The kindest cut of all

I got my hair cut this weekend. Even in normal times I tend to put off this chore, but my locks had extended to more than halfway down my back, the longest since I was 15. As my current hair is fluffier than my teenage hair, whenever it hit my bare back it tickles like sixteen strolling spiders. Time for Supercuts.

I used to go to higher end salons, back when my efforts to pass for normal were at their height. The kind of joints where customers used the same stylist every time, with appointments set weeks in advance. Where they bring you a coffee or tea, sometimes even a little glass of wine. Where there’s a pitcher of lemon-water and a tray of nibbles in the waiting area, with artisan jewelry, tiny jars of face cream, and fancy hair products for sale as well as stacks of fashion magazines to browse. Where there are dedicated shampooers, and sometimes even a darkened shampoo room with stars in the ceiling and music-of-the-spheres tunes on the soundtrack.

These salons do, generally, give somewhat superior haircuts to Supercuts. I left with hair that was smooth and shiny, wafting the scent of an umbrella drink sipped on a Caribbean beach. I wonder if the aesthetic experience at the expensive places is worse now that everybody has to wear masks and socially distance. It wasn’t the pandemic (or finances) that sent me to Supercuts, though. A couple of issues arising from my autism, specifically involving shampoos and conversation, had soured me on snooty beauty.

For me, a salon shampoo became an ordeal, especially if it culminated in a “relaxing” scalp massage. My entire body would cramp. It’s been sad to realize that some of the autistic sensory issues that I’d thought I’d conquered over the years (e.g., tolerance for someone kneading my scalp) have resurrected. And perhaps even intensified. I can pretend not to be bothered by stuff like this, which might build character but also wears me out for more important stuff, or I can avoid it. Supercuts stylists don’t push you to get a shampoo. They just wet the hair with a spray bottle and carry on.

In the pricey parlors you see the same stylist every time. Some of them keep notes and will ask how your kid or cat is doing. Yikes! I can handle small talk or casual conversations okay, I hope, sometimes. Other times I perseverate about what I’m doing wrong. I hate the idea of boring or annoying someone whose pay depends at least in part on my satisfaction. Conversation is an area where I’m always learning and experimenting, but do I have the right takeaways from my experiments? Am I a valued or dreaded customer (albeit one who tips at least 30%)? Supercuts stylists can vary in chattiness, but since I never have the same one twice there’s less pressure to be perfect. In cases where I feel that I really goofed…there are Supercuts in other towns. Sometimes the gods smile on me, and the stylists are so busy talking to each other that no one is talking much to me except to check whether the length is okay.

My stylist made sure I knew how much hair four inches was, sprayed me down, and started pruning. We talked for a bit about how today was sunny and warm and tomorrow would be rainy, and then we shut up and listened to the radio. She started to even out my bangs, which between haircuts I solo-trim very badly. The comb’s teeth dragged over my forehead again and again as she snipped. I thought I would go mad. Scrape. Snip. Scrape. Snipsnip. Scraaaape. I was glad to be wearing a mask so that I only had to manage the third of my face that was uncovered.

Finally she was done. My hair bounced around my shoulders. The sun was shining, and it would be months before the spiders strolled again. A fragile triumph, but a victory nonetheless.

My creation…bwah hah hah

It was a dark and stormy night. I was alone in my lab with the parts. Joints that had lain untouched for years in a jumble around me. Thunder rumbled. Some would say the body on the bench was deformed. Unnatural. I admitted that there was an ungainliness to it. Feverish, desperate, I fastened the pieces, unwilling to think past the moment when life might return. Lightning speared the sky. With trembling fingers I attached a reed to the mouthpiece, ready to breathe life into the Franken-clarinet.

As in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, I was alone with my creation. The Frankenstein movies typically have the primary cast members in the lab at the creature’s awakening. Dr. Frankenstein himself, his fiancée, his best friend, and an assistant or two. The original Frankenstein, he’s alone, and he flees his creature the moment it draws breath. Why? Because he suddenly notices that it’s ugly.

