One Small Step for a Cat, One Giant Step for Kittenhood

The kittens have reached the Month Milestone – actually, today was Day 32. So far, they’ve been shambling and shuffling around their bathroom world for the last few days, getting their sea-legs ready and practicing their wrestling moves (which also means wrestling with anything that moves, including my foot). But last night another milestone was reached: I had left the door open to the master bedroom and turned around to capture the moment from perhaps the wrong angle, rather than capturing what might be thought of as the wonder in their eyes:

Here’s one of the orange tabbies (Baker, I think) looking out at this whole new world they’ve just discovered. For a while, they stayed fairly close to Mom – in fact, one time when she hissed (presumably at me), they all went shuffling back to her as if she’d said “Get back here, NOW!” This time, their sense of adventure won out.

But it was another of the orange tabbies – Charlie (left) – who actually crossed over the threshold and was the first to explore the carpet in the bedroom. He went about two feet, then turned and ran back into the safe and familiar bathroom. His eyes were big like he couldn’t wait to tell everybody else: “you won’t believe what’s out there!” Huge, to those who’s spent all their lives so far underneath a toilet tank...

In a way, I feel a bit of that same excitement and uncertainty, moving back into the house I grew up in, getting my childhood bedroom ready to be my composer’s studio.

There are many reasons I’m glad to be leaving midtown Harrisburg behind me, after 24½ years of living in the same neighborhood – certainly before Break-In Season has gotten underway – but I’m not keen on Suburbia, myself, never was even when I was a kid. Still, the older I get and the more reclusive I become – especially when I want to compose – it’s preferable to the noise and inconsiderateness of city living. It’s not ideally quiet, here: the kids across the street have some fairly noisy motorcycles but they’re not bad; more of a problem is the constant whine of the highway 1/4-mile away which never seems to let up, 24/7. The traffic around the mall is absurd and at times it’s like Christmas Shopping even in April, but I’m used to shopping after work, doing my groceries around midnight even if I detest those self-scanning aisles you have to use then (“please put the item back in the bag...”)

I’m not sorry to no longer be renting, after my latest experience with landlords – the hole in my bathroom ceiling from last December still has the plywood patch over it and the pipes upstairs still leak; the back yard has been mowed once since LAST May – but I have concerns about being a home-owner, now, the financial responsibilities aside.

So, like the kittens, I tend to look around with a sense of awe, especially moving from a small apartment into a house three times as big. I wonder what big changes will be happening in my life, now, two hours before I turn another year older, experiencing my first birthday without my mother here to remind me that I had kept her awake that night until 2am.

There’s a tiny remnant of a red peony in the back yard, the only plant left from the ones that she had brought to the new house from the old one when we moved in 1960. I know those peonies existed in the back yard when I was a year old because I’ve seen them in old photographs. The story has it they were originally my grandmother’s peonies and Mother had transplanted these from her parents’ old house when they moved after World War II because they had been an important part of her own childhood back yard. That could make this plant, at least originally, almost 88 years old if my grandparents planted them when they bought their first house in 1919, the year my mother was born. There had been three plants – the pink one and the white one died over the years, but the red one is still hanging in there. One flower opened this afternoon, so tomorrow I will cut it and put it on her grave.

Change does not have to mean better, nor does it have to imply it could be worse: it just means things will be different. And the challenge is to accept it with the sense of wonder as if you’re discovering it all for the first time, and contemplating the possibilities.


Dr. Dick

One of those Epiphanies

This is a picture I’ve known for a while, perhaps years ago when I didn’t really think too much about it. This is my dad playing the Hammond Organ in the living room of the house I was born in, before I was born. I knew the organ was one that belonged to a friend of the family’s, Jack M, who after the War was building a house in Lemoyne and who’d ordered a Hammond organ from J.H. Troup, the best known music store in town, located on the south end of the square opposite the church.

Also part of the legend was how the organ was supposed to be delivered but Jack’s house wasn’t ready yet, so he asked my dad if he’d be willing to “give it a temporary home” because if Jack said no, the organ would go to the next person on the list and Jack would be moved to the bottom.
My dad, who’d learned to play the piano when he was a kid by watching a player piano and figuring out where to put his fingers when the keys went down, was delighted to help out. During the war, he had had a chance to play a Hammond in the base’s chapel and fell in love with it.

What I didn’t know until I was going through one of my mother’s ubiquitous calendars which she kept like a diary, was when the organ arrived and when it left for Jack’s now-completed house. I would have assumed months but it was only a short time – weeks, really – which puts a more definitive time on when this picture was taken.

Friday: April 18th – Organ [underlined several times] delivered in morning
Thursday: May 8th – Organ being taken to Jack’s

But in the week’s following this brief 3-week visit, there are about fifteen references to my dad going over to Jack’s, several times specifically “to play the organ.”

Then there was a week’s vacation in early August – on Monday, “Jack’s for supper – ball game... appt 8:00 to see Wayne Wiegle at Pueblo - organ” followed by a blank Tuesday and then, on Wednesday, “Jack’s at 12:30 - Wayne to audition Curly [my dad’s family nickname] at organ & sign papers for rental” [presumably for an organ at the Pueblo]. The next day, after my mother canned pickles during the afternoon and took my brother (then almost 6) down to my dad’s folks who were going to babysit him, my folks went to the Pueblo at 9:00 for my dad’s “debut at the organ.”

The first time he played as a “professional” musician. She added this note on the opposite page: August 7th, 1947, Norm had his debut playing the organ at the new night club “Pueblo” [then mentioning a friend who stopped in as a customer]. August 8, 1947 – went over much better. Received his first tip ($1.00) from a gentleman who requested ‘Trees.’”

And so my dad’s second career began: he would play at several clubs and restaurants in the area for the next 17 years or so, before the rheumatoid arthritis made it impossible for him to play. When he would go into the hospital for frequent treatments, he talked J.H. Troup’s into bringing in a Hammond so he could play every night for the other patients after dinner, leading them in sing-alongs and playing requests. It was as much therapy for him as it was for them and the room was always packed.

Today, my dad’s birthday, I looked at this picture of him playing Jack’s Hammond in our living room – a defining moment in his life – and realized, if it was taken between April 18th and May 8th, 1947, a month or less before he turned 29, that next week I will turn twice the age my father was in this picture.

Happy Mother's Day from Frieda's Five

Mother’s Day, last week, had been a little more difficult than I’d thought even though much of the day was spent trying to get two short posts up on “Dr. Dick’s [Other] Blog,” thanks to major issues logging in (and staying in) to blogger... There were lots of things I wanted to do that day but just didn’t get around to any of it, given the blogging frustrations. Finally, after several hours of foiled and failed attempts, I managed to get them posted but I also wanted to do a quick one here: who has that kind of time? It’s not been completely resolved and it seems to be an issue with THIS computer (which is where I do most of my blogging, anyway). The next day, I tried again to post some pictures of the kittens, but even though by then I was able to log in (and stay in) alright, the photo up-loader kept saying “sorry, loser...” So forgive me if I haven’t been posting a lot here.

One of these days, I’m going to get back to composing again, but I have to get my piano out here and that just hasn’t been in the cards: though it turns out the hernia is really two hernias (herniae? hernii?), the problem basically is a pulled muscle in my weakened abdominable wall which is keeping the packing and moving down to – well, nothing, at this point.

Meanwhile, some of Mother’s Day was spent with the new mother in my mom’s house: Frieda the Ex-Stray whom I’ve started calling Frieda Farrell with her five kittens. As of May 14th, they were 3 weeks old. So here are a bunch of pictures I took this past week.

This is a typical group shot. Frieda had them in the right corner behind the toilet of the “turquoise bathroom,” one of 2½ bathrooms in the house, then more recently moved them to the left corner which seems a little more spacious. She still hasn’t gotten used to me and hisses if I get too close to them. After all, not only is she a stray, she’s a new mother, defending her babies. Here they are, lined up (from left to right) Abel, Baker, Guy Noir (the dark one) and Blanche (the cream tabby) and Charlie.

Here they are, trying to get a meeting organized to wish Frieda a happy Mother’s Day, but Baker seems to be having a little trouble getting them called to order. Guy Noir & Blanche are wondering what’s going on with the guy and the camera and Abel is just easily distracted. That’s Charlie hiding under Guy Noir, trying to pretend he’s AWOL...

Here’s a close-up of Guy Noir: who, more and more, is beginning to look like those gremlins you’re not supposed to feed after midnight... Originally, I thought this one was solid black but in the first week or so, all you saw were butts and back legs while they body-surfed into nursing positions. It was only later that, after the eyes opened up, he (or she) began showing more specific signs of orange tabbiness mixed in among the black -- and dig the white bib! Technically, I imagine this is a tortoise-shell which means, like calicos, most likely a female and hence not likely a Guy, and not really Noir enough, either. But for now, it works...

