I chose the wrong instrument. Harp, piano, cello, organ, flute, guitar, drums, bells—out of all of the instruments I’ve dabbled with, I chose the wrong one to perform with. I chose voice. Last week, during my choir’s dress rehearsal, I watched the orchestra tuning in their seats below us. Yes, the key word was seats. The choir stands on risers. Now risers are lovely, especially for those who, like me, need all of the vertical help we can get to see the conductor. But risers usually aren’t deep enough for chairs. And these weren’t even deep enough for a body holding a music folder.
I do love choir. Each semester we pull out a new piece to learn. Sometimes I’ve heard one or two of the movements before (like Carmina Burana: “Trust me,” I’d tell friends and family when they said they were unfamiliar with the work, “You’ve heard it before if you’ve watched any action movie ever. Or even just seen a trailer for an action movie.”) and have the fun of learning the new-to-me movements, hating them the first three or four (or seven) rehearsals until, without noticing the change, I melt in anticipation of my favorite motifs or even chords. Sometimes I’ve never heard any of the piece or composer before (like Faure’s Requiem or Lauridsen’s “Sure on This Shining Night”) and fall in love at first listen and can’t imagine my music life complete without them. These are wonderful reasons to come to choir practice each week. But performances—that’s when I realize anew that I chose the wrong instrument. The orchestra doesn’t have to march in a line to their spots on risers, the musical equivalent to Russian roulette. They get to mosey in and calmly claim their chairs which are in exactly the spot they left them. Yet, rarely do I end up at the spot that I was in during rehearsals. How, I wonder, do people really gain that much weight in the few hours between dress rehearsal and performance? Once I ended up with only enough space for one of my feet on the step and spent the entire concert precariously balancing on that one foot so that I could see over the front row. In years of watching the orchestra perform with us, I’ve also never seen anyone in the string section get bowed by someone sitting too close to them either. But in our concert this week, I’m convinced that the person behind me was resting her music folder on my head. At first I just thought that she was hitting me accidentally and tried to scoot further forward in my spot, but my toes were already hanging off the edge. Then I started to notice that the music folder didn’t just tap me and retreat. It stayed in place until I ducked my head to throw its balance off. That realization added a whole new level of creative interpretation to my singing.
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During last week’s hurricane, while trying to stay sane long after stir-craziness had set in, my friends and I played a new game I bought over the summer: Chronology. I am a fan. Although it took a hurricane-forced hermitage to remind me that I hadn’t tried out my new games, the intellectual entertainment was worth sitting in the dark for hours.
The game consists of a deck of cards, each referring to a historical event accompanied by its date. The object of the game is for each player to create a timeline (or chronology) that includes seven events in historical order. A player’s turn begins with another player reading an event from the deck (excluding the date), and ends when the player guesses whether the events precedes or follows (why is antecede not the antonym for precede?) the other events in the timeline. While historical knowledge is necessary if, say, you must determine whether the Academy Awards started before or after the invention of Velcro, the luck of the draw really determines winners (especially if your friends have to determine if King Tut died before or after the invention of the computer!). The real danger of the game for us was forgetting that we were playing a game. We had an hour-long tangential discussion on how to fix our nation’s educational, economical, and political issues just because one of us drew a card about an amendment to the Constitution. (And believe you me, we had everything solved rather elegantly.) Another of our tangents still lingers in my mind, rewiring how I view the concept of leaven. (Yes, my friend had the task of deciding whether the Egyptians’ invention of yeast happened before or after the Academy Awards: tough choice. It should be obvious who didn’t win the game.) At first, when we read the card that the Egyptians had invented yeast thousands of years ago, we responded with a mild, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Then almost simultaneously it hit us: the Jewish prohibition on leaven during Pesach (Passover) had a very different meaning for them than what we were taught in Sunday school. Leaven as a representation of sin limits its symbolism. The nomadic Hebrew children would have been introduced to leaven during their captivity in Egypt. Removing leaven from their homes and breads in preparation for Pesach was them reasserting their identity, removing the influence of the Egyptian culture in their daily lives. I’m still having intellectual fun teasing out the nuances of that shift in focus and certainly don’t need to wait until another power-outage to play Chronology again. Despite having enjoyed roughing it in third-world countries, this weekend I was forced to acknowledge that when I’m on my home turf with no one to be a good example for, I’m soft. Honestly, when doing volunteer work in the islands, I didn’t care that I hadn’t washed my hair in five days (the micro-braids make it harder to tell anyway). But going without running water for three days here in my own home almost made me crazy.