I’ll admit that my creature wasn’t the prettiest. Nor are many of the other Franken-clarinets around. It’s a common practice among clarinetists to change out one or more pieces of the soprano clarinet in order to improve the instrument’s sound or tuning. Practically nobody sticks with the factory mouthpiece. The upper and lower joints, where the key-work and tone holes are located, are the most important and are usually kept together. The barrel, which joins the mouthpiece to the upper joint, and the bell, which fits onto the lower joint, are often swapped out. The substitute barrel or bell can be of a markedly different color and shape than the original version; these clarinets can sometimes look as though they are well advanced on the journey to lamphood that is the ultimate fate of many aged instruments. But they sound better.

Victor Frankenstein just can’t see past his creature’s ugliness. Some critics have noted that the crime in the relationship of Frankenstein to monster seems more a violation of motherhood (rather than fatherhood) in its abandonment of nourishment and guidance. Shelley was just 18 when she started the book, the idea originating from a ghost story competition at a house party. She was pregnant at the time and had already lost one baby. She knew firsthand that a newborn thing may not be particularly beautiful and can inspire both love and fear. A baby is sublime—a word that comes up a lot in the text. The term is used in the Romantic poetic sense, to mean a human reaction to something overwhelming (a mountain, an electrical storm, a birth) that combines ecstasy and terror.

It goes beyond standard Franken-clarinetting to mess around with the joints, but I was desperate. I have loved playing clarinet more than most things. My experiences with the sublime have chiefly come through music. My Yamaha CSV Bb clarinet, now 14 years old, had a creamy sound and was once a joy. Except that the upper joint had a habit of cracking. Once in the first year, then about every two or three years after that. Cracks make playing effortful and perilous, especially on the high notes. They are expensive to repair. I got the latest one fixed in November, but the instrument still felt like it was pushing back on my every breath.

My husband Dave, who stopped playing clarinet about five years ago, said I could have his Bb Buffet if I wanted. Buffet makes great clarinets, too. Dave’s horn had been in its case for so long that its keys were fuzzy. Also a rubber thumbrest cushion had disintegrated, melting and spreading into the tone holes of the lower joint. It was unusable.

I had two unusable Bb clarinets, two different brands, and hope and need and terror. That dark and stormy night, I stuck Dave’s Buffet upper joint onto my Yamaha lower joint. Unnatural! The  Buffet joint, grayish black, the key plating worn off in patches where fingers had hit them. The Yamaha joint ebony, with its keys still bright.

Shelley’s creature, also a jumble of parts, starts out with plenty of potential. Strong, tall, and (in the book) graceful, he learns to feed and shelter himself, teaches himself to talk and read, and spends many months doing humans hidden kindnesses. All to no avail; the humans misunderstand and attack him. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend,” he tells Frankenstein when they meet at last. The movie creature achieves this psychological transition in a matter of days; the novel creature, years. The novel is of its time and moves slowly.

I apologized to the thing I had made and tried a few notes. They felt easy and free. It had been so long since playing felt that good.

Frankenstein never apologizes to his creature. He agrees reluctantly to help it, then breaks his promise, leading to more deaths and a final chase to the ends of the earth.

Some of the Frankenstein movies have happy endings (at least for most of the principle characters, including Doctor Frankenstein and his bride). The novel doesn’t. Frankenstein, unsuccessful in his chase, dies. The captain who has helped with the last leg of the journey turns away from his quest for the North Pole. The creature proceeds Pole-ward. The sublime remains unattained.

The tuner reassured me that the notes were where they needed to be. I set to work with a polishing cloth, tape, thread, and screwdriver. Soon I had a functional clarinet (though I’m still tinkering with barrels and bells). The sublime remains unattained—but possible.

Number 80 with a bullet

“This is stupid,” I thought, again, as I trudged to the Bally’s gym on Clark Street. A fit of self-loathing after a birthday week surfeit of cake, stuffed pizza, and daiquiris had led to my spending my birthday check on a year’s membership. I wasn’t enjoying my workouts much, but I was determined to get my money’s worth by going five days a week.

Bally’s occupied the the seventh floor of a vertical mall. Horizontal space in downtown Chicago being limited, a lot of shopping centers instead expanded upwards. A glass elevator dropped me off in front of the reception desk.

For the first couple of months I mostly pedaled one of the LifeCycles that lived by the aerobics floor. I watched Stacy C’s 5:30 high impact class as the members jumped, grape-vined and whooped. By the time I lined up (all the way at the back) I’d already practiced the routines, slow-mo, in my apartment. Soon, though, I was jumping and grape-vining along. The whooping will always be beyond me.

