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My parents moved to Florida in 1980, when they were fresh-minted retirees. Their community had a distinctly “Greatest Generation” feel to it. But time passes. Boomers are moving in and I’m starting to think that I might have more in common with their newest neighbors than they do…
Wherever you’ve been, I hope you’ve had a good time.
Blogging and other activities will resume shortly. Philosophically and theologically, I’m agnostic, without knowledge or wisdom, though what I really lack is faith. It takes faith to believe in a god and just as much faith not to believe in one either. (Where faith equates to a willingness to accept as true that which cannot be empirically proven.) Culturally, though, I’m Christian (I’m a confirmed (and therefore apostate) Presbyterian who paid attention in Sunday School) and I love Christmas, especially Christmas music. Not the Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire sort of secular holiday music, but traditional carols, carols that are not so traditional, and hard-core sacred stuff, the older the better. When last I checked my mp3 library, it contained nearly 1,000 Xmas-themed files and over 60 hours of unrepeated music. It contains more now, if only because I succumbed to Sting’s Christmas album last month. I mean, I’m seriously into the sounds of the season. So yesterday, when I went to the Melon Patch for my second round of their Christmas fund-raiser, (My friend and neighbor, The Ballet Mistress, does a lot of the theater’s choreography) I was well-prepared to answer a performer’s questions: Do you have a favorite Christmas song and Are there seasonal songs that completely describe a moment in your memory? My favorite Christmas song is relatively easy. It’s the one that distracts me whenever it cycles up to the speakers, regardless of which arrangement I’m hearing. (Just because I have 60 unique hours of Christmas music, that doesn’t mean I don’t have multiple versions of some of the more popular tunes.) And that one is Riu Riu Chiu, because, really, what says Christmas more than a song referencing rabid wolves? I first took note of the song when I was living in New York City and invited my parents to join me for a Waverly Consort Christmas concert in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s famous Christmas tree in the Medieval Sculpture Hall. Which is as good a segue as I’m likely to get between the two questions…. Christmas music, that when I hear it, instantly transports me to another time and place. I Believe in Father Christmas / Greg Lake – I first heard it in 1975 and played it for my parents when they came to my apartment in the Bronx for Christmas Eve dinner. The refrain incorporates a theme from Sergei Prokofiev‘s Lieutenant Kijé Suite. The Little Drummer Boy – is not actually one of my favorite songs, but I clearly remember that it and The Chipmunk Song were all over the radio in 1958. Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day – My stepson was (and remains) musically talented and, in fourth grade, his teacher suggested he join the Ann Arbor Boychoir, which he did, and Bob and I dutifully went to the Boychoir’s Christmas Concert at a beautiful Victorian-Gothic church. We weren’t expecting great things, and were not disappointed. Then, late in the program, the boys made their way through an uptempo, syncopated setting of a carol that had never really appealed to me. I looked at Bob, he looked at me, and we observed the parents of all the other choirboys we knew doing the same thing: our boys had actually learned something! I spent nearly twenty years trying to find a commercial recording of that particular setting, and finally did. It’s on What Sweeter Music, which, needless to say, I bought immediately. BTW, I wouldn’t have had such a difficult search, where I to start my search today rather than in the mid-eighties. Now I could use Shazam to precisely identify bits of music. No post yesterday evening because I’d forgotten about my o’dark-thirty doctor’s appointment. The news on the finger-front is good. I’ve restored about 80% of my range-of-motion and there’s a good chance I’ll get the other 20% back over the next month or so without signing up for formal rehab. I’ve noticed that both hands are much weaker than they were and she said to a) continue the stress-ball exercises I have been doing and b) add some weight training for my arms. So I’ll dig out my weights and start doing that. The timing is good because tomorrow I pick up my neighbor’s daughter at the Orlando airport. We’ve gotten to be good friends over the years I’ve been living here at Spanish Oaks and, in addition, she’s by far the most knowledgeable physical therapist ever to cross my path. She’ll give my fingers a thorough exam and tell me exactly what I need to do next. (Although my doctor used one of those truly discouraging words Arthritis when I asked her about the lingering pain across my knuckles.) I did have something planned for last night. I’ll try to put it together later today. The title says it all. I woke up in Macon, had a lovely breakfast, said goodbye to Roberta and her family, and began driving SS1 and her mother back to Florida. We were moving along quite nicely, leaving the rain behind us, until we were about eighty miles from the Florida line. Some of it was accidents, some was construction, and some will remain a mystery, but the net result was that a five-hour journey turned out to be quite a bit longer than that. So, instead of getting home and having some recoup time before my next round of holiday fun, I had barely 45 minutes before heading out to dinner with friends, followed by watching the Leesburg Dance Centre’s final performances of the season, and a brief stop for the last few numbers of the Melon Patch Theater’s Christmas Concert (not to worry, I’ll catch the whole thing tomorrow afternoon). By the time I got home, I was exhausted and brainless. There will be no scintillating prose tonight, no musings, no nothing…. Except… Sometimes something arrives in your inbox that’s just so WRONG that it must be shared. The link below does NOT