It’s funny, but the part of running water that I missed the most, even more than being able to wash my hair, was being able to wash my hands. Oh, I knew that my hands were clean, but somehow rinsing soap off with hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol didn’t have the symbolic level of cleansing that warm, running water gives. Just as Pontius Pilot and Macbeth highlight, hand-washing is a symbolic, psychological act as much as a physical one. So, how to stay entertained during a hurricane? Well, there are lots of fun activities for the people with power and running water. They can get caught up on housework (I can’t tell you how many times I thought “Oh, I’ll scrub the floors!” only to remember that I was without water), or get caught up on grading papers (easier said than done by candelight), or do handcrafts (have you tried crocheting blindly?). Since, the more engaging activities of deep-cleaning, reading, and sewing were not viable options, we settled down to try out some new games I had bought over the summer. One of them, Chronology, was easy to learn, interesting to play, and sparked conversation and ideas for classroom use. In other words, a hit. The other game, Typo, was harder to learn, harder to play, and after a couple hands, we unanimously abandoned the game in favor of another activity. Perhaps the most successful activity (based on the standard of time-consumption) we tried was doing a puzzle, a surprisingly tactile activity. Working by the light of four tealights and a smattering of votives, we were able to piece the outside edges of the puzzle. But once we got to the center of the puzzle it became harder. I had bought this puzzle because the 650-piece fireworks display over the Chicago skyline seemed to present enough challenge for an avid puzzler (if that’s what we’re really called). That challenge exponentially increased when it became evident that by candlelight it is impossible to distinguish between firework specks and city light specks. And the subtle shading of the water turned into all the same shade of indistinguishable dark. So, every few minutes we would shine a flashlight on the pieces, trying to soak in every detail and possible match we could before plunging ourselves back into the relative darkness of candlelight. Finally, out of sheer boredom, I went to bed and stared at the ceiling for two hours, wondering how exactly the early settlers survived long winter nights when it was too dark to continue working by four in the afternoon. It’s finally autumn. Okay, I know that technically fall starts in September, but to me it never truly feels like fall until October arrives. Somehow, even though I haven’t lived in the north for almost a decade, I still expected to wake up on October 1st to a blaze of color on the trees and a nip in the air because, to me anyway, that is fall.
Similarly, as soon as that nip is in the air, my mind tells me that it’s good soccer weather. I am no athlete, but my brother and I played almost every sport imaginable in our backyard, a backyard that is probably a mere fraction of the expanse my memory thinks it was. “Okay, Eleanor, I won’t cross half field, I’ll use my right foot, and I won’t enter the goalie box. We’ll play to eleven, and you start with ten,” my brother would say to convince me to play. Despite the handicap, he would still win. He always won. For almost every sport we played, Gabe would handicap himself and win. He didn’t win because he was an amazing athlete; he won because I was a pathetic one. Football was one of the few fall sports we played which Gabe didn’t handicap himself in. Or perhaps he did. I always had to be Michigan State. He got to be U of M, and I had to be Michigan State. Coming from a staunch University of Michigan family, my being forced to be Michigan State was tragic. But Gabe was three years older, and he always pinned me when we wrestled, so, while I may have whined, I didn’t try to change his mind. I would play Michigan State, and Gabe would win. Unfortunately for me, backyard football, unlike backyard baseball doesn’t have ghost players, so my brother and I represented our entire teams. I was Michigan State’s quarterback, wide receiver, running back, all of the line men, and the other positions that sometimes sound made-up. Sometimes I played the referee when I needed to protest against the brutality of University of Michigan’s players. In other words, I normally ended up squashed to the ground with a faceful of autumn leaves watching Gabe steal the ball and run across the yard to make yet another touch-down. Now, seeing pictures of my nieces and nephews playing in the fall leaves of their northern backyard, I feel like a wonderful part of fall is missing this afternoon. Gabe and I haven’t played against each other in years. I actually miss afternoons filled with soccer, football, and other games we invented. If Gabe randomly showed up this afternoon, asking me to play football with him, I would do it—even if I had to be Michigan State. |
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