I don’t know when I stopped thinking “this is stupid,” but it happened. One evening I found myself heading down in the glass elevator along with Stacy C and a few others from the class. “Wow,” she said. “I can’t wait to get home and eat a big salad!”

Stacy C and I would never be soulmates, but I stayed hooked on fitness.

It was with a familiar feeling of desperate determination that I started bullet journaling at the beginning of this year, as chronicled in January 10th’s “The Bullet Ballet.” I was fed up with my reaction to the pandemic and feeling behind and disorganized. I liked looking at artistic bullet journal (bujo) spreads on YouTube and Pinterest. It was exciting to know that my bujo could be exactly what I wanted. So many bullet journal proponents said the practice had changed their lives for the better. I felt doubtful whether this could be the case for me, but hoped for a similar miracle. Who doesn’t want to be a better person? Or, if not better, at least more bearable to myself?

Also for a while I’d wanted a single place to keep records of a year. Not so much the daily thoughts and feelings and research, the kind of things that take up space in my notebooks, but business records and appointments and lists of things I’d read, heard, and made. Because the bujo would incorporate my calendar and all of my business information, I would be committed to using it for a year.

I acquired a dot grid notebook and various accoutrements. The Fineliners, washi tape, stickers, gluesticks, etc. On January 1 I muttered a brief prayer to Ryder Carroll and made the first entry. As of March 21, 80 days into the year, I’m 50 pages in. Thoughts so far:

Pluses: 2021 in one notebook!I’m using these standard bujo features a bunch:

Future planning pages, to write upcoming dates before I set up a month.

Monthly calendar spreads, with plenty of room for personal and professional notes.

Weekly calendar spreads. I do one week on a two-page spread. To-dos, appointments, long aspirational lists of things morning me wants evening me to have accomplished, phone numbers and reminders: it all fits in here.

Collections: Covid-19 stats, books read, words written, notes written, videos completed. I’d hoped that setting up these collections would encourage me to spend more time reading, or writing, or composing, or filming. That hasn’t happened. However, as far as I can tell I’m not doing any of these activities less than I was in 2020.

Minuses: be careful of what you track!I’ve abandoned or greatly changed these features:

Collections: Fitness tracking. This page was a disaster because my first set-up was based on time, 30-minute increments, which turned me into a clock watcher and made it hard to enjoy moving. Now I just list the date along with letters representing what kind(s) of activity I did (S=strength, C=class, W=walk, B=bike, etc.). 

Habit trackers in general. My tendency to scribble items on Post-It notes resulted in me misplacing the notes more often than recording them. How the stickies kept making their way to my socks I’m not sure. 

Neutrals: Things I never wound up using much:

The Index (anything that’s top of mind or important has a flag or tab).

Brainstorming/idea lists (I never remember that I’ve started them).

Key/Symbols. I’m not visually minded enough to process a Ryder-style list.

Big projects pages. This was going to be a thing, but I substituted lists on the weekly spreads and sometimes Post-Its, even at the hazard of their migrating sock-ward. 

Art skills. As I have none, an aesthetic spread will always be a nonstarter.

Overall, I feel the bujo’s a reasonable strategy. At the very least, organizing my 2021 tax information next year will be a snap. The fitness spread debacle has helped me figure out how to set up trackers with better metrics. I’m still on the sidelines, pedaling the LifeCycle, but I’ve stopped thinking “this is stupid.”

Bowled over

It’s all over the news: a man spent $35 for a pretty blue-and-white porcelain bowl at a yard sale somewhere near New Haven, Connecticut. This was a small item, about six inches across, with a design of flowers and vines. The buyer “had a feeling” and didn’t even haggle about the price. Maybe $35 is normal for yard sale finds in New Haven, home of Yale University, but as one of the anchors on the Channel 4 morning news said, “It’s cute, but it looks like something you’d pay four bucks for, maximum.” I agree.

It turns out, however, that this lotus bowl (named for its lotus flower-like shape) is fabulously old and rare. It’s a Ming Dynasty piece from the early 1400s, and there are only seven similar bowls surviving in the world today, most of them in museums. The yard sale bowl just sold at Sotheby’s for $721,800!!

