Fortissimo

To try and rid me of my 10 year old shyness and timidity on the keys, my first music teacher always told me: If you ever have to take it all out on something, just remember you can't hurt a Piano.

Years later, there is still a little part of me that doesn't believe her.

falling back and a few other things

I was so tired today I walked my barefoot self to the west Ash and fell asleep in the fallen leaves with max and the autumn sunshine. It was peaceful like a cloud and warm. The tree is almost bare now. You can hear leaves fall one by one while you sleep. Or I can. Autumn is tinged with the wistful.

Also, fallen leaves smell like honey.

I stayed at L's Sunday and yesterday. There is a small abandoned quarry place near her house with great tall cliffs that semicircle a swampy cove and there is also a rusty bridge. I'm so jealous of her cliffs and bridge that I would have kicked her dog and ran away if she didn't know where I lived. When it was dark we built a fire and talked about the moon and sang Blue Moon and watched the moon rise then pranced danced around the fire like satellites ourselves. The wonderful thing about being my age is that I don't ever have to be my age at all.

*
Now it is quite dark and I have had Flash inside from the cold for a while. My dog and I are studying math and eating mini marshmallows and vanilla tea. Ok, we were before I gave it up for blogging. Ok, he wasn't doing any studying at all, but he does like my choice of a Tuesday supper. The house is very silent except for thoughts, but I have been thinking for a while about two new Voices of long-had friends and about L and the moon, and I wonder how I could have ever been alone.


*

As an aside, I wish someone would please please please tell me that I wasn't the only who forgot about last year's extension to DST and set my little clock back an hour on Saturday night and won't soon live it down.

The trouble with hunting season

It's beautiful outside, but there are gunshots all around, and unlike some of the trees, I haven't got a thing that's Orange to wear.

Mistaken in Missouri

"Hola!"

- Salute across a quiet street, from two young boys who, after whispered consultations, evidently took my sisters and I to be three caliente immigrants

On a rainy day, Beethoven plays

quietly g C D Eb - F D - Eb C-- fourthfingernow d'C c thumb C D fourth again f'Eb thumb D Eb F G! changGe! G! F G fgAb! da, Eb F EbfG! da, C-D-Eb, Eb-F-D, D-Eb-C. F G Tall! now, Eb F Tall! now, andagain and again and a gain. crescendo here and on and up and up la! la-a-a and down and down again and here, la! lo-o-o and down and down until a C, tRiLl, up, and THERE!

Ever since I was little there has always been music in my head.

Quote

I am I because my little dog knows me.
Gertrude Stein

Because I care

Note I left last night on Mom's sink:

Hi Mum, cleaned your bathroom for you, am pretty sure the toilet is leaking all over the floor and it's not my fault, hope you have a good night
much love, Christina

PS watch your step

The River

Photo from 3 days ago, at one of my favorite places in the world... here.

Drift by

Only the ash trees have changed, fully changed. The photo is the babiest maple who is almost there. The east ash I see out this window this moment, and it is a bristling orangen gold against a lavender sky. I pulled back the curtains as far as they would go, I pulled the blinds up and up, and now I want to take out all the glass to see it better. Why do I love colours with all my heart? I don't know.

Whence cometh this?
85° yesterday,
and now it's freezing outside.

*

Flash and the purple spots

Still resentful of his recent pokeberryin', Flash attempts lens slobber to avenge his fur.

One little Indian

Flash awakes and considers going on the warpath.

Happy Windsday

It's deceptively calm now. tricksy tricksy tricksy. Two nights I have had to close the windows against the wind to keep it from gusting in and carrying me out. I have to sleep, I say. I walked already. I walk every night now. I watch everything that comes. Lightning, rain, tornadoes, galing winds. And then I say good-night, climb down from the roof and hope it all comes again tomorrow. On the Weather Channel which I am watching they say Saturday forecast is beautiful, beaming, bright, boring. Blech. That's why I don't watch the Weather Channel. I watch thunderstorms, and Pooh Bear.

