"Morgenlich leuchtend in rosigen Schein"

I was out walking this evening, pounding along to the jazz trio on my iPhone. The playlist ran out. I stopped. What to listen to next?

It's not an easy decision. The wrong music at the wrong time irritates me. No, not those Bach cello suites again. (And I love Bach cello suites--at certain moments.) Ella Fitzgerald? Good for walking fast. When she sings Cole Porter, man, it takes energy to listen. Good for a burst of speed in the middle of a walk, but not for the winding-down stretch.

I tapped W and went to Wagner. Yes, I have the Solti "Die Meistersinger von Nurenberg" on my iPhone. I don't think the whole thing is there--one of those syncs where I'm not really sure what happens. I looked at the lines of German dialogue in the playlist and tapped something I thought would be from Act IV.  I was hoping for Walter's prize song, but I didn't get it. What I heard, I think, was Beckmesser's rather pedantic effort. The beautiful voice was persuasive, not unpleasant to listen to, but the music did not go anywhere.

I kept listening, kept walking, and about four blocks from home, there it was. Three still, shining tonic chords to establish the tonality, and then a big ringing romantic tenor (literally big--Ben Heppner) at center stage singing "Morgenlich leuchtend . . . "  Finishes the first stanza, the crowd reacts--cautiously. He sings another, there's a buzz. He keeps going, the crowd is swept up in the music.

Here is Ben Heppner in a concert version. Or listen and watch Johan Botha here.  He sings beautiful phrases, although he looks kind of silly standing on that box. I liked the reaction shots of the crowd, everyone listening thoughtfully. But the staging doesn't show the crowd's excitement, which Wagner wrote so vividly into the music. To do justice to Wagner's music for the  townspeople I suppose you'd have to have a movie set with cameras zooming in from up high, quick cuts, a swirl of pleasure and discovery.

There was a big smile on my face as I walked that last quarter mile tonight. I came back in the house with my heart sitting six inches higher in my chest.

Eighth Grade Confirmation

I agreed to co-teach Sunday morning eighth-grade confirmation class. From now until mid-April it's a merry chase through half the catchism: the commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer. The teacher's guide provides eight times as much activity as a sane, middle-aged adult could possibly want to tackle with 20-plus kids in 55 minutes. I could drink more coffee on Sunday mornings, but the result of that would not be pretty.

Still, this will be interesting, especially the commandments. How do they hook up with the grace and love of God that young teens need to experience? What's good about being shown your sin? And what are these sins in today's world. I spent this afternoon shopping for new pants--remembering the sabbath? How do you judge if someone purporting to speak for God is using God's name in truth or in vain?

I sat in on this morning's class, taught by the other teacher. A reality bath. Eighth graders are restless, wary, self-conscious, and oh, so very hard to engage. One young man suggested something was a metaphor for God, which led me to be hopeful--someone understands that God is more than the words in which we try to describe something both immanent and unknowable. Other kids searched for "right" answers--some for the ones the teacher was looking for, some for the ones that seemed right to them. Some wanted to be noticed. Some wanted to escape.  They were all acutely aware of one another.

Yeah. I'm either gonna like this or be very frustrated.

Thinner

I am approximately thirty pounds lighter than I was at the end of May. Thirty years ago I would have expected this to change my life. I would have expected to get great parts on stage. I would have expected to be much more attractive to men. I would have expected to be happier.

This time, I am simply thinner. I am eating better. I'm approaching the normal range for BMI, so presumably I'm healthier. I am fascinated by the whole process. If you limit yourself to about a thousand calories a day, the red numbers in the LED display on the bathroom scale go down as the weeks go by. Relentlessly. And skirts and pants and t-shirts that used to be tight hang low on my hips, flap around my middle.

People ask, so I have to tell them what I did. It's seems odd to be discussing this with others--it's not that interesting to me. No sugar. Only fruits and vegetables for snacks, not boxes of crackers or bags of chips. And I eat when my body needs nourishment. I don't eat because I'm unhappy or lonely. I'm still unhappy and lonely and stressed-out. But it's not a reason to eat a bowl of cereal, much less to open a bag of potato chips. Celebrating is no excuse either.

I'm thinner, but I'm not younger. My face is thinner, and that makes the sags and bags more obvious. I walk lighter. I do feel better about how I look and I want to wear younger-looking clothes, but without looking ridiculous. I still don't know how a person my age is supposed to act.

It's all pretty superficial. Yet we judge people by their weight. Hmm.

Morning post

Perhaps I need a vacation from screen time.

Too many ideas? Too few pursued and incorporated into my own? Too much abstract back and forth and not enough solid imagery that connects with the heart as well as the head--even if that heart, logically, must be located in my head.

Blog posts here often begin with an image--physical, or at least a moment in time or a specific interaction. Blog-reading, website-reading leave impressions that come and go too quickly, as soon as you click the link to the next item.

I've stayed home at the computer to listen to Carl Grapentine on WFMT, Chicago's classic radio station. Carl is a friend from church and I've been informed that between 8:00 and 8:30 this morning he's playing a recording of the Grace Senior Choir singing a piece by Paul Bouman that I wrote about on this blog a couple years ago.