connect to my annual holiday message….mostly because I simply could never, in a thousand years, come up with it… It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced a cold, rainy day. Everything’s grayed and muted, but glistening a bit as the raindrops strike and set things to moving and the temperatures are low enough that I’m wearing a sweater. A couple of weeks of such weather (which in Ann Arbor was a typical November) and I know I’d be begging for some sunshine, but as a break, today’s weather was a delight. SS1 and her mom had things to do over at Carlyle Place and Roberta and I had talked about all sorts of potential expeditions, but, given the weather, none of them seemed inevitable. So, I set the laptop up in the very pleasant dining room. First thing, of course, was to check my email, which brought a very pleasant surprise: a jpg of the Guardians cover. Wow! My heart absolutely sank when I first beheld the copy ACE put on the original Guardians. It was stock art: a generic painting not commissioned for any specific book and although it’s a fairly striking design and professionally executed….well, I’ve always referred to it as Death Mask with Contact Lens. I don’t think the cover killed the book—that’s a whole different story involving Thieves’ World—but, surely, it didn’t help. That’s going to change. Selina and Lynn haven’t given me permission to reveal the cover, so I can’t post it here….yet. And I don’t know who painted it. But it’s FANTASTIC! It takes a minor liberty with the specifics of the plot, but it’s dead-on for setting the atmosphere and theme. I am so excited. I dove back into proofing the scanned chapters. People came and went, but my concentration held. I don’t want to admit how long it’s been since my determination to work was stronger than the average distraction. Some of this new energy comes, I think, from a decision to go off my meds. Depression and I have been dancing together since I was in high school. When it comes to anti-depressants, I’ve pretty much tried them all. In my experience, the SSRI-type anti-depressant (Prozac, its generics and its cousins) are equal parts effective and frustrating. They’re effective because they’re sort of like life jackets: they will keep you from drowning, but you’re not going to swim very far while wearing one. They’re great if you’re depressed about “outside” things, because while you’re under the influence of an SSRI those weights aren’t going to pull you down. OTOH, if you’re depressed because you’re hearing voices that tell you to kill yourself or because you just really think that life’s not worth living, then there’s a real chance that going on an SSRI is going to lead to suicide—because your depression is a completely rational reaction to the urge to self-destruction. (This is sort of why there’re warnings against adolescents taking SSRIs—it’s fairly easy to spot that a kid’s depressed; it’s much harder to figure out why or defang it….and the why is sometimes a much more serious problem than the more obvious depression.) But, I digress. I fall in between. I’m never suicidal and I don’t get depressed about “outside” things. No, every few years, my internal landscape tries to fall apart. I stop sleeping normally and I start dreaming when I’m awake, which is a lot less pleasant than it sounds. The SSRIs will firm up what doctors have called my “sleep architecture,” but they don’t, in and of themselves, do anything about the shattered landscape….worse, while I’m taking them, the fact that my life has lost all shape and direction doesn’t bother me — The life jacket’s keeping me above water, but I can’t swim to shore. The current cycle kicked off, I think, when my ex-, Bob Asprin died in May of 2008. By May of this year, I wasn’t sleeping much and things were getting pretty strange inside my head. My doctor prescribed an SSRI and I didn’t have the wherewithal to argue with her. In a week I was sleeping productively again, but I didn’t care that I wasn’t actually doing anything until I finally got so utterly bored with myself that it occurred to me that, since I wasn’t sinking any more, it might be time to take off the damn life jacket. So, now I’m in a bit of a race: can I re-establish the habits that will keep me engaged in my own existence before I stop sleeping again. Days like today….when no one can distract me from my plots and characters….having me hoping that engagement will win. Never mind that I should be working on The Guardians or, at the very least, getting my holiday stuff together, today I drove to Macon, GA. (There are several other Macons, or so weather.com informed me.) I didn’t drive by myself….I wasn’t even driving my own car. A very special friend and her mother needed the services of a designated driver and I was glad to step up to the plate. SisterStitcher1 (SS1) has endured a recurrence of breast cancer that isn’t likely to go into remission. Being an eminently sane sort of person, she concluded that—uncertainty taken into consideration—it would be a good idea if she and her mother bought into a Continuing Care Facility. And while there are good CCF’s in Florida, Macon, GA, ultimately made more sense since she has other friends who’ve put down roots here. (Said friend (Roberta) blogs at http://simplystitchinginthegarden.blogspot.com/ where her current post Guardian Angel watching out for us should not be used as a measure of the depths of her roots. SS1 has picked a CCF: Carlyle Place. I’m not well versed in CCF’s, but Carlyle Place is definitely a top-drawer enterprise. It ain’t cheap, not by a long-shot, but when I think of what lies down the road for a single woman with neither siblings nor children of her own, I have to admit, it wouldn’t be a bad final destination, Getting into Carlyle Place requires many forms and interviews, which is why I’m here. Rather like an elite college admissions office, they’re not going to take just any doctor’s word for things; they want to form their own in-person opinion. I can’t imagine that all won’t go well tomorrow, but while it’s happening, I’ll be here….working on The Guardians |
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