"Oh the wind is lashing lusterly
and the trees are thrashing thrusterly
and the leaves are rustling gusterly

so it's rather safe to say
that it seems that it may turn out to be
it feels that it will undoubtedly

looks like a rather blustery day today"

I am drivin' up 85 in the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon

John Mayer

I put Mum to bed a while ago with echinacea tea and steamy soup and a spoon and now she is watching Bonanza and behaving just like a child. She told me Hoss is my friend, look how big he is on that horse next to all the others! I chide her to stop laughing because it makes her cough, but it is a reluctant rebuke because I like to hear her laugh.

It has been raining all morning. After I put on a sweater and my warm socks I went around opening all the windows just enough to let the rain sounds in and keep the cold out. I didn't have any energy to open the Spinet or to play Beethoven. I am tired from waking up so often in the night. So tired that my mind is frozen. So tired my eyes glue when they rest. The rain is very soft and mournful. It permits whispers at most. So in whispers I helped Con with his school today. He has discovered the thee-sorus. In whispers I congratulated him heartily. There are a pretty few things better in this Life than thee-sorusses. While he was perusing his newfound tool I watched Mom reading to K at the kitchen table even though she was positively pneumonic and needed to rest, and the rain was falling gently and it made me smile and sad and solemn at the same time.

Roberta said two nice things to me today. I can't figure it. I think she is making attempts at amends for her sulkiness of yesterday. The first was when I passed through the schoolroom and she was at work and looked at me and said You look pretty! I smiled, cause I didn't look pretty. The second I don't think was meant to be a compliment at all and that made it the nicer one. It was Ah, Chris I could recognize your hum anywhere.

fall

About Ludwig and baseball and other things

I've been here and there and everywhere but where I want to be which is the Piano. And all the spare times I've got so far aren't enough for Beethoven. Beethoven will demand. I'm not feeling it yet. It's not there. It hasn't even started. And I have been thinking a lot about a certain Rondo Capriccio, some G Major, a little Rage over the Lost Penny. Why am I thinking about a Next when I haven't begun the Now? Because that's me. How infuriating.

*

I got a package from my uncle a while ago. He had said the last time the Rivals met that if the Cards won he would send me the baseball that he caught at the Cubbies minor league game one of the numerous times he snuck in. they stop checking the gates after the third inning and you just gotta look like you belong there, you know how it is. We didn't beat the Cubs - we didn't beat ANYone - but he sent me the baseball. It is brownish and weathered and smells just like my uncle, a deep deep smoke smell, heavy cigarette smoke and the faraway drifty smoke that comes through the wood when they burn the fields. The smell has been on my hands all day. It makes everyone else sick but I don't want to wash it away, not yet. My uncle is funny. He tells me the same stories on the phone every time. Everyone says the drinking is what took his mind and memory and I would believe it if I had time to, but I don't between listening to his recount of a day spent with his granddaughter Nevaeh that's heaven spelled backwards, and laughing helplessly at his Oh my GAWWD stories about vultures and caves and Tippy the Tapeworm and homeless women, and smiling when he starts one more time into at the Minor League Stadium they stop checking the gates around the third inning, ok, and


**

petit femme

Happy birthday, K.

beethoven

Have acquired movement two and three of the Sonata, Pathetique. Have fallen in love. Long absence from blog highly likely.

Fall for Flash

belteshazzar

I have been at work on K's Birthday Present since I woke up this morning. Actually I have been technically working on it since I went to bed last night because at night when I'm trying to sleep is when I do most of my thinking. So far today I have finished step 1. there are at least 14 steps I've thought of so far. I probably should have started last week, but I didn't have any ideas last week because all my night thinking time was taken up with dreams. I had too many dreams, probably a thousand a night. The most terrible interesting one was the one when my sisters and I were traveling to Afghanistan and the way we traveled was a method using underground tunnels and classical music. When we listened to a piece we would emerge from the ground on the same spot it had been written. We had a whole list of songs to get to Afghanistan. I asked my older sister why we couldn't simply listen to the last song and be there instead of hopping randomly all over the world. She laughed at such a ridiculous question. Somehow every place we came out was desert, beautiful ochre desert. When we were halfway there I ran all the way home to get my camera only to find there was no film and WalMart was closed. I came back to the tunnels to find that O had gone on with S and without me; they left the list of songs and my own tunnel and I was so angry at her for splitting us up I didn't know if I was going to find the way myself. I woke before I knew if either of us ever reached Afghanistan.

