampie's house!) a week before he died. A few weeks earlier we had looked through all the family scrapbooks. He had complete recall...who-what-where etc. going back eighty years. He was proud to have been a long time member of the Arlington MA fire department. He had two families and was loved and honored by both. At 87 and in failing health, I can't say his death was unexpected, but it was a shock nonetheless. I had hoped to bring my daughter back to see him in the fall. He told me he would sit and go through the family scrapbooks with her, and I waned badly to take a picture of them together. Not to be.

Here are two Uncle Jack stories, one funny and one sad but beautiful.
The funny one he used to tell on himself.
We had a distant cousin named Julia. She was of my grandparents' (his parents) generation. I remember her as a large, hearty lady with a brogue. She died, and of course it was necessary to go to her wake. Uncle Jack and Grandpa set out but made a few stops along the way. They arrived at the funeral home feeling no pain, tried to gather themselves and went in to pay respects. They looked down on Julia in her casket and thought: "Oh, that cancer is terrible-poor lady. She looks awful." They spent the evening visiting the family, lurching a bit and paid one last visit to the bier ("she looks terrible") and only later were told that that the deceased was a smallish ninety year old MAN they didn't know ("but the family was very nice") and poor Julia was laid out, looking hearty, in another funeral home. True story.

Sad: I understand it was Uncle Jack who found my mother in the basement. He called the Lexington fire department. One of the firemen came to her funeral. I had gone to high school with this guy--didn't know him well. He took me aside and told me "I knew your Uncle was a fire fighter. He wouldn't let us touch your mother. She was in her nightgown and until he covered her he wouldn't let us near her. He was a brother then, not a fireman. We were four big guys with axes and he was a man in his sixties just out of heart surgery and we were all afraid of him!"

Mother used to boss him (all of us) around but in the end it was he who was most protective of her. Sad. Beautiful, though. I loved him before that and I loved him more ever since.

I had three great visits with him this summer and I'm grateful for that. The last time I saw him he was in good form. We were so lucky to have had him as long as we did.

Remembering Mother R

Virgina Hastings died unexpectedly on August 1st at the age of 76. The obituary notice gives the facts and runs a lovely picture, and space is provided for tributes. There will be a lot of tributes. I suspect that the first few will be short. It will be hard, even for the people closest to her to absorb this shock and to find the necessary words. I've moved my thoughts to this blog so as not to hog other's space. The obituary lists her survivors, three adult children, sons and daughters in law, a sister, her sister's family. Just the facts. Its left to others to fill it all in.

I was enough of a jerk in my teens to have little use for my own parents. It was serendipitous that I met Lisa and her mother in 1973 when my jerk-ness was it its height. To meet them is to be immediately assimilated into the extended family structure which has only grown and endured over thirty- five years (is it possible?) They don't ask. They grab you and you hang on for the ride. And what a great journey! Virgina's homes were modest-all of ours were in that pre- McMansion nonsense era- and Virginia's home, whether above a nursing home, or next door to one or later in a a terrific cottage by a lake-her homes were magnets. This woman had the gift of drawing young people to her and offering instant acceptance. Don't confuse acceptance with license or even approval. You had to earn your place at the table-or on the floor next to the stereo speakers-with a degree of class and dignity. You could curse-she did-you could drink-she did-you could fight and scream she did-but the one word I will always associate with Virgina is DIGNITY. She had a complete sense of who she was and what was expected of others. There was a line you didn't cross. But if you stayed on the right side of the line, you got years of unconditional love, of acceptance, of-yes-craziness and disorder, but you never but never forgot to treat yourself and more importantly-to treat others as best you could. That's what Virgina did. I learned that from her. Other people matter. A lot.

Now, about this Mother R nickname. Virgina assigned this name to herself. I use it. I suspect few others do, so I claim ownership, my own bond with her. It is how she signed every Christmas card and every baby gift. As a parent myself now, all those years later I do know enough to be grateful to any sane adult who reaches out and shows an interest. But I'm in my fifties now. Back in those jerk days I threw my relationship with Mother R and her family into my parents face. And they were hurt. R stood for 'Mrs Robinson '. That's how my own Mother referred to her at first. It wasn't meant kindly, not yet. My father didn't care. Lisa was and is a dish and knew how to wrap him around-well lets just say that Bill as an easy conquest. Mary was something else. She was threatened , and it took a few years for a deep appreciation to grow, that she knew I had a safe place and that Virginia-Mother R-was at its center (I never used the term 'Mother' about another woman in my own Mother's presence. I had that much sense at least and I suspect Virgina would have read me the riot act had I done so) Mary's innate and very deep goodness and generosity kicked in after a few years. Bill just made gaga eyes at Lisa and that was fine. So you see, Mother R was the catalyst who brought out goodness in everyone-even if it was hard to dig out at first of seventeen year old jerks back in 1973. My contact with her dwindled and dwindled as the years went by, I married, had a child, moved away, moved on. Well, you can move on all you like but just like that line not to be crossed you only got to move but so far. Thank God.

I've thought of the music I heard in Mother R's house-mostly Wagner and Verdi and ALWAYS LOUD and I think of the Red Sox game on with the sound turned off while Isolde is dying or the Valkyries are crying or Sigmund and Sieglinde are sighing. I will never think of the Sox or Wagner ever again without thinking of her. What a gift!

I 'm feeling a bit presumptuous writing these lines. I was not her child. She had three children and the were the stars. The rest of us were satellites,-and I was one of many-but we were warmed by the same sun. The lessons were love and dignity and school remains in session. Finally, Mother R's example leads me to reach out to my own parents, to acknowledge them with love and thanks many years after their deaths. It's the best tribute I can pay to put photos of all three of them on this post. {That's Mother R with the glasses.} Mary and Bill will be among the many greeting Mother R in paradise...an eternal happy hour!