What is it about early June recently? Two years ago we vacationed in Yellowstone, and on June 3 or 4th, it snowed an inch and a half, more or less. Here we are again on June 4, in northern California, and it is pouring rain and looks like breaking a precipitation record set in 1884.
Climate change? Naaah.
This all happened too fast for me to get any photos, I’m sorry to say, but it was hilarious. We have thought for some time that we have a nesting pair of scrub jays in our neighbor’s tree right by the fence, because of all the air traffic. This morning we are sure. The scrub jays – both of them – were attacking the resident squirrel – and he was running for his life! Clearly protecting a nest. I wonder if we’ll get to see the new ones when they hatch.
For once I’m not talking about my retirement; after four years I’ve got a routine established, weird as it may look to anyone else. No, this is about my husband. He retired a week ago yesterday, and turned off the alarm clock for the last time. Working 45 miles away at a job that began at 8 AM, he used to get up at 5:50 AM and leave the house a little after seven.
This morning he commented that his new schedule had a downside. When he was working, he used to go out and cruise the garden after breakfast for a few minutes, looking for snails and slugs to remove. After an early incident when he accidentally sprayed the rosebushes with RoundUp, he reduced chemicals in the garden to a very small minimum, and his manual snail control methods kept things pretty well under control with only minor amounts of snail bait.
Well, that was when breakfast was at 6:30. When “after breakfast” is after 8 AM, there aren’t any snails visible. They’ve had dinner and gone back to their holes. As far as I know he’s still mulling this over. If the alarm starts going off at 6 AM again, I’ll know why.
As my knee recovers from the assault and battery it went through in March, walking is officially part of my rehab, so I’m slowly extending the range of my walks. Today I did an errand on foot, instead of in the car – I had to pick up a couple of items from the local drugstore. The weather said it might rain, and it did, but not while I was walking; it was cloudy and not even very cold. My pedometer tells me I walked 1.3 miles, round trip, which was just about the right increase from my 1 mile walk the other day.
My neighborhood, Rockridge in north Oakland, is a walker’s paradise, and in April in California just about everything is in bloom. Sorry, I didn’t get any photographs. I particularly liked the Pacific coast iris, but the whole walk was very floral.
As I was walking down Florio to College Avenue, I heard a rumble and a roar, and just as I reached the corner, three California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers swooped into Florio, curved gracefully into a perfect line, and backed in formation into a parking place. It was a really elegant maneuver. According to the immortal Herb Caen’s definition, I guess that makes the Claremont Diner, on the corner, a “Santa Rosa three-star” restaurant!
On my way home, I stopped by the juniper patch in the Bank of America parking lot to watch the birds. There were four or five male and maybe one or two female sparrows hopping around on top of the plants – let’s just say they were doing what birds do in April! I saw at least three tries at it, plus numerous males chasing other males away from the girls. In case you wonder how birds do it, the males weren’t in position on the females for more than about 2 seconds at a time. I assume they were successful but I’m not a bird expert – maybe these were all near misses.
You wouldn’t think that staying at home doing rehab exercises after knee surgery (see Waiting for Surgery and Aftermath on my blog Hedera’s Corner) would be any different from staying at home as a retired lady doing volunteer stuff on the computer; but it is. For one thing, I have to do those exercises twice a day, which means I can’t settle into something really detailed and forget about everything else for four hours, the way I often do. I have to do stuff I can drop at regular intervals and do my short arc quads, et cetera.
For another, I always (this is the third time I’ve been through this) seem to spend my rehab re-reading novels from my collection. I distinctly remember, while recovering from my first total knee replacement in 2001, re-rereading the entire Brother Cadfael series (by Ellis Peters), in consecutive order. Yes, I do own all of them, mostly in paperback. Oddly, I can’t remember what I read in 2005 for the second round of rehab. This time I’m going through my Agatha Christie collection, mainly Hercule Poirot with a small amount of Jane Marple. My world has been expanded, though, by the Rockridge Branch Library, which has an entire set of Christie in matching bindings, including all the stuff I never bought; so I’m working my way through that, too. Some of the ones I hadn’t read before are very odd indeed. Let’s just say that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd isn’t the only book Christie wrote in which you suddenly realize in the last chapter that the narrator you’ve been comfortably listening to for 200 pages is actually the murderer. In fact, I think the reason I stick with Christie’s “detective” novels is that they’re the only ones where I can be reasonably sure that won’t happen! (Reasonably sure – Roger Ackroyd, after all, is a Poirot novel!) I find it disturbing to realize that I’ve developed a sympathetic relationship with a murderer…
The Golden Gate Gardener column in today’s San Francisco Chronicle is all about planting your yard to attract California quail, and to illustrate the joys of quail, they have a lovely photo of a male quail in full display. Check him out, he’s gorgeous!
I can’t take credit for this. One of my friends sent it to me in an email – one of those anonymous, “you have to read this” emails that go around. But it is so good that I have to share it, so here we go:
A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. ‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.’ ‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz.’
A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?' Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer’ should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.
The men’s group decided that ‘computer’ should definitely be of the feminine gender (‘la computadora’), because:
(THIS GETS BETTER!)
The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine (‘el computador’), because:
The women won.
The email then went on to suggest that you send this to all the smart women you know … and all the men that have a sense of humor. I leave it to my readers to decide how and where to share this!
