Music, sweet music

We devoted a significant amount of our time in Arlington singing, or engaged in activities related to singing.  So it was evident early on once we moved to Swampscott that we had a big gap in our lives without singing.  Fortunately, the Boston area offers plenty of opportunities to sing and we are taking steps to fill that gap with song.

The first thing we did was to attend a couple of summer sings with Chorus Pro Musica, a choral group with a rich performing history in Boston, taking the commuter rail and T to Old South Church.  Even though I’ve sung the Bach Magnificat several times, the Chorus Director Betsy Burleigh pointed out a number of things about the piece that I hadn’t heard before.  The Spring concert is Britten’s War Requiem for which a cast of thousands is needed.  Maybe I’ll have the guts to audition.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn is right up the street from our house, and is blessed with a terrific music director, FrancesFitch, who teaches at several local universities and is a world renown harpsichordist .  The choir is small, about a dozen singers, but appears really focused on making listenable music.  Trudi and I sang for the first service of the Fall, an outdoor service under a crystal clear late summer sky.

Trudi has joined the Marblehead Little Theatre for its fall performance of the musical Oliver.  She is both excited and relieved that her need to perform on stage has an outlet.  I hope this will be an ongoing opportunity for her, as she sorely misses her beloved Chalice Theatre.

Recently, I joined the Concert Singers of Greater Lynn that rehearses at the UU church, a local group that required no audition.  The group will be offering a Christmas concert of music by John Rutter and Stephen Paulus.  The group does not charge admission to its concerts and apparently makes a lot of its income from fall and spring lobster roll sales.  Now that is my type of fund raiser!   Not to be outdone, Trudi attended an open rehearsal of a chorus based about a half hour from here called Cantemus, and is planning to audition with them. 

What is it about choral singing that has so much appeal for me?  It is a variety of things, including getting a sense of the structure and mechanics of the compositions we sing, and the reward of hearing from others that they enjoyed something I participated in creating.  But most of all, I think it is the feeling of working as a team (albeit at times a large team) to cooperatively produce something beautiful.

We also hope to take advantage of the Boston as a place to hear music performed.  The first week here we drove up to Newburyport to enjoy a sold out solo performance by Leo Kottke at the high school auditorium.  And last week we saw the acclaimed performance of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, a revised production of the original starring Audra McDonald in Cambridge’s A.R.T.  The performance was amazing and I was in tears at several points.

Très Riches Heures of the Family Olivetti

For the last 8 years or so we have been empty nesters with our offspring taking up residence 400 miles distant. We would end up getting together with one or both daughters three, maybe four times in a good year, for a few days, as their busy lives and our permitted. Once we had retired, this paucity of face-to-face contact began to seem more and more absurd, a void that couldn’t be filled by phone, email, Facebook, or Skype.

And then with the birth of our first grandchild, the need to establish ourselves as her grandparents added weight to the argument that the little family that is us be closer geographically and temporally. (I realize this last sentence is a more than a bit awkward, but you get the idea).

In my life I have had some strong images of the importance of family. As far back as I can remember, my mother would drive an hour and a half each week to spend the day with her parents. And when my granny got too old to live alone, she moved into a retirement home a few minutes drive away, and Mom would visit her every day without fail. While my father left his homeland as a refugee to come to the US, he spent every vacation he took without exception, back in Italy with family. [Now that I think of it, as I write this posting, Adella and her folks are visiting my Italian cousins, and hiking in the same mountains my Dad did as a young man.]

We have been here about 6 weeks now, and have been together a number of times, both at our home and theirs. We have celebrated two birthdays, tended to Adella’s needs while her folks worked, hung out on the beach with Jolie on her day off, loaned a car in support of a trip to the Newport Folk Festival, and had a three generation hike on Mount Monadnock. Here are a couple of photos from that wonderful hike. Truly very rich hours spent with family.

A visit from Irene

My next posting was to offer some early observations concerning the change our move north has brought with regard to our family life. But Hurricane Irene interjected herself into this plan, so I will instead share a couple of pictures taken a few blocks from our house. I went down to the Swampscott bay twice during the storm. The first time with Trudi, the rain and wind were so fierce, we had trouble seeing. It was just high tide, and waves were crashing over the sea wall onto the sidewalk. We stood in awe for about 3 minutes and then beat a hasty retreat. About 3 hours later, the rain had abated, so I ventured down again. As I got to the shore, an unmanned sailboat was being picked up by the waves and carried across the harbor at considerable speed. It grounded itself on the sand in pretty fair shape. I was able to take a few photos included one that shows a second unfortunate boat.

I am not sure what the next high tide will bring, but I am afraid their end will not be pretty.

Irene reminds us, as did last week’s East Coast earthquake, that we all have in Mother Nature, a kind but strict parent, another family member who deserves our love and respect.

