whirling dervish

I want to be one …

Can’t you just see it?  Music Shivers whizzing in slow-mo around her apartment, skirts perfectly circular, arms spontaneously reaching out and fixing things as she passes them …

I have an old Petra LP on.  It’s one of my cleaning albums.  The laundry machines and dishwasher are doing their best to match Greg X. Volz’s vocals.

This Sunday is my mother’s harp concert, the sixth annual one … !  I can’t believe it has been that long since she started her business.  When it’s over, I’m going to California for six days, and my mom will have the keys to my apartment, which I mean to transform into her own personal sanctuary.  She has been going full-steam since Oma died – arranging the funeral, being the executor of her will, then preparing her own harp concert – and she has yet to really be alone and cry and think or not think.  I have lavendar bath products waiting for her under the bathroom sink.

In the meantime, there are nooks and crannies I haven’t paid attention to since I moved in A YEAR AGO.  This is somewhat frightening.  And exhilirating.  I like re-focusing now and then on my physical surroundings.  Those who’ve known me here for a while know that I tend to completely tune out the space in which I live: my threshold for mess endurance is pretty high, as long as I know which pile corresponds to which project of mine.

I’m teaching music history again this summer.  I have six students (three last year).  I just relocated the hasty notes I made last summer before the first class.  Teaching it was a surprise back then; H was supposed to teach it but at the time, only two kids were signed up and she didn’t think it was worth her time and gas money.  So I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants.  This time, I’ve known in advance that I would teach it, and have been nibbling away at preparations for a while.  So those hasty night-before notes I just found look almost pathetic.  This is going to be a good summer.

The ridiculously unnameable Orthodox guy (who turned around and surprised me AGAIN this weekend; just when I’ve finished complaining about him on OD, he is serious and mature for two days in a row) and I are playing in a piano quintet for a July gig.  RUOG is playing piano.  I am playing viola.  We had our second rehearsal last night, and although it was harder work than I’ve had to do, musically, in a while, it also was sheer relief.  I never get over the surprise of connection when it happens.  My viola and the cello, playing unison voices (an octave apart).  RUOG and me passing motives back and forth.  Whatever.  It’s glorious.

Fr. M said once that the language of heaven is silence, and I laughed, "That sounds kind of bleak to me."

On the ride home last night, RUOG said, "What do we end up doing with all this skill we’ve acquired when we’re dead?  We can’t take it with us."

"No – we can – I’m sure of it," I said, "But it gets transfigured – whatever good work we do goes with us – Knowing how to harmonize may actually give us a leg up in the spiritual harmony department."

I am (and was) aware that I have (had) no idea what I am (was) talking about.