I’m still recovering from singing Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem last night. It was a tremendous evening – somewhere in the sixth movement I remember realizing that everything was going beautifully, and I got a tremendous surge of exhilaration. Sometimes, when you perform, you aren’t sure how it’s going; sometimes you know you’ve bombed; and sometimes – rarely – you realize that you’ve dropped into the groove and you’re sailing. It was glorious; the performers (including the chorus) got three curtain calls.
I’m really glad I didn’t drop out of the performance. I considered it. I’m having my left knee replaced in early March; last weekend I had a really bad night with a lot of pain, and I have a diary entry that says I’m not sure I can sing the Brahms. Now that it’s over, I wouldn’t have missed it.
Performing a choral work of this magnitude is physically demanding; if you’ve never sung symphonic music you wouldn’t know. It’s long, seven movements, and the chorus sings every one of them, and not just a few bars either. I didn’t clock how long we took to perform it, but my recording (Philippe Herreweghe, Orchestre des Champs Elysees, La Chappelle Royale) runs 66 minutes. We’re standing and singing our hearts out for most of that. Of the pieces I’ve performed, only a couple are longer. It’s challenging music; alone among his contemporaries, Brahms liked to write fugues, and there are major, difficult fugues in movements two, three, and six, and a minor fugue in four.
It meant rehearsing with the orchestra and soloists until 10 PM Wednesday and Thursday night, and then the performance Friday. Before I retired, I used to take concert Fridays off, so I could get some rest. During rehearsals we sit on backless benches on stage, baking under the stage lighting, while Maestro Michael Morgan works out performance details with the symphony, standing to sing when he’s ready to go on. You hold the music up and out in front of you, so you can see the music and the conductor at the same time, and your back aches; for a long piece like this you have to be careful about your feet. In a concert years ago, I almost fell coming off the risers, because both my feet were asleep. It’s hot and cramped and crowded and the music makes it all worth it.
This is probably the only non-Catholic requiem you’ll ever hear; Brahms based the text on the German Luther Bible, and dedicated it to the living. It has no direct references to Christian doctrine. But the music is glorious, beautiful, inspiring. It’s still running through my head.
The men in my father’s family were charmers, all of them – including Dad! My sister recently told me a wonderful story about Dad, which I must share. I assume this happened in the summer of 1975 because that’s the only time in the ’70s I didn’t have a job that would have kept me from taking the trip I describe.
In 1975 I was in the process of divorcing my first husband, and was living with my parents, stony broke and unemployed. My mother worked for the local library, and planned to attend a library convention in Los Angeles; we decided I would go with her for company. This left my sister and my father living in the Napa house together for a few days. Dad was retired at this time and was either 67 or 68 (I don’t recall the exact date).
My sister says one evening while Mother and I were gone, Dad came into the living room all dressed up in a suit and tie (and probably a hat; Dad was a very sharp dresser). She asked him where he was going, and he said he was going to Santa Rosa to the senior center dance. “You can’t go to the dance all by yourself,” she objected, whereupon he said that of course he could, he was going to dance with all the widow women. He went out the door and didn’t come back until 2 AM. My sister complained that she had sat up waiting for him, and he said that was her payback for all the nights he sat up until 2 AM waiting for her!
When she told me this, I asked her if she went to the dance with him, and she said he wouldn’t let her – he was afraid she’d cramp his style! I couldn’t have posted this while Mother was alive, but she’s gone, God rest her, and it’s too classic not to share.
The explanation for this starts with cleaning out the garage. Unfortunately, we found rodents in same, which had chewed up some of the old papers we stored there 
(I think it ate the paper certificate for my bachelor’s degree but I’m not sure. It ate something from the University of California.) So I had to go through several boxes and sort out the things that I wanted to keep and look at, to bring in the house for safer storage.
Some of the boxes had papers from my school days (so that’s where my high school yearbooks were), which I think we salvaged when we moved my mother out of the Napa house in 1994. Among them was a single sheet of 5 x 7 lined notebook paper, torn out of a spiral binding, covered in my adolescent handwriting. It’s not dated; could be from high school or college, probably not before that. Apparently I thought this was so funny that I copied it down and put it away with my college class notebooks, which I stored in the house in Napa, and my mother saved it through the next thirty years. Mother was a major pack rat, and I come by it honestly myself.
So here is the recipe for How to Catch an Alligator, just as I wrote it down fifty-some years ago:
You need: a beer can, a pup tent, a copy of Romeo and Juliet, a club, binoculars, and tweezers.
You beat the alligator over the head with the club so he will start chasing you. Since a person can run faster than a ‘gator [Ed. note: in light of later experience I don't think this is true, so don't try this at home!], you get to the tent first. You wait awhile and the alligator doesn’t get there, so you start to read Romeo and Juliet, which is so dry you fall asleep. Meanwhile the alligator arrives, sees the book, starts to read it and falls asleep. Now, if you go to sleep first, you wake up first, so when you wake up, you grab the binoculars and look at the alligator through the wrong end. This makes him look about 1½ inches long and you can pick him up with the tweezers and put him in the beer can.
As I copied this, I realized that no one who has actually read Romeo and Juliet would describe it as dry (certainly no one who’s seen the Zeffirelli film!), which argues that this little gem dates from my high school years, before I studied Shakespeare in college.
