Calendars

This is the first time I have ever had to tell my students in June, "You had better pick your lesson time for September, I’m starting to fill up.  Oh, you want that space? Taken already … nope, that’s gone too … "

Over the last three years, without really planning to, my teaching times have spread from a few morning baby classes and Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, to three morning classes, every weekday afternoon and Saturday mornings.

I had 21 piano students this year (at one point, 22, when an older lady came to me for four lessons just to explore the world of ragtime).  I also ended up accompanying four group classes, teaching a theory class, teaching a sight-singing class, and coaching an ensemble for several weeks.

I am in awe when I consider this.

Combined with how often I end up at church (this is perhaps the first time in my life I have literally wanted to go to church, as opposed to feeling I ought to go), this explains the constant busyness.  (I sing in the choir.  There’s Sunday matins and liturgy, of course, but there are also Tuesday and Saturday night vespers.)

I’m barely through June and the end-of-year exhaustion, and I’m already anticipating the lovely cycle of the school year as I pencil students’ names into my agenda from September to December.  The feel of the air when Halloween approaches, the snowflake stickers starting to make their appearance in lessons as Christmas comes, …

One of the perks (for me) of being Orthodox is the sheer depth of the church calendar.  I have only begun to scratch the surface of these strata of meanings.  With my busyness, it is all I can do most weeks to stay on top of which Sunday of the year it is; in the mornings I want to look up all the saints of the day and get to know them all, but right now that’s a stretch in my routine.

There is a "long line," though.  Like what Aaron Copland wrote about in composing.  This circle that is really a spiral, this story that keeps being told so that every time you hear it, you hear something new …

……………….

It doesn’t seem to matter how old I get.  The future is still open and full of possibility.

I get dour sometimes, when I let myself get cluttered with unhelpful thoughts.  But underneath I’m still really blank calendar spaces and shiny new pencils poised over them.

………………….

You never know,

you never really know,

and you can’t have people figured out …

For a variety of reasons I found myself in a taxi heading to a different city today. The driver was one I had met before.  A few months ago I sprained my toe

[Insert hilarious shot as seen from my living room, looking down the entrance hallway: Music Shivers emerging from the laundry room, which is opposite the bathroom, stumbling over a shoe, bracing herself on the bathroom door which isn’t shut, to her horror, and falling straight into the bathroom, splat! From our vantage point we see only her feet sticking out of the dark bathroom but we hear her alternately moaning with pain and giggling insanely.]

so I occasionally took a taxi to work in the mornings, rather than walk.  The driver remembered me.  I remembered him because we had talked Canucks hockey (and because he had had decidedly kindred eyes).  Today we talked more hockey.  Things were going along swimmingly and I realized, by the time we had gotten to my destination, that we had covered 1. the vicissitudes of single parenthood, 2. the virtues of spatial reasoning, 3. our future hopes for our jobs, 4. our ages and how funny it is that everyone thinks we’re so much younger.  As a matter of fact, I took him to be much younger than me but he turned out to be seven years older!

A part of me sighed.  This was such a movie scenario.  I wanted just to be grateful for a human connection.  It was nice to think later on that I knew someone was watching the hockey game with his 16-year-old daughter, and that he knew I’d be listening to it, rooting for the same team, even if we never set eyes on each other again.

——————

Only three?! days till I am visiting some nuns and taking part in their daily round …