Spring is a serenade but Autumn is a nocturne.

I am now...

Things fathers should not repeatedly ask immediately before recitals, auditions, &c:

are you nervous?

are you sure you're not nervous?

backtracking

Oct 9 Audition day day yesterday was a long long long long day. I was too tired to think about it afterwards, I didn't really want to think about it afterwards, a whole load of uncertainty was on my shoulders afterward. I have no idea how it was. There was no hint of anything in their faces, and of course that's how they're supposed to be, impartial unbiased unsupportive, isn't it? And there was no feeling of "YES, I nailed it that time", but no thought that I blew it so what am I left with now until I know? I wish for the tiniest bit of reassurance and am not finding it, in myself or anywhere. Why I have not wanted to touch the Spinet or any other piano since, for the first time I can remember, I don't know. Maybe it makes me tired and I am already exhaustively tired and spent from everything, from weeks putting all my energy into one thing and now it's over and I can't change a thing. I can't rest with that yet. Still, it won't possibly last. Maybe I will discover Beethoven. I had avoided before the temptation while I focused on Mozart because to fall in love with Beethoven while committed to Amadeus seemed like polygamy, musical polygamy the sin of all sin. But now, now it's probably permissible. Now I am somewhat unaffiliated. Now I wait.

Closing for the night

There is a bunch to blog and no time. Please come back tomorrow.

Who paints the skies?

The clouds were this colour yesterday.

Happy birthday John

My big brother is 22 today, but sometimes I don't think he's in too much danger of growing up.

Good night, good weekend

I will blog when it's all over.

Sail on home to Jesus won't you good girls and boys

I'm all in pieces, you can have your own choice
But I can hear a heavenly band full of angels
And they're coming to set me free
I don't know nothing bout
the why or when but
I can tell that its bound to be
Because I could feel it, child
On a country road

I guess my feet know where they want me to go

James Taylor

Dog days

we played in the leaves, too.

The tell tale tread

Guess who played in the mud today.

Sad in St Louis

I took this photo on Opening Day of the season this year... two boys standing next to us watching batting practice, wishing the game would start, wishing they were the ones on the field maybe. I don't know, I just wished I had thought to dye my hair that colour and that one of them would catch a baseball and smile.

It was the last day of the Season yesterday. The Cards ended on a 5 game win streak, small consolation for the long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long O-Word. Six months of O-word. St Louisans must be spoiled surely because now it's October and we are sitting here much like two boys I saw once, chins in chubby hands, wishing. Now it's October and none of us are quite sure what to do with it.

September at last, I presume

It is a fine bright day. It was a fine dark night. I sat on the low wall in the dark for a bit, munching something, swinging my feet, watching the west flash with Lightning, listening to deep thunder roll in, the gnomes at ninepins last night. The wind was up all day long all night long making the trees frantic and the dust scoop itself like Hands. It's calmed down today. A fine bright day. Good for climbing trees.

*

Didn't blog much last week. Besides having nothing of merit to say, I am still practicing. Today I went to T of the Beautiful Piano's house to get a feel for the Mozart on a grand and so I got after a while, but somehow all that is left on my fingers now is the feel of a Granados Danza Espanola which I started playing almost absentmindedly. The Mozart was beautiful but the Granados was so beautiful my fingers thought they surely were making it up as they went nobody could have possibly played this this way before and lived to write it down. But ahem as I was saying, the Mozart. Yes, I have focused on this nearly every waking/sleeping/walking/starving moment for 4 weeks which is a new previously thought impossible record for me focusing yee-haw. I didn't have an aim before which is probably why I was flitting which is probably why I didn't get anywhere which is probably why I didn't like myself.

Audition in one week.