Bike rides from home – we’re not on the W&OD anymore Toto

We have two obvious choices when leaving our new house by bike to take a bit of exercise. The two options both start by heading down to the ocean. Turning right at the shore offers the opportunity to bike along the breakwater promenade which parallels the Lynnway.

The latter is a four lane road with a lot of relatively slow moving traffic that lies between the breakwater and a mix of beach homes, apartments, and large restored Victorian houses. You are sharing the promenade with all varieties of pedestrians, dog walkers, baby carriage pushers, joggers, skaters and other bikers. Therefore, the pace is of necessity a leisurely one. The view of the Bay is lovely and there is often a breeze.

People watching is definitely a distraction. About halfway on this ride the path veers south and follows the causeway on a separated trail to Little Nahant and Nahant. The beach at Nahant is wide and shallow even at high tide. It seems perfect for kite flying, paddleboarding, sand castles, and wading.

There are great views back to Swampscott, out to several islands in the Bay, or toward the packed houses perched on the hills of the Nahants.

One way distance to the far end of Nahant Beach 3 ¼ miles.

[Other photos to be added as they come available, that is, as I remember to bring my camera along]

Turning left at the shore has us riding in traffic through an older commercial section of Swampscott offering a smattering of restaurants, ice cream places, a great Jewish bakery, and many beauty parlors and dentist offices. After a brief stretch, the road enters a residential section and we bike along with traffic on a wide two lane road. There would be adequate width, I believe, to define a bike lane, and certainly there are plenty of bikers travelling in both directions, but none is delineated. At the Swampscott/Marblehead border, we pass Trudi’s favorite town beach, Preston Beach. Once in Marblehead, the road widens, the pavement improves, the traffic lessens a bit, and the road becomes shaded on both sides with stretches of maples and beech trees. Turning right on Ocean Street leads to Marblehead neck and Devereaux Beach, which we have not tried as yet. Across the causeway from the beach is Marblehead Harbor, a sheltered harbor so stuffed with sailboats that you could probably walk across it from boat to boat without getting wet. One way distance to Devereaux Beach 3 ¾ miles.

In both cases, the rides could be extended by riding the circumference of Nahant or Marblehead Neck, which I am sure we will do at some point in the not too distant future.

Memorials

The formal entrance to the Olmsted historic district where we now live is a lovely, if shortish, boulevard called Memorial Avenue. The town keeps it well manicured and planted as it rolls down a mild hill to the Bay. In length at most a quarter mile, it includes eight monuments to wars fought by American forces. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if all small New England towns are as enthusiastic as Swampscott in erecting war memorials, or if the town fathers over the last 130 years felt some pressure given the expanse of green space made available by Olmsted’s plan to stock it with granite and bronze. I also wonder if Olmsted envisioned how the coming decades would create no shortage of opportunities to memorialize the sacrifice of its townspeople to war.

The memorials above in order are for: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, The World War, Desert Storm, Revolutionary War, World War I dead, and The Civil War dead.

Perhaps not surprising, the town has a standing War Memorial Committee, which rolled out plans in December 2010 for a future memorial to those from the town who have served in the War on Terror.
Inscribed on the back of the sand-colored stone memorial to service in Desert Storm in quotation marks, but unattributed, are these words: “Desert Storm truly was a victory of good over evil, of freedom over tyranny, of peace over war”. I couldn’t resist searching out the author of these stirring, if somewhat puzzling words. The answer, in case you didn’t know, is Dan Quayle. Clearly I have much to learn about our new town.

Wednesday in the park with Adella

What a great thing it is to be able to drop in on our granddaughter and her folks for an afternoon in the park

What's the opposite of deja vu?

For me, living in a new place has been sort of like being on an extended trip to a location I’m only vaguely  familiar with.  Moving  out of the behavioral grooves (or ruts) I dug for myself since retirement by following comfortable, comforting routines has been disorienting.  I find the smallest things require my  attention --  I can’t fall back on having done something umpteen times before.    Whether its finding my way to the bathroom at night, heating the omelet pan properly on the electric range after 40 years of cooking on gas ranges, or locating the bulk grains at Whole Paycheck, everything is new again.

Predictably, driving is one area that this heightened attending is most important.  North Shore drivers seem much more assertive than drivers in Northern Virginia.  If there is a truck stopped in the oncoming lane, drivers coming toward you just take your lane to pass it.  The fact that they are coming directly at you doesn’t seem to phase them at all.  Similarly, left turns across your lane are done without hesitation.  Even pedestrians seem to practice assertive walking.  Crossing the road on foot day and night is done apparently without considering that drivers might have trouble picking out pedestrians from the background noise surrounding them.    Most secondary roads are typically in terrible condition, and require constant vigilance not to hit a large pot hole or jagged pavement at speed.  And road names themselves often change as I cross town lines in a way that reduces my confidence in exactly where the hell I’ve gotten to.

I find that all this “attending” leaves me pretty worn out by mid afternoon.  On the other hand, it probably is staving off Alzheimer’s.