Here it comes: strings introducing "Now Rest Beneath Night's Shadow." It's Paul's birthday. The sopranos have the first stanza. Oooh, a little flat over the top. Better at the second shot at that melodic line. One could wish for a little less violin and a little more choir, 'cause it's the melody line that's lovely: "Let praise to your Creator rise."

"Lord Jesus, since you love me." Good job tenors. This is the verse Paul made much of in his setting--a prayer prayed through a long life, from childhood to deathbeds. all the counterpoint coming to rest in Jesus with  "I rest in your protecting arms."

And then there's a choral setting of stanza three. Not heavenly-perfected chorale singing. The sound is not quite together--perhaps mostly because the congregation is singing along and there's lag time in the building acoustics and recording. But that imperfection that includes everyone--surely that's more like the kingdom of God than exclusive excellence.

There's my image for the day. Put that on a sampler.

Came in from a 45-minute walk thinking about having a beer--just a beer--for supper. Guess I didn't come back in a significantly better mood than I was in when I left. I had Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter on my iPod, which set a pretty good pace. But I walked directly west for the first 20 minutes, right into the sun. The afternoon's scowl from looking into the computer screen was heat-set between my eyebrows by the light of the sun just above the housetops.

That's the same sun whose setting I enjoyed so much last week on vacation.

But sitting and watching and talking--or not--to my kids is not the same as trying to walk off the piling-up anxiety and pressure of being back at work, getting ready for a new school year, and wildly thinking of more things to do than can ever be done in the time there is to do them. Where will my effort go? To the low spot in the ground to which it will most easily flow? Or will I dig some new channels, find new things to do, new ways to publish and present them? Will I keep on caring?

 What's the trick of living one year after another?

Not beer for supper. I had a salad--organic greens, cottage cheese, carrots, sweet peppers, and some green grapes.

Maybe a glass  of red wine for dessert?

Smiles

"Don't you love farce?"

That's the question posed in "Send in the Clowns," the best-known song from Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," which I am currently directing. The show opens July 16. The next ten days are about putting the bits and pieces together into a cohesive, stylish whole.

The bits and pieces include plenty of farce: a cuckolded older man, a jealous pea-brained lover tripping on his trousers, a scorned wife, earthy lovers, young stupid romantics, and a schemer whose plots work despite her best efforts, not because of them. Yet the characters, even the ones we thought several weeks ago were kind of shallow show unexpected depth when confronted with their own foolishness.

Partly this is a choice made in this production--to consider the possibility that people change and learn, rather than stage a cynical ending and assume that the character's lives will go on as screwed-up as before but with new partners.  Partly this is the poetry of the show, the summer night smiling on God's creatures in need of grace. And it's very much the music: despite a great deal of dissonance and uncertainty about tonal centers all the way through the second act, the show ends with a solo violin's upward winding scale resolving into major-key tonality in the last chord.

I can't wait.

Tuesday's Child presents
Stephen Sondheim's
"A Little Night Music"
July 16-18, 23-25
Tickets online

Baby birds

In the past few weeks I've noticed robins making dive-bomb runs across our patio. They swoop by, low and fast and angry, and fly to the tree outside the gate. Sometimes it's a female alone. Sometimes it's one bird on the tail of another.

I've seen this behavior before. In past summers, I've seen robins dive at our dogs and then dash outside the fence. It's a diversionary tactic, the mama robin's way of quickly distracting attention away from her nest at the top of the tall pole that supports a Concord grape vine on the edge of our patio. It's left over from a huge but ugly arbor that I ripped down several years ago. The vine still produces grapes, and lots and lots of leaves. Robins have been nesting there for many years.

So as I sat on the patio the other morning growing bored with my book, I looked hard into the green umbrella of the grape vine, and found the dense twiggery of the nest. 

I even saw two tiny beaks, open to the sky. I heard the babies' tiny chirp, answered with a tiny, soothing chirp from the mother who was in the tree outside the gate. She understands that flying to her babies' aid puts them in danger. They are better hidden without her presence. But today, when I looked very closely, I saw the spotted breast of one of these babies. It's towards the center of the circle, at about ten o'clock.

I've seen robins' nests in our backyard before, seen robin's-egg-blue shells on the ground. Many years ago I saw a fledgling on the ground, trying to figure out how to fly. But I've never seen such a healthy baby in the next waiting for its next meal.

This is the first summer in the twenty-four years I've lived in this house that there is no dog in the back yard. I used to think that any mother robin who built a nest in our back yard had a few screws loose, or didn't have the brains it would take for her genes to survive in her offspring. Backyard dogs will bark and bark and eat anything that ends up on the ground in front of them.

I have high hopes for these babies. I'll watch the nest closely in the the next couple weeks. I'll listen for that mother chirping at a distance. It reminds me, oddly, of myself, sending my teenager gentle, carefully worded text messages about staying safe and coming home at a reasonable hour. Mama robin is busy gathering worms and whatever else these growing infants eat. I forage at Jewel and bring home sweet cider from the Farmers' Market.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father." Matthew 10:29

Sparrows, robins, teenagers--all are cared for by a mothering God.