The other Channel 4 anchor said, “I love and hate this story. I love it because it happens, and I hate it because it never happens to me.” I agree. On consideration, though, how could I know it’s never happened to me? When I go to a yard sale or flea market I’m not searching for treasure to resell; I’m looking for something to use or to enjoy looking at on the daily. Never has calling Sotheby’s occurred to me. Therefore:  there’s at least a tiny possibility that I have acquired a rare treasure. Certainly I have a lot of stuff that says “Made in China”…

When we first set up house together, Dave and I got a lot of our furniture, crockery, and the occasional decorative tchotchke from a secondhand collective nearby. This was a big indoor space, four floors, divided into lots of little booths. I loved going there so much. We paid 50 cents each to get in, and when we wanted a break from shopping we visited a canteen at the back that sold soda, donuts, popcorn, and coffee.

I prefer the venues where there are a lot of vendors: flea markets, antiques collectives, and art fairs and the like. All that stuff makes it feel like a museum (I luurve museums) where you can take home a piece from your favorite exhibit. So much eye candy. My favorites–the pictures, glass art, ceramics, the old books–draw me like a magnet.

I’m less likely to stop at a typical yard sale, where it’s just one family with their stuff laid out all over the front lawn. Partly that’s because the merchandise tends more towards clothes, toys, furniture, and small appliances. Also, my autism makes it hard to navigate the social intricacies of a situation where it feels as if “just looking” is not okay, that good manners requires buying something, anything.

At that New Haven yard sale, I believe I’d have noticed the Ming bowl, even if it had been stuck between a set of He-Man action figures and some hand-embroidered kitchen towels. I’d have checked it out, then walked away, thinking $35 for that? I understand that haggling is expected and not considered offensive, but I.just.can’t. It feels like attempted robbery. For $4 I’d have snapped it up.

Or maybe not. We already have a lotus bowl, found at a Saturday flea market one town over. Our lotus bowl is about the same size as the Sotheby’s one. A decent size for serving nuts or candy. Like the Ming, its dominant colors are blue and white. The Sotheby’s design is a bit busier than our bowl’s, but ours has a grander (maybe gaudier) color scheme, with  details in orange, gold, crimson, and green. There’s a lovely, somewhat perplexing scene on the outside of the bowl: houses along a river, mountains in the distance, maybe a skyscraper, too?, flowering tree branches stretched over the water, and a group of five things floating on or above or maybe in the river. Dave and I can’t agree whether they’re lotus flowers, goldfish, or birds. Also there are two guys fishing in a boat. Inside the bowl, at the center, is a lotus flower plus leaves, but it also looks like a creepy monster hand with a big ring, reaching for that last cashew…which you took, and now you are subject to its terrible revenge, bwah hah hah!

Maybe every time I wash my lotus bowl I’m degrading its market value by another $1,000. I daydream briefly of a serendipitous visitor, maybe someone who comes to check the electric meter because he hasn’t yet found a position that uses his PhD in Chinese art history, who tells me that our bowl is fabulously valuable. As Dave noted this morning, “you can buy a lot of bowls with $721,000.” Then I snap back to reality and the $7 that I found in my fall coat pocket. When the flea markets and art fairs and yard sales start back up, I’ll go looking. There’s always room for one more beautiful thing.

Spring in some direction or other

Last night I dreamt of music theory again. There was a boy and a birthday party and a dominant seven chord gone wrong. I tried to explain to the boy that he needed Bb, not B natural, while fumbling with the ribbon on the present I’d brought. The bow kept coming untied.

My eyes jolted open in that definitive way that makes it clear there’s no settling back into a doze. The clock read 5:40, in the general neighborhood of when I get up.

Dave, who rises earlier than I do, pulled a pair of socks from the dresser. I asked if there was any chance he could bring my coffee upstairs. “Sure. Oh, and I’ll remind you that it’s Spring Forward today,” said Dave. “It’s almost seven.”

Just like that, I was running an hour late.

I hate the change to Daylight Saving Time (DST). Even on this Sunday, when my morning tasks were simply to make the bed, shower, write the blog, and grocery shop. I understood why the anxiety dream.

Every year around this time the weather people start wagging their fingers at those of us dolts who can’t remember that it’s Daylight Saving, not Savings, Time. I change the channel before the diatribe works up steam and then forget to reset the clocks. Grammar is one of my most shameful failings, along with music theory.

I love the results of DST. The sun will set tonight at 6:49! That makes me almost happy enough to forgive New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, who proposed the idea of DST in 1895. It proved a slow-moving notion, with the first governments to adopt DST nationwide being Germany and the Austrian empire in 1916. Nowadays some form of DST is more common than not.

Opponents of time changes, many of whom argue that we should be on DST permanently, say that the back and forth is hard on people, especially little kids. Truth! And on pets, too! Some studies show statistically significant side effects. Traffic accidents and some health problems tend to increase, while electricity costs and prime time TV ratings tend to decrease.

In England and parts of Europe DST is called “summer time.” That feels a bit confusing, but I could get used to it. It’s a lovely phrase, appropriate, and not nearly as complicated as the difference between Saving and Savings. The image I’d associated with DST back when I thought it was savings was a jar filled with bits of sunshine. Nonsensical, but pretty. A foray into the internet grammarverse turns up site after site purporting to explain. I squint at the computer screen. Countable and uncountable nouns, verbs, adjectives, hyphenation, capitalization. A tiny hammer in my head starts to pound. Savings accounts, a saving grace, saving the whales. I close the browser, giving my blood pressure a chance to come back down. Perhaps someday I will understand.

I taught myself to read words at age four and music notes at age five, fitting them into structures that made sense in my head. When teachers tried to teach me the theory behind the words or notes, with new bits of information mixed in with old bits, the structures didn’t synch. My autism undoubtedly played a role as well. I would ask questions that seemed weird or premature (“We’ll be getting to that in Chapter 6, Jean”), not pertinent to the rest of the class. Various humiliations ensued, so I stopped asking and listening.

I scraped by with little formal grammar, writing by ear as you might say, until graduate school. We freshman comp teachers were given a quick-and-dirty grammar guide, which helped me become temporarily competent. After I stopped teaching that knowledge flitted out of my brain.

I avoided music theory for even longer. I started taking jazz piano lessons in my late 30s, and my teacher helped me feel comfortable with chord progressions. Eventually I started online courses. Sometimes theory was easier than I’d expected, but much of the time it was frickin’ hard. Also: worth it. Adding even the first few new concepts expanded my understanding and created idea after idea.

There’ve been lots of ideas for dealing with waxing and waning daylight. Some civilizations changed the shape of the hours, deciding that daylight would have twelve equal segments whose lengths would vary throughout the year. A slender winter solstice hour lasted 44 minutes, while a summer solstice hour rounded out to 75. I love that.

However…if I decide to spend an hour or two reviewing grammar, maybe I should wait until December.

Abundance

I made it to the dress rehearsal an hour early. In record time, in fact: the traffic gods had been kind.

I killed some time at the Dunkin Donuts down the street from the playhouse. (Just as you’re usually less than eight feet from a spider, in Massachusetts you’re usually less than a mile from a Dunkin.) The counter ladies were talking about the virus, of course. There were no cases in the area so far. The whole United States had recorded just six official deaths. I gathered my hot black, no sugar, and blueberry muffin, nodding in full agreement that it was crazy that the town, out of an abundance of caution, was thinking about shutting down school for two weeks!

I had the tables to myself for a few minutes. Then class finished at the dance center next door, generating a line of moms, the daughters with their toes turned out ballerina style. One of the girls coughed. “Don’t worry: it’s allergies, not Covid,” said her mom, with a nervous laugh. In an abundance of caution I headed back to the car.

The playhouse had a brick facade and fancy columns. It looked a lot like my local library. Still too early for rehearsal, I took a quick walk. There was a park across the street with playing fields and a pond, which I’d already explored, so I headed down a residential street with a little frisson of uneasiness. This was for personal reasons, not Covid.

Early in our relationship, my husband Dave had driven me around various North Shore neighborhoods, with commentary. Beverly: his elementary school, his high school. Gloucester: his family’s first house, the one with no heat upstairs. Salem, Marblehead. And this town, where his first wife Lily had grown up. After their four-year marriage collapsed she’d moved back here.

Now was twenty-five years on from those tours. Lily and Dave hadn’t stayed in touch, but according to the family