Abel and Charlie (left) have begun working on their wrasslin’ moves... Originally, the three orange tabbies looked identical but even now, as their personalities start surfacing, it's sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Abel is paler with more prominent stripes; Charlie is darker, generally, and more subdued.

Baker, right, probably wondering about life beyond the toilet bowl... This one probably has the greatest sense of curiosity and not surprisingly, a few days later, was the first one to be seen testing her sea-legs in the vast space in front of the toilet! But she soon scampered back into the corner and Mother's protective presence. It's a big, scary world out there.

Apparenly, Blanche has doubts about the wider world, too. She and Charlie are the quietest of the litter. And I'm not sure who wins the Cutest Face Award, Blanche or Baker...

Beethoven Writes a Gut-Wrenching Chord

Another in a series of somewhat surreal stories from the collection, Stravinsky's Tavern.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Ludwig van Beethoven sat at his desk, surrounded by papers and pens, the rug underneath (much to his landlord’s dismay) stained by spilled ink. If only he could figure out how to use one of the computer programs all his colleagues talked about using.

The way they explained how it works, you could write a passage, then sequence it in a different key just by hitting a button – it could even play it back to you so you could hear what it sounded like. Beethoven thought this was a cop out: what composer worth his salt needed to have a machine play it back to him? If he couldn’t hear it in his head, should he be composing in the first place? And if he needed to work it out on a “machine,” wasn’t a piano good enough?

No, he shook his head, this new-fangled technology only made it possible for people of little talent to fancy themselves “composers.” It made it too easy. Why, if Vivaldi didn’t have that cut-and-paste function available to him, he might come up with something more interesting than all those endlessly repeated figures in his accompaniments. And that Glass guy – Philip or whatever his name was – it’s just copy-paste paste paste paste paste paste paste...

He turned to his piano and took a typical Glass figure, singing “dah-doo-dee, dah-doo-dee” over and over while he played:
But then he heard, in his inner ear (the true test of anyone’s creative genius), this:

“Hmmm,” he reconsidered, “I should put that aside, that might come in handy some time...”

But today he was supposed to be working on the last movement of his 9th Symphony and it had been giving him an immense amount of trouble, not just figuring out how to begin but where it should go. He had given up the light-hearted finales of his teacher Haydn – too “lah-dee-dah” for him: Mozart had seen to that. A finale needed to be a summing-up, not a cutesy kind of waving bye-bye. He shuddered at the thought, after these first three intense movements he’d struggled with for so long.

No, this needed to start... to start with... uhm... he pondered a while. He wracked his brain a while longer. He sipped his coffee in between ponderings and wrackings. He paced the floor in between sippings. He looked out the window onto the street below in between pacings. After this long, gorgeous, luxuriously unfolding slow movement, he needed to get the listener’s attention, but how?

He sat down heavily at the piano – his poor battered, long-suffering Broadwood piano given to him by a London piano-maker – and crashed his hands down onto the keys in exasperation.

If his downstairs neighbor had been in, she would’ve thought Herr Beethoven had completely lost it, perhaps even passed out, falling across the keyboard, dead on the spot. “Ja ja, I heard it – he collapsed just like that – bang – like a body-slam in wrestling, ja!” She was always watching wrestling on TV – a big fan of Hulk Hoffmeister, she was, too – one of those times Beethoven didn’t mind being deaf, he thought, not having to listen to that racket seeping up through the floor of his music room. People pitied poor Beethoven who couldn’t hear the roar of the traffic outside his apartment or listen to those rock-star wannabees crooning on TV without an ounce of self-respect. The guy next door, who watched every episode of “Austrian Idol,” often wondered what Beethoven had to talk about with his friends if he couldn’t hear what was going on on TV. Pity, that...

But Beethoven felt something. He tried to play that same chord again, just bringing his hands down without really thinking about what they were playing. Yes, he thought, yes! Something deep inside him stirred from the discovery: this was IT – the chord he was looking for!

When he hurried over to his desk to write it down, he felt something else stirring deep inside him: something that snapped and hurt just a little, at first. He hurriedly scribbled down this chord
then felt along the right side of his abdomen... there, just above the belt. Damn... it felt like... well, he’d never had one before, but he figured it had to be one.

A hernia!

He tried to keep working on this chord but the pain in his side distracted him. He was used to being ill but he always hated it. Worse was going to the doctor’s – they’re always bleeding you for something or other, but he figured “what if I just pulled a muscle? What if it’s actually a badly timed attack of appendicitis?” One of his neighbors had a friend who thought he’d had a little gas but when the pain got worse, he went to the hospital only to discover that his appendix was about to explode. Such a silly little thing, an appendix, yet it could kill you if you weren’t observant.

Beethoven kept feeling his side. It hurt when he pressed on it, it hurt when he tried walking but not so bad when he sat down. So it wasn’t continuous – hmm, probably not the appendix. But just in case, he grabbed his coat and shuffled off toward his doctor whose office was a couple streets over, just by the post-office, and he had some things to drop off there, anyway. Off he went, annoyed by the interruption when he was on the cusp of inspiration...

Unfortunately, the nurse he disliked the most was on-duty. Brunnhilde Waffenschlagen had no time for patients and she let them know it. It was her job to keep the office in line with all the government regulations and she did it with the heartlessness and precision of a Prussian field-marshall.

“Ach, Herr Beethoven,” she preened with barely disguised contempt, “vhat zeemz to be bozzering you today, ja?”

“I must see the doctor – I hurt myself... uhm, here,” he said, putting his hand gingerly against his side, “and I’m not sure if it’s a hernia or perhaps appendicitis. Could he take just a few moments to check this out for me?” He hesitated adding “please” for fear it would sound more like he were begging. And Beethoven didn’t beg.

“Und zis pain, ja,” she said, looking down over the glasses resting near the tip of her otherworldly nose, refusing even to glance where Beethoven had placed his hand, “zis happened vhile you vere vorking, ja?”

“Ja,” and he began telling her how he was composing and came up with this incredible chord – well, he wasn’t even sure it was a real chord, because it sounded like a pile-up of dissonances and he hadn’t had a chance to work out how it would all resolve just yet.

Nurse Waffenschlagen’s eyes glazed over. She hated when he started going all technical on her. She would remember to use as much medical jargon on him as her training would allow.

“Zo, zis did not happen vhen you vere valking along ze shtreet or doingk ze dishess – but vhile you vere... compozingk?”

Annoyed to have to explain it all over again, he simply shouted, “Ja!” Then mumbled something he hoped was sufficiently under his breath. Judging from the arch suddenly appearing in Nurse Waffenschlagen’s right eyebrow, it was not.

“Zen, in zat case, ze doctor cannot zee you yet because zis vill be a Vorkman’s Composer Insurance Claim und zat vill reqvire a whole different series of protocols vhich must be followed TO ZE LETTER und zo you must contact your composer’s union representative” – she tapped this out syllable by syllable as if marked staccato molto, her voice becoming more and more shrill – “in order to obtain ze appropriate claim account number for ze file, und zen, ja – und ZEN... ve can talk about setting up ze appointment.” She was clearly enjoying every minute of this.

“But I just want to find out if this is indeed a hernia or something more serious like appendicitis!” Beethoven was close to roaring.

“If zis turns out to be a... khhhhhernia” – she spat this out with a rolling, guttural “h” so thick Beethoven would need to clean his glasses – “zen it vill be covered under ze Vorkman’s Composer Insurance Regulations. If not, zen your own insurances vill cover it, but zat, I am afrrrraidt, vill be a different processss completely, do you underschtand mich?” By now, she had traversed her full range from below the staff to several lines above.

With that she slammed the window shut, stood up to her full 5'2" height and turned toward the photocopier to continue processing insurance forms from last month’s patients.

Beethoven was simply furious. It was not a good start to his day.



- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2007

Just a Moment in Time

At three minutes and four seconds past 2:00am today, it will be

02:03:04 05/06/07

which will never happen again in our lifetimes unless you plan on being around in a hundred years.

At the moment, however, a quick glimpse into an important moment in the life of a kitten: Day 13 and the eyes are beginning to open. And in this photograph, the first time I really get to glimpse some faces! Mother and the Mighty Handful are doing well -- tentatively Frieda's kittens are named Abel, Baker and Charlie (for the three orange tabbies; though one is darker than the other two, they're basically so far indestinguishable), and, pending gender identifications, Blanche and Guy Noir for the cream-colored tabby and the black one (which may, I think, turn out to be a tortiseshell and therefore likely a female).

Meanwhile plans for completing the move have been put on hold by the arrival of my new side-kick, Hermie the Hernia, who will preclude a great deal of packing much less anything else: I think there may be a new comic short-story in the making dealing with workman's comp insurance regulations, perhaps something Wagnerian...

As we approach Mother's Day next week, I find myself reading Joyce Carol Oates' Missing Mom which I figured would prove cathartic rather than just purely entertaining, now that I find myself living alone in the same house my mom lived alone in, reading her 1,000-plus mysteries, for the past nearly 22 years. More on the book, later.

Moving back to the house I grew up in, I have to admit some of the things I've been finding, sifting through my own stuff that has been stored here (either by me or by my mother) have been surprising to unearth: an interview with me about my compositions when I was having works played by the Harrisburg Symphony in my mid-teens, talking about creativity issues and finding myself almost the exact opposite, now; and what may well be the first piece of my music I ever tried to write down, embarrassingly infantile considering I was just learning the basics of theory and notation, but hey, I was 8 years old... But that's for a later post, too.

But it's now closing in on 02:03:04 05/06/07 and I doubt I'll be around in 2107 to note its passing once again: perhaps a toast from me, the cats... and Hermie... Then we can all gather 'round and do this again next year in June -- at 3:04:05, 06/07/08! (But without Hermie...)

Dr. Dick

A Kaboodle of Kittens: Day 6

Some years ago, a friend of mine, adopting a stray kitten that had only recently been weaned, told me she had often had cats but had never started one “from scratch.” Several of my cats over the years came to me as kittens or ‘teen-aged’ cats (and all but the first two, strays), yet even though I may have missed the exact “miracle of birth” only by minutes, I have never had the chance to watch kittens grow up from Day One. It has been amazing!

And the opportunities for catblogging on a grand scale!

This morning is “Kittens: Day 6." Of course, I’ve been taking pictures of them every day, documenting their growth even though it’s been a little difficult trying not to disturb them. Frieda, the proud and wary mother of five, is still not used to me or to being in a house. Compared to her last litter, I wonder how this one is faring: with food placed twice a day in a bowl a few feet from her, she at least doesn’t have to wander far to forage and leave the kittens unattended for very long. I also had hoped she would have moved them over to a section of the floor covered with a towel since I imagine the bathroom tiles must be chilly for little kittens, but she chose this corner (which hadn’t occurred to the resident human) just because of its security and basic inaccessibility (at least as far as the resident human is concerned).
So far, everything seems to be going well. While I was sure there had been two black ones, perhaps the darkest of the three orange tabbies looked even darker on those first two days. On the other hand, perhaps there had been two black ones and one didn’t make it. I was more concerned about not spooking the mother than counting how many furballs surrounded her that Monday morning. I certainly haven’t tried examining them – with my scent on them, it’s possible the mother may refuse to nurse them any more – so I don’t know what genders they may be.

The cream-colored tabby and the black one (which one night, in the flash light, didn’t look all that black – could it be a black tabby? I haven’t noticed that he (or she) has any white anywhere) are the ones I’ve thought about keeping (once before, I’d adopted a mother and her one surviving kitten – the kitten is now 12). If the genders are right, they could end up being named Blanche and Guy Noir.

It seems appropriate starting off life in the house (not a new house to me but a new chapter in my life in it) with an arm-load of kittens. My mother would be fascinated to observe this (at least for a while) if not mighty peeved to realize they’ve taken over her bathroom (as in “they’re so cute, but do they have to be there?”).

The other cats, filtered from them by the space of the bedroom as well, have not registered any curiosity beyond wondering why I keep disappearing behind this door with a can of food. It will be a challenge, introducing Frieda to the three cats already here, but I want to hold off on that little surprise until the kittens are old enough she won’t feel they’re quite so vulnerable: who knows how many of her kittens were killed before by other stray tomcats? It’s not an easy world out there for newborn cats on the street, all the more reason to consider spaying and neutering your pets!!

But meanwhile, there’s work to do and I must head into it. I think I’m ready, now, to start moving my stuff in – the scores and CDs, the books and OMG the piano, how I miss having that piano!

On Wednesday afternoon, seeing WITF’s nine-foot grand open in the studio, I went in and practiced – well, played through a couple of stock pieces that had been in my repertoire since college days, perhaps, but rarely practiced (I think the last time I seriously practiced was maybe a year and five months ago) – a few Scarlatti sonatas, a few pieces by Schumann (the Arabesque, the Romance in F-sharp, the last movement of the Fantasy in C), some Chopin (selected mazurkas, nocturnes and preludes), some of the Beethoven bagatelles from Op.126.

While I don’t think I’m going to be ready to be performing in public any time soon, at this rate, it was good to know the wounds on my index fingers – incurred last week while snagging a certain stray cat flying around the kitchen – didn’t keep me from getting around the keys. Oh, the scales were rough and the voicing maybe a little more uneven than usual, but at least they were still moving. With signs of arthritis developing, playing the piano more regularly will be good therapy if not for the soul at least for the hands.

And there’s a new piece working its way into my head: I need to start jotting down ideas (some of which I can do without a piano) but I also need to finish these violin and piano pieces I’d stopped working on in December. John Clare and I had talked about having them ready to perform in May but that’s not going to happen...

And tomorrow is Family Day at WITF – I can’t wait for “Take Your Kittens to Work Day”!

Dr. Dick

Photo credits: from Dr. Dick's collection -- (top) Day 4; (center) Day 5; (bottom) Day 6...

A House-Warming Present

With all the usual joys of moving, one of the things I determined would be going with me would be the Stray Cat.

Last summer, perhaps even in early June, a small orange tabby appeared on my back porch in town, clearly a feral street-born cat. Naturally, I put food out for it and after it had kept coming back every night, I decided I should probably try rescuing it except I already had three cats in a small, already cramped one-bedroom apartment. Regardless, this cat was immediately named Farrell. And they say when you start naming the strays, the next step is to adopt them.

One night the cat showed up twice, which was unusual: “but I just fed you,” I argued. Still, my cats had not eaten everything of theirs, so I put some ‘left-overs’ out thinking this cat was really really hungry.

The next night, there were TWO cats on my porch, identical, side by side like bookends! Apparently they were from the same litter. As the summer wore on, they would both appear either together or fairly close together and I realized there was a pattern here: the one would head out to the street in front of my house; the other one would always head out through my back yard and across the neighbor’s lot toward 2nd Street. Later, it turned out one was pregnant. So I named her Frieda and was wondering if Farrell was going to be Uncle Dad...

No matter how much I fed them or stayed out on the porch with them while they ate – and they always were waiting for me and ran to the door when I’d come home from work – they never allowed me to get close to them. I had to be at least four feet away from the bowl before they’d come in closer to eat. Thoughts of catching either of them were pretty slim and what was I going to do with TWO cats and a litter of kittens?

Sometime toward the end of July, the female stopped coming around. I assumed Frieda may have gone off to have her litter and she’d be back. At the end of August, she returned but now I was afraid to catch her for fear the kittens, though probably weaned, may not be ready to be on their own. It was over Labor Day weekend that she stopped coming around again: Farrell kept coming by until 10 nights later, then I saw him for the last time. Small as he was, he bushed himself up as much as he could and chased a big black bruiser of a tomcat off the porch. Once chasing him off, he turned right when the tom turned left and just kept going. Never saw him again.

All through the fall and winter, I wondered if they’d ever come back. What is the shelf-life of a city stray cat? I figured someone may have caught them, or they may have been killed by other, larger cats or perhaps the dogs that kids sometimes sic on street-cats (I rescued one stray from that fate in 1985 and had her for 15 years) - or perhaps they had become road-kill on a city street. I preferred thinking the first option.

So it was much to my surprise that a not-quite-as-small orange tabby appeared at my back-door, waiting to be fed, in early March just a week or so after my mother’s funeral. I immediately put food out for it and recognized the scar on its tail, though I couldn’t remember if that was the way I could tell which one was Farrell or which one was Frieda. She came by, often greeting me on my porch, every night when I’d get home.

Well, I figured out it was the female – she was getting a little fuller around the belly, clearly pregnant again. I hadn’t noticed she’d been in heat at any time, so I don’t know when she might have gotten “hit” but she was still the same, wary street-wise cat she’d been before. Sometimes she’d dash in to start eating if I sat beside the food bowl but I still couldn’t touch her: she’d turn and run, even run away without eating if she thought I was trying to catch her. She’d come back minutes later, waiting until I was safely inside before she’d approach the bowl.

Fair enough.

Then, when I started moving out of the apartment and into the house, now that I’d taken my own cats with me, I could try just leaving the kitchen door open in hopes she’d come inside to eat. Every night after work, I’d come into town just to feed her (and do a little sorting and packing) and finally she’d hop up on the step and eat there... then maybe inside as far as the doormat but no farther.

I had caught one stray years ago by making a bread-crumb trail of ground-beef which I’d happened to be cooking at the time, and that cat was so hungry, despite any misgivings, she followed the trail into the center of my kitchen before I shut the door behind her (I had her for 15 years, also).

Frieda, however, turned out not to like ground beef. She became warier and ran off. The next night she wouldn’t even come close to the door and even ran off before I put the food outside for her (the ‘possum got that dishful).

Which brings me to last Friday night – and I had decided (a) maybe I’m not supposed to have this cat even though I’ve now got room for her and (b) I’d wait until Sunday night because I knew with the symphony’s pre-concert talks, I’d probably be too busy with everything else to deal with settling a stray cat into a spare bathroom.

But Friday night, she decided to come in. She hadn’t eaten much the past two nights and it seems like she hardly eats anything anywhere else, for all I know. She looked longingly at the dish. I moved it in further – far enough to be able to shut the door behind her. I was able to block off the hallway out of the kitchen: once the door was closed, she’d be trapped. Then I’d grab her and put her in the carrier, already waiting for her.

It took maybe 20 minutes but she worked up enough courage to come in – first a bite, then a dash back to the porch... then another bite or two, then a retreat to the step. Then she settled down to eat. That’s when I shut the door behind her, hoping I’d be faster than she’d be and that I wouldn’t cut her in half in the process.

Slam! Bam! Gotcha, ma’am!

After she took two laps around the kitchen, during which I was afraid she might start spitting out kittens left and right, I managed to corral her. I have the bite-marks on both index fingers to prove it. Once in the carrier, she was quiet – wide-eyed but quiet, no yowling or crying. In fact, I didn’t hear a peep from her all the way out to the house (which is more than I could say for two of my long-domesticated cats). I stopped to buy some band-aids and peroxide, having already taken some time to wash out the wounds and add a little Neosporin.

But Frieda was now mine. I’m not sure either of us were really ready for this.

I figured I couldn’t put this off any longer because I didn’t know when she’d have the kittens: after they’d be born, I would be long gone from the apartment if she should return. I would never see her again.

I put her in a spare bathroom at the back of the house, out of the way from general traffic and isolated from the other cats. Once out of the carrier, she immediately flew up the wall and hung (by one claw) from the curtains. Then she settled down on the counter-top. She sat in front of the mirror (see picture, left), finding some comfort, apparently, in this other cat. Did she think it was Farrell? She actually allowed me to pet her and I spent a few minutes nuzzling her behind her ears and down her neck, under the chin, down over the back but not too close to the mound of kittens deep inside her. She eventually curled up in the sink (see picture, below). After sitting with her for a while, it was now past 3am and I decided to get some sleep.


When I checked her in the morning, she settled into a corner under the counter. She would not let me pet her – and I have claw-marks to prove it – and I figured, okay, she’s pregnant and she’s very defensive, so I’d just let her alone. It might take a week for her to adapt. Okay, I could handle that.

On Sunday, she’d moved over to a different corner, even more inaccessible: behind the toilet.

The plan was to try catching her again to take her out to the vets, have her checked out, get her what shots she could have, given her condition, and see how the kittens are progressing.

Monday morning, when I woke up around 8:45, I discovered she had no intention of going to the vets. She had just given birth to what will be her last litter of kittens.

She was still licking one off. They were all soaking wet, looked more like hairballs with rat-tails except they were squirming and mewing. I wasn’t sure but I think there were four or five. I decided she needed to be left alone: the more I check in on her, she might feel threatened and destroy them.

About an hour later, I cleaned the litter box (so relieved to discover she actually was using it) and put down fresh water, trying to be quiet and non-aggressive. She was now on her other side and the kittens were out-of-view behind her. There was a pile of dark something-or-other about six inches from her which I took to mean one of them didn’t make it but I wasn’t about to reach back and try taking it away.

Meanwhile, I had called the vets, asked “OMG WHAT NOW?!” and they said basically just let her raise them, I don’t need to do anything except make sure she has lots of food and water and to clean the litter box a couple times a day. And then wait until they're weaned – uhm, maybe 4-6 weeks.

If this had happened at the old apartment, she would’ve been in the only bathroom I have which would be a real disaster trying to accommodate her. Fortunately, I’d gotten her out to the house in time where it won’t be anywhere near the inconvenience. But still...

Out of cat food, I made a quick dash to the store, then just put a can of food down for her, the kittens mewing and crawling around. They were now dried-off and looking more like cats than drowned mice. Earlier, I thought there were two dark ones, one orange tabby like her and another one kind of nondescript but partly hidden. But now I could see three orange tabbies and one so pale it looked like a white kitten with pale orange tabby markings (I decided, okay, if everything works out, I’m keeping that one). And the one I thought was dead may be the dark one I now see nursing from her. By the time I got the camera, I could now see only three (or maybe four) of them.

So there you have it – Frieda Plus Four, Maybe Five. The excitement continues to build!

Dr. Dick

The Past as a Present

Since this was intended as a "creativity" blog and I haven't been very creative recently, following my mother's death, there hasn't been anything to write about except I am very agitated about not being able to compose right now which I guess is a good sign. In the past, going a few months without feeling like writing made me question whether I was a composer or not.

Back in December, nearly finished with three of the pieces for violin and piano I'd been working on, I decided to take a break and write something else. Since it was Christmastime, a Christmas piece seemed logical, but that came to a halt on January 16th (and that after three days of inactivity) because of numerous distractions mostly related to the apartment and the constantly barking doberneighborman. I had decided it was time to move -- a hateful occupation of time that is sure to destroy the creative impulse as everything else falls before it.

The question was where? It would be a spring-time project.

In the past, most of my moves came toward the end of summer: in fact, the last move took place over the hottest week of the summer of 2001 and I refuse to get stuck with that again.

And not in winter: a former co-worker told me stories of moving into Central PA during the Blizzards of January 1996 -- she moved the weekend of the Flood, however, the one with the ice jam that took out the Walnut Street Bridge -- and I didn't want to risk scheduling movers only to tempt Mother Nature into coming up with something equally memorable in this otherwise unmemorable winter.

Since my mother's death in February, much of the time has been spent dealing with the grief and the changes one senses, even at my age, in losing one's mother. It has not been a weepy, mournful grief (trying to avoid those who've been weepy and mournful has helped) but a quiet, contemplative one that at times is sad and wistful, at others joyful and humorous, mostly depending on the memory of the moment or something I may have found as we clean through the stuff-congested house with its accumulation of not only my parents' lifetime but their parents as well.

A few weeks ago, a friend showed me a book he had just gotten back after loaning it out and I said I had to read it: it was called "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!" by Teller, the shorter, quiet half of the master magicians Penn & Teller, a portrait of his dad (primarily) and the memories he discovered going through some of their stuff while, fortunately, both his parents were alive to tell him its significance. Through this "stuff" the son discovers aspects of his parents' lives he was unaware of before.

The cover shows a very wary Teller sitting in the midst of his dad's shop, a dusty broken victrola on his lap, his father emphatically expounding on the importance of some rusted contraption he's handing him. They're surrounded by tools, mops, jars full of nails, a porcelain pitcher, what looks like a stuffed raven but also paintings and what may be the cartoons Joe Teller had drawn in 1939 which become the focus of the book: these cartoons are The Discovery, something the son never even knew existed, and this leads to letters and reminiscences about the years his dad had gone tramping across the country (quite literally) before becoming an artist, meeting his future wife at an art school, then getting married just before World War II. After the war, Joe Teller settled into the world of commercial art, primarily as a "letter man" doing the wording for ads in the Philadelphia newspapers.

So far, I have not found a box of cartoons, but I did just find a box of india inks and paints, brushes and pen-nibs my dad used when he'd do the lettering for the ads he designed for "The Boston Store," one of the Greenberg stores in Harrisburg where he'd worked since graduating from high school (or perhaps even before) and had long been the manager. I found a card he had made for my mom's 60th birthday in which he wrote about how they met:

"It was the summer of '38 at Hershey Park when I saw 'Ginny' Hartman for the first time. I didn't know then that God had a plan for everyone's life from beginning to end, so on this special day I didn't know I was looking at the girl God had chosen for my life!

A few days later, in Pomeroy's Department Store, I saw the most beautiful, wholesome-looking girl I had ever seen. It was Ginny Hartman!! My heart 'pounded with excitement' on June 17, 1938 when I asked her for a date and she accepted. And on March 17, 1940, her name became Ginny Strawser."

As I remember the story, my dad, two years out of Hummelstown High School, was working at Greenberg's clothing store at 5th & Market in downtown Harrisburg. My mother, a '37 graduate of John Harris High School, was working at Pomeroy's at 4th & Market. The story goes that dad went back to Greenberg's, told a co-worker named Duke about the girl he'd just seen and wanted him to go back and find out her name: "she's wearing a white blouse and black skirt." When Duke got there, it turned out ALL the sales clerks wore white blouses and black skirts. It must've worked out okay, though: Duke's in the wedding photo as Best Man.

My dad was a natural-born musician, teaching himself to play the piano and eventually the Hammond organ. He couldn't read music but had perfect pitch and could play a thousand songs if you could hum a few bars. I found dozens of reel-to-reel tapes made in 1954 when my dad had a 15-minute radio show once a week, broadcast live from the Blue Mountain Hotel (now Felicita). I was 5 years old and thought everybody's dad had a radio show. Funny how I've just passed my 17th anniversary working at WITF-FM...

But I also knew somewhere there was a record. We have many recordings -- 45s, 78s and then the long-playing 33s. But this one was different: my dad made this recording and it was a song he wrote and sang while he was in San Diego during the War and sent to Mom back home. It was one of those things where servicemen could go to this studio and record greetings their loved ones back home could listen to -- think about it: they were on the verge of being shipped off to the Pacific Front -- but my dad wrote a song and performed it himself.

Last night, I found the record.

It was unmarked, just a blank label in a blank sleeve but I just knew it had to be that song. I haven't listened to it yet because I'm afraid one time may be the last time it would play or I'd break it. I want to wait till I can transfer it onto a CD just to make sure I can hear it again. It may not have been a box of cartoons, but it was a discovery all the same.

There was a story my mother told me shortly after Dad died in 1985. When he was in San Diego, he and a bunch of his Navy buddies were on a train that had an old piano on it. If there was a piano in a room, my dad wanted to play it, so he and his friends went over to the piano and he played while they all sang along to the popular songs of the day.

One of the passengers in that car was the wife of actor Raymond Massey who went up and complimented him, introducing herself and saying she had some "connections" (some guy named Crosby, I believe) if he'd be interested in playing in a band for Hollywood.

My dad, a Hollywood studio musician!

I wonder how different things would've been if he'd followed up on that. The war was over not long after that and the first thought in his mind was getting home to his family -- not just his wife but also his 4-year-old son, my older brother. He remembered the problems his parents had had, his father a trumpet player in numerous bands in the area and as family legend has it subbed in the Sousa band for part of a year. This became a bone of contention with my grandmother who didn't want to be stuck home with the kids while he travelled around playing music all over the place, so he gave it up.

My dad didn't "give it up," though. He stayed here in Harrisburg and became a well-known musician "on the side," maintaining his day job (one newspaper article about him when he was active in the Uptown Business Men's Association, described him as "shoe salesman to the poor") earning a kind of fame. True, it was not without its issues: if my folks went out on their anniversary, it was always a St. Patrick's Day party where Dad was playing the organ and Mom would sit there and listen to him. New Years Eve, she was always alone with the kids, ushering in the new year with a toast of homemade egg nog.

My parents built this house and we moved into it in March of 1960, around the time of their 20th wedding anniversary.

Now 47 years later, I will be moving into it myself. It's not a "new" place because I grew up here, though now it's "my" place even if it is still (and will always be to an extent) "their" place. It is not perfect -- there are aspects of "deferred maintenance" to contend with -- but it is a far cry from the cramped little apartments I have been renting all my life.

Once the piano is back in my old childhood bedroom, I can compose again. I won't have to worry about the sleeping (or fighting) schedules of upstairs neighbors, the noise of boom-boxes from the street, the loud music pounding through the walls from next door, the doberneighborman barking all day long as I'm trying to write. I can play the piano when I want and compose whenever I feel like it.

And I already have some pieces in mind to work on. But more of that, later.

Dr. Dick

Loss & Remembrance

We are creatures of habit, building up a routine over the years of what is comfortable and anticipated. And though we might adapt as schedules and expectations evolve, for some reason of presumed invincibility we think things will never change, or perhaps hope they never will, even when change is inevitable. Because we expect people to always be there for us – with us – things go unsaid (but hopefully understood) and plans are put off because there’s always another day. Until we realize that, however it happened, there are no more days to procrastinate with. Now, instead, we look back to find consolation in memories.

In the week since my mother’s death, I have found boxes of pictures that I knew she had been sorting through and sometimes labeling, scanning pictures to e-mail to my brother and I or her sister on the computer we’d gotten her when she turned 80, including lots of photos from the 1920s to the 1940s as well as her parents’ wedding picture from 1911 and family photographs of her mother taken before they left England.

There were some with vague historical details that I only remember from what she had told me, then: a heavily bearded gentleman was her grandfather whom no one in the family seemed to know much about. All the known pictures of her grandmother show her in “widow’s black” which leads us to believe he died when she was not yet middle-aged. By association, she must be the young woman with her hand leaning demurely on her older husband’s shoulder in a carefully choreographed family portrait taken after his own father’s death, his mother (my great-great-grandmother) seated amidst her children looking very much like Queen Victoria who spent much of her own life wearing widow’s black. Looking at it, I’m not sure I can explain why I dated this picture to the 1870s, now, but it’s the start of a long line of family photographs – using this old technology – that ends with a photograph taken a year or so ago of my mother, then in her mid-80s, with her great-granddaughter. I will scan many of these onto a CD and hope that, when she grows up, my great-niece will have the technology available to view a CD-Rom, if looking at the sadness on the face of her great-great-great-great grandmother (whose name I do not even know) will connect her with a past she never knew existed.

But I also found other boxes that I had never seen before and which maybe Mother had forgotten she’d placed on a top shelf in a closet. Many of them were recognizable – this aunt, that uncle, though taken before I was born – and others may not really matter as long as I can tell they are part of her father’s large collection of friends and siblings.

In an album that had only a few pages of mounted photographs which my father had generously captioned – followed by several pages with fistfuls of unsorted, usually uncaptioned photos intended for later inclusion – I saw a series taken on a mild December day in 1940 with my Uncle Marlin who had died later in World War II. There was my mother, not quite 10 months a bride, standing with my uncle who looked proud and spiffy in his army uniform. Then I saw my dad in his army uniform and thought, “wait, he wasn’t in the army” before I realized he – and then my Uncle Bob too – were all having their pictures taken wearing Uncle Marlin’s jacket!

Some lack dates which might be helpful, others lack clues if you don’t know what to look for (one couple’s wedding photo she helpfully labeled “not a clue”).

It was good to find pictures of her that erase the pain of seeing her those final days. It was amazing to read through old calendars, some stored in boxes in her office (on a desk that her father had bought when he graduated from high school in 1905) that were kind of like journals where I could fill in the details, knowing an anecdote from the family history or discovering a day in June marked “1st Anniv of 1st Date” with my dad and pictures taken on her grandfather’s farm (see photo at left) in upper Dauphin County.

One anecdote I knew from early in my childhood: how Dad got his first Hammond organ. Well, not really his... He had played the piano since he was in grade school – he had perfect pitch but never took lessons from anyone, just figuring everything out by ear – and he learned how to play the organ much the same way during The War, sneaking into the base’s chapel though he was primarily playing the popular songs of the day to entertain his friends and anyone who’d listen. After the war, a friend of his, Jack, was building his own house and the Hammond organ he’d ordered was going to be delivered before the house was ready: would my folks mind if he’d have it delivered to their place in Paxtang so he wouldn’t lose the option on it (it would go to the next person on the list and he’d be bumped to the bottom, otherwise). Well, sure! Paging through a 1947-1948 ‘engagement’ book, my mother wrote down the day Jack’s Hammond was delivered (see photo at right). Later that summer, my dad made his debut at the Pueblo, a night-spot in Harrisburg, as a “cocktail organist” (the second night, she noted, went better than the first; a few days later, she also mentions his first tip, $1.00). Throughout the book were annotations of “Jack over for dinner” or “dinner at Jack’s” and frequent games of pinochle with Jack and other friends. On March 17th, 1948, she writes “Our 8th Wedding Anniversary.”

There was a box of her father’s early record-keeping, too: rent receipts he’d paid for apartments before they bought their first house the year my mother was born ($15/month rent – not bad) or lists of furniture they’d bought (including a piano for $420), lists of books he’d read, lists of facts he thought were important to remember, and a string of medallions he wore as a member of the Philadelphia branch of the Knights of Malta in 1918. Ironically, I realized, last Friday sitting there amidst these boxes of papers and pictures we were sorting through on the floor, looking up at the desk I often looked up at when I was a child, that that Friday was my grandfather’s birthday and so we went out for dinner to celebrate the past.

My mother had become a keeper of lists herself: the gene is apparently inherited from her father. There are ledger books with every book she read since 1985 when my father died and piles of books that she’d not yet logged but which had post-it notes on them indicating when she’d finished reading them. There’s a ledger itemizing every piece of clothing she bought between 1984 and 1994. There are bundles of notes listing every visitor and phone call she received and made since 1993 (and I suspect I will find previous years tucked away somewhere else). Her more recent calendars, while devoid of highlights like she noted in 1947, may have contained less interesting information – the high and low temperatures for every day or when the Lawn Guy mowed the grass (highlighted in green). She was, if anything, a meticulously organized packrat. I have inherited the packrat gene but unfortunately not her organizational skills: my laissez-faire approach to clutter is something I inherited from my dad.

There are bundles of letters still to be sorted and read, though fewer than I would’ve thought. But that is for another day. In this age of e-mail and instant messaging – and yes, I found print-outs my mother had made of several of the chat sessions we’d had when she first got her computer – what will be left for families to reminisce over in the future? I can hold a 130-year-old photograph in my hand and feel the connection with my family’s distant English roots, but what of all those jpg’s locked in some already out-dated computer software program or storage format? What about all those reel-to-reel audio tapes she’d made from the radio broadcasts when my dad had a weekly 15-minute show, live from the Blue Mountain Hotel in the mid-1950s? We had often talked about trying to resurrect them so she could hear them again before she died, but it kept getting put off, too involved a process, perhaps, and even at 87½ we still felt there was time.

One of my rituals these past 15 years or so was to call my mother, however often I may have talked to her the rest of the week, Sunday nights following the 11:00 news. Even though she was expecting it, she said it always made her jump when the phone rang and she would worry if I was a few minutes late. We would talk, maybe, for an hour or more, both of us night-owls (I was born, according to my baby calendar in which she annotated every event and illness that first year, at 2:58 a.m.). But tonight was the first Sunday night since the funeral that I know she’s not there for me to call on the phone.

Years ago, I had found a quote – mentioned in one of May Sarton’s journals – attributed to St. John Chrysostom:

He whom we have loved and lost
Is no longer where he once was.
He is now wherever we are.

And I also know that, after 21 years, my mother and my father are together again. And these two understandings help me considerably in dealing with her loss.

-- Dr. Dick

Photo credits: all from family collections - (1) Mother in a black dress taken by my dad in early-1940s; (2) Mom & Dad on the Hartman Farm in Williamstown PA, 1939, the year before they married; (3) My dad, Norm Strawser, playing Jack's Hammond organ in the living room of our house in Paxtang (two years before I was born); (4) Mom & Dad in 1944, a photograph I found in her wallet the day she died, February 23rd, 2007.

WLVB Looks For an Evening Announcer

And now for something a little lighter, placing composers in surreal plot situations like a Classical Music Radio Station that would be staffed by the composers themselves? Though WLVB is actually a country music station in Vermont, it seemed the logical place where the station manager would be a guy named Beethoven.

(Incidentally, any resemblance to characters in the story and my former colleagues at WITF 89.5 is purely accidental, and the fact they're looking for an evening announcer had no bearing that I was aware of at the time concerning WITF's former evening announcer.)

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

The phone rang, the little blinking light barely catching his attention. He picked up the receiver and snapped, “Ja, Beethoven here,” and soon slammed it back down. “Another hang-up!”

He had gotten a letter the other day from somebody in Hollywood wanting to know if he could recommend someone to compose music for the studio’s next big hit, “American Pie VIII,” but he tossed it in the trash. “What do I know about music for dumplings and pies,” he muttered. He thought maybe it was them calling him, now. The last time he had tried writing for Hollywood, these idiots kept trying to change everything: “Keep it simple,” they told him, “don’t ramble.” Infuriating!

He returned to the e-mail he was almost ready to send his program director, Richard Wagner, about the latest ratings book. Things were not going well at WLVB lately, the classical music station where he had long been the station manager. But then, classical music on the radio was always a problem in this country. “People these days prefer American Idol,” he sniffed, “but then it wasn’t much different in Vienna, either.”

The morning guy, Bach, was always complaining about what it had been like battling the Philistines in Leipzig. Brahms, in between cigars, would say how much he loved a good Strauss waltz but now and then, something a little serious was good for the soul yet a lot of listeners kept complaining about all the old-fashioned music he was playing in the afternoon. “This is America in the 21st Century,” they’d grouse, but turning to Beethoven, he’d say “Have you heard any of this so-called music they’re writing today?” Beethoven just looked at him and Brahms went back to his cigar.

Beethoven sighed as he looked out the window of his office before he remembered it was only a photograph of a window looking out onto the Vienna Woods which he missed so much. He had gone against Wagner’s objections about bringing in a woman to host the weekend’s Old & New Age show, but Hildegard of Bingen had proven to be a wise choice on his part. If nothing else, her numbers were very good and she didn’t hang out at the station much except on Fridays for a little while.

Now Wagner was complaining about the guy they recently hired to host the opera program. Verdi certainly had his credentials, but he rarely ever did any German operas and how could you have an opera program without good German opera? “No wonder the ratings were in trouble,” he argued!

The problem, Wagner said, whatever he might have been hinting at in his obtuse e-mails about the Direction of Art and the Role of the Artist in Society, had nothing to do with ratings but with the purity of the message. “Spare me the philosophy, Herr Wagner,” Beethoven grumbled as he hit the Send key. Or thought he hit the Send key: it disappeared from his screen so fast, he was sure he must have hit the wrong key instead and deleted it.

Clara, his new secretary, brought in another cup of coffee for him. He just knew she was going to start in about hiring her husband Robert Schumann for that development position that always seemed to be open. The other day he noticed her and Brahms hanging around the coffee machine a little longer than necessary, like he needed that kind of trouble on his staff anyway. He found it difficult making small talk with her, asking about the kids and all. “Ja, ja, thank you,” waving his hand in her general direction, pretending to be lost in another article about the competition with satellite radio.

She put the afternoon mail on his desk, mostly applications for the evening position. Since Wagner had finally succeeded in switching Mendelssohn to the overnight spot, they needed someone in a hurry, but nobody was quite right. This guy Schubert was too quiet; Mahler was too loud. Tchaikovsky was just too depressing and Mozart, you could tell, was always going to be asking for time off because it would interfere with his social life. We could use somebody French, he thought, but Wagner was pushing for this friend of his named Bruckner. Paging through the latest edition of the classical radio trade journal, The Courant, Beethoven wondered if there was a composer out there like this Howard Stern: maybe that was what they needed, someone who could shake things up a bit – and play the violin, as well.

Bach had given up explaining he must be thinking of Isaac Stern. Brahms just chuckled into his beer.

At the last staff meeting, Bach thought maybe Handel would be a worthwhile candidate – at least his hair was neater than Stern’s. Brahms thought surely Johann Strauss – the younger one, that is, who had great hair – would get all the young listeners dancing.

Wagner just rolled his eyes. He knew all about the Music of the Future, and Johann Strauss, he assured them, was not it.

“What about Schoenberg, then,” Beethoven had asked, looking from one to the other. “Or maybe Stravinsky?” No one responded. He thought maybe they were all suddenly deaf.

That was when Mendelssohn, bleary-eyed from his late-night shift, suggested Berlioz. He’d met him in Rome and though he didn’t care for his music much, himself, it was certainly consistent with the personality and spoke directly to a younger generation: maybe that was what WLVB needed in the evening?

Bach sneered at him. “We need a drug bust? To hell with Berlioz,” waving his hand in disgust.

Ravel, one of the new guys in sales, slapped his fist down on the table, wincing at the sudden pain. “That’s it,” he shouted, “that’s exactly it! ‘To Hell with Berlioz,’ the new evening show at WLVB!”

“Hmmm,” Beethoven thought, looking over the scrap of paper Mendelssohn had passed his way, “I like it. Clara, give him a call and see if he’s available to come in for an interview, ja?”

She took the scrap of paper warily between her fingers as if it were crawling with cooties and left the room.

There had also been a letter asking about the possibility of an internship from a student named Juan Chrisostomo Arriaga, so Beethoven dutifully passed his resume around for their inspection. Some felt he was too young or too inexperienced, sounded too much like Mozart but Beethoven just glowered at them. “It’s an internship,” he grimaced. “Dummkopfs,” he muttered not quite under his breath.

They were also talking about some kind of gimmick that could help the next ratings book. Bach thought a marathon of great pianists playing his Goldberg Variations back to back would do the trick, but Wagner just started to snore.

“If you wanted a Marathon, I’ve already written the ultimate Marathon,” Wagner tossed out into the conversation but just thinking about it, Brahms began to snore.

Mendelssohn, who enjoyed cooking, was wondering about a take-off on “The Iron Chef” but with symphonists instead. Brahms was wary of the quality of anything that could be composed that quickly: “you couldn’t improvise a symphony,” he grumbled.

Wagner thought he could get Liszt to arrange another series of “Dueling Pianists” but Beethoven liked the idea of a grudge match between two soccer teams, pitting the Russian Five against the French Six. Ravel said it would be too expensive to pull off and wasn’t really suited to radio, for that matter. True, hadn’t they learned their lesson with “Celebrity Bowling with Mozart” which didn’t even last three weeks?

Beethoven sat at his desk, sipping his coffee when he saw the light blinking on the phone again. Once more, he picked it up with a sigh but as usual no one was there. “What good is all this technology if it doesn’t work, ja?” he stormed, slamming it down, then thought about writing another e-mail to his Immortal Beloved.

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2007

The Care & Feeding of the Creative Spirit: Part 2

Continuing from Part 1:

When I was in school, I had weekly lessons in composition and occasionally we’d talk about “the teaching of composition.” But nowhere was there any kind of “creative psychology,” preparing students for changes to their creativity as we mature, if we would have even listened (the “I’ll never change, that won’t happen to me” argument) other than the occasional wink-wink about any impending mid-life crisis.

When I was a composition student, I could sit in a practice room at school surrounded by other students who’d be practicing or running up and down the hall like a bunch of idiots: nothing really seemed to bother me. Now, listening to the soft rock beat of my neighbor’s stereo through my walls (thump thump thump) or the barking doberman next door sends me into a tailspin: how can I possibly write with all this racket?!

Then there’s that new voice you may have just discovered, one inside yourself that’s louder than all your neighbor’s stereos and dogs put together, the one that keeps saying “Who cares what you write? You think someone’s going to like that shit? What orchestra do you think is going to have the rehearsal time to learn to play this? You think you’re Beethoven or something?”

It’s the kind of voice that, when you look in the mirror and think “I look nice,” is saying to you, “Are you kidding? You look fat!”

This is what some writers call “The Inner Critic.”

Kill him!

In the old cartoons, they used to depict this voice as the little devil sitting on your shoulder, urging you to do things you knew were wrong, before the little angel would pop up on your other shoulder, the voice of your conscience, telling you you shouldn’t do that. The only problem with the Inner Critic is there’s no little angel around to talk you out of it. Pretty soon, you begin to believe that voice and if you’re not able to kill him off or at least drown him out (I know – white noise!!), it can kill your creativity faster than anything else in the world.

For the typical student – high school or college – long-range planning is generally “how do I make it through to the weekend?” When you become a senior, then there are either plans for grad school or career choices that need to be made. If that wasn’t a big enough change, there’s getting married and the even bigger change and responsibilities that take precedence with children.

From a creative (and selfish) standpoint, there are distractions and new responsibilities that reorganize your life, change your priorities. As the Bible says, “When I was a child, I spake as a child” and so on... “But now that I am a man” (it would be too complicated to diversify this quote politically correctly: but now that I am a man or a woman? Well, these days, anything is possible) “I have put away these childish things...” Okay, maybe “now that I am an adult”...

Art is a form of play. You let your imagination play. At one point, you have the freedom of youth to play anything you feel like playing – you experiment with possibilities, you take risks and it doesn’t matter: you can always try again – there’s plenty of time!

What happens when you turn 21, other than being able to vote and drink (legally)? Everyone expects you to act “like an adult.” (Let’s leave the immature adult who’s acting like a child out of the equation for the moment.)

Creativity is Play but now you have to Work. You get a job, hopefully earn a living, support yourself, have a family – these all take time from the creative play and sometimes sap the energy from it. And you find you don’t have plenty of time any more. If you’re a mother trying to hold down a job and raise a family, you have NO time.

Your employer isn’t going to be too concerned about your plans for the Great American Novel or Symphony. “You do that on your own time.” And that’s if you have a job that doesn’t require more than an 8-hour day. Who would have time, if you’re like Toru Takemitsu, to sit down and play through the St. Matthew Passion just to get inspired?

Play is for children – that’s the image. Now that you’re an adult, it’s time to put the toys away.

Don’t.

At least not in some remote corner of the brain where you allow society to throw away the key.

How do you keep play in your life so your creativity can be nurtured by it? Well, there ARE weekends, but if you own a home, play is not exactly mowing the grass or cleaning the garage. If you have children, play can suddenly open up the whole world of your own childhood again like a kind of magic. If artists have been inspired by romance, may have been inspired by the birth of a child, though there are different responsibilities, from diapers and beyond.

Creativity is the work of play, the imagination free of the Everyday. Give your creativity something to keep the everyday reality out for a while.

When I was in my early-30s, I spent a month at a writer’s colony called Yaddo (the MacDowell Colony is another one and there are several in other parts of the country as well). There was a routine: breakfast was served at before 9am and lunch was handed to you in a box – then between 9 and 5, you stayed in your room and wrote. No one could go into anyone else’s room without prior arrangement and bother them. You could escape to eat your lunch downstairs or on the patio or you could stay in your room and eat while you’re working. The TV set in the parlor could only be on after 5pm (they made an exception: I was there the day President Reagan was shot). Dinner was served at 5. The rest of the evening was yours – you could socialize or continue to work, but no one was supposed to bother you in your room. One thing that helped was the recognition that creativity was the equal of work – not that it was “work,” because any artist knows how hard creative work is, but because it was being equated with that 9-to-5 sense of work.

Around the houses and cabins that comprise this colony in the woods were 50-60 acres with several different paths. Some of us would take brisk walks along the shorter path, a kind of inner circle around the mansion; other times maybe you wanted to spend more time and take the longer, outer circle. Rather than a brisk walk, perhaps it was a day to linger and look at the new spring growth (I was there in mid-March) or watch the birds. You could take as long as you liked or needed, but once you were back in your room, it was now time to work.

These walks were a double form of exercise: more than just cardiovascular, it got the blood flowing through the brain. And it eliminated the build-up of stress, sweeping out the day’s reality and allowing your creativity to stop and smell the roses.

It doesn’t have to be a full workout at the gym: all you need is a little just to dust off the brain and give it a little fuel so you’re good to go for the rest of the day.

So if you feel you have trouble, suddenly, being creative – take a walk. And tell that Inner Critic to take a hike! Go somewhere that relaxes you or energizes you, whatever works for you. You may have to drive somewhere, but the drive is not enough. In the winter if it’s too cold to get out and walk, maybe it’s time to turn that coatrack back into a stationary bike...

For some writers, reading other people’s words can inhibit the flow of your own. For others, it may inspire them or give them something to “take off” from. For composers, it’s not just a matter of not listening to someone else’s music. For instance, I have music spilling through my head all the time. I work at a radio station and play classical music in the evening, but there can be music all around you, not just from the radio but everywhere else you turn – the ubiquitous Muzak. And nothing is worse than getting some inane phrase stuck in your head you can’t get rid of, something that just repeats over and over again. They call these “ear worms” (kill them, too).

One thing that several writers about creativity have suggested is keeping a journal. Unfortunately mine becomes more a report on what happened rather than what I’m thinking about. Sometimes, it’s therapeutic to get issues off your mind (“off your chest” is the standard expression) – problems at work, trouble with a relationship. Julia Cameron, in her popular book “The Artist’s Way,” suggests you write first thing after you wake up: it’s not WHAT you write but THAT you write, and this works whether you’re a writer or a painter or a composer. You clear the stuff out of your brain, maybe writing about a dream or just nonsense just to get the mind moving. Eventually this will lead to ideas or something that can lead to ideas, something that could be the creative light-bulb you need to get the real creative work started.

Occasionally, I find myself just simply asking “Why am I stuck?” I might get into a question why I like one composer over another and maybe discover something that piques my creative curiosity (or leads me down the Red Herring Road). Maybe I’ll start hearing sound-images in my head – not necessarily themes but maybe musical shapes (or “gestures”), instrumental colors or kinds of texture which I then try to describe in prose or drawings. It is my dialogue with my self. It helps to activate my inner self, freeing it up for... PLAY!

After several years of not having composed anything (nor even trying to), I heard the concertmaster of the Harrisburg Symphony play Ernest Chausson’s “Poeme.” It’s a piece I’ve never really cared for. But at the end of the piece, in the very last measures, there’s a chain of very high trills over a long sustained chord before everything resolves. Even though I’ve heard this piece many times and often found this passage unsettling because it’s so hard to play in tune, this time I sat up like I’d never heard it before. I’m not sure it was just the performance (which was very good) but I found this, now, very mysterious and before long (actually, I think, days later) a very mysterious piece started forming in my head. Now keep in mind, I had not completed a single piece of music in something like over 12 years, so this was definitely unexpected.

Some years before, I had read the opening of Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” where the world is sung into existence by a chief deity and a committee of sub-deities. It’s one of the most beautiful creation stories I’ve read, everything willed into being through a kind of astral music. One of these “sub-deities” brings in a note of discord, introducing evil into the world – and this theatrical aspect is what set the piece in my mind in motion. What exactly this had to do with the trills at the end of Chausson’s “Poeme,” I have no idea, but there it was.

It evolved into a piece for violin and orchestra about 12 minutes long which took 6 months to write but (several years later) still doesn’t have a title. I didn’t want it to become the Silmarillion Piece. But it worked for me and became the first piece I’d completed in about 16 years or so. Later, I began to see it as a conflict between my creativity (the solo violin) with the introduction of evil from my own Inner Critic.

In the process of working on this, it occurred to me it was taking soooo long getting back into the swing of composing again. It had been years, of course, and it wasn’t quite like “getting back on the bicycle” (a cliche I hate because, truthfully, I never learned to ride a bicycle in the first place) There were whole new things to learn, it seemed, things I hadn’t been doing for 16 years. Discipline was a big thing to have to learn, the idea of “showing up at the page,” the equivalent of going to work and working regardless of productivity or success. It was difficult not to be discouraged by how long this was taking. That “Inner Critic” was constantly reminding me that I once wrote a very complex 9-minute choral work basically in one day.

Perhaps you remember the claymation film that came out in 2000 (around the time I was working on this piece) called “Chicken Run”? One night, I happened to catch one of those “Making Of...” TV shows, how they put this stop-action animated film together. They take little figures made out of clay... set it up, take a shot, then move an arm a smidge, adjust the facial expression a bit, take another shot and so on – a very tedious process. They realize that with computers today it would be so much easier to make an animated film but they were committed to the look and feel of their claymation process. It didn’t bother them that, at the end of a very long working day, usually 8 or 9 strenuous hours on the set (which was basically the size of a kid’s Christmas train platform) they had... 3½ seconds of film footage. Let me say that again – 8 or 9 hours of work, 3½ seconds of film!

So I sat down to figure out how much music I was basically averaging in the process of composing, keeping track of the number of hours and then timing what I’d actually composed in that period of time. Though I could never manage 8 or 9 hours of composing time in a day (too fatiguing, mentally) even though much of that could be spent staring at what I’d written the day before, it still averaged out to about 3½ minutes of music for every 8 hours of clock-time spent working. So I figured if they couldn’t be discouraged at “Chicken Run” with that kind of progress, why should I? It’s a matter of having a vision and believing in it. It was a kind of revelation – like “poultry in motion” – that helped kill (for a time) that nasty little inner voice.

Several composers have told me, in one way or another, “the piece you finish is never the piece you started.” It takes on a life of its own, in most cases, and becomes something else from that initial idea. Sometimes this is a problem; sometimes it becomes a better piece. But life is like that, too.

We all have distractions: you have a job, now, and maybe a family to support and raise. Many people can’t always manage to get up an hour earlier to write that novel, but some can figure out what things to do to accommodate that dream: set up a special room in a quiet part of the house (if there is such a thing), a place you won’t be disturbed while the door is shut. Maybe ask the spouse to take the kids out for an hour – turn off the phone. Spend an hour concentrating on what you’re writing, composing, painting, practicing. One hour. You’d be surprised how much, once you get used to it, you can accomplish in an hour.

Of course it takes me sometimes almost that much time before I even realize where I need to start, figuring out where things were going when I left off the last time, but now my hour is up and I need to leave for work. So I started looking for other ways of prepping my time: before I stop, jot down some ideas where I need to begin. Spend as much time, when inspiration strikes, getting something down on paper that will jog the memory the next time, even if it’s drawings or squiggles or descriptive words. If you just think “yeah, I’ll remember that tomorrow,” chances are you won’t.

Take stock of yourself. I am not a morning person but I can’t work late at night after I get home from my second shift job: the neighbors are asleep, my brain is fried. I am also basically a lazy person. I spent years writing spontaneously with a facility that allowed me to sit down and write a 30-minute chamber opera over Thanksgiving vacation. If inspiration isn’t popping up any more on its own, prepare yourself with back-up – other things to work on, perhaps abstract things that might be the equivalent of a cross-word puzzle but could jog the mind into creating something.

Following some of the advice from Julia Cameron's “Artist’s Way,” I would do my “morning pages” and take those “Artist Dates,” things you do for yourself by yourself. I tried to avoid those “crazy-makers,” as she called them, the friends who would come by and complain about their problems until you’re just as miserable as they are (it’s not legal to kill them, but you get the idea).

There are some distractions you can’t get away from: children need you when they need you. Your spouse may understand but there are limits. Being an artist in a relationship means trying to find the balance between love and selfishness, in a way. Perhaps somebody is ill – illness is never anything you expect. These are often the most difficult to accommodate because they require immediate attention and can be the most spiritually draining.

Basically, you learn what you have to do – I have to make money, I have to do this job – also, I have to be with my family because there are also things you need to do – I need to be with my family just as I need to compose. I don't need this and could do with a little less of that. You learn to compensate but you also learn to put the different aspects of your life into some kind of perspective. You find some time when you can sit down and say to your inner child, “can you come out and play?”

If you don’t find these adjustments between your life as a student and as you grow older, you will find yourself stuck in Middle Age with a job you may or may not like but chances are “may not like.” Perhaps the kids are now grown and off to college or on their own and maybe your focus has shifted from taking care of your kids to taking care of your parents. At some point, you will realize you are the age your parents were when YOU were a kid going off to college and you thought they were so old. You couldn’t imagine it before, but there may come a time when you might actually prefer to stay home and read a book rather than go out and party.

The worst thing about Middle Age, life changes that make puberty look like child’s-play, is “The Rut.” The same stuff at work, the same stuff for dinner, the same problems at home, the same stuff on TV. You find yourself in a rut that gets deeper and deeper until you can no longer see up out over the top of it and you find it impossible to climb out of. It doesn’t mean running off and having an affair, buying a snazzy red sports car to reclaim your youth (cars that can be regarded as penis extenders) or dying your hair so you won’t look 50 but more like a 30-something who’s led a hard life. If you didn’t have the discipline to exercise before, chances are you won’t discover that discipline trying to work off the extra pounds when you start feeling stiff in the joints or when those 6-pack abs you always dreamed of have turned into a keg...

There are lots of ways to stave this off or turn things around before it’s too late, or before you run headlong into a wall – like a heart attack – where you have to change everything, or else! Eating right and living right all help your being happy, being engaged in your life, and vice versa. You need to recognize there is a problem and then figure out how to solve it. Big problems are easier to solve if you break them down into smaller issues that can be addressed with greater potential for success. It’s too easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of everything that’s happening (or not happening) to you!

This is a Left Brain thing, looking at the details and working at it bit by bit. If you’re too Right Brained about it, you’ll see the Big Picture but react emotionally – and that emotion could be fear.

The dreams and goals you have today – and you should have them, no matter where you are in life – are just as important to someone who’s a student now as they will be 35 years from now. If career choices and circumstances beyond your control take you in other directions, don’t think of yourself as a failure. Look at what you’re doing, think about what you’d like to do and figure out some way of keeping that involved in your life.

Maybe I won’t write the Great American Symphony. Just because a pianist never quite made it to Carnegie Hall doesn’t mean she’s not a good pianist. There are ways your creativity can help you find some meaning in your life and enrich your family and community.

Without dreams and goals, life has no direction. Figure out where you want to go and what you need to do to get there. Can you always reach that destination? Maybe not – there are lots of twists and turns on those paths and you have to be prepared to react to them, maybe retrace your steps and find a different one. You need to be able to adapt, you need to be able to accept change, not be paralyzed by it. And this something can happen in your home-life, in your work-life as well as in your creative-life.

Everything you do is a risk: it’s the only way you move forward. If you don’t, you’re stuck. Don’t be afraid to take risks – but don’t be depressed if this one didn’t work. Maybe the next one will.

In a relationship, they tell you to “communicate.” You have problem? Talk them out. It’s the same thing with your inner-self, your creativity: you have problems? I’m not saying “talk to yourself” in that way (though with people on cell phones all the time, there’s less stigma attached to it), but yes, you need to communicate with your Self and listen to what the good inner voice is trying to tell you.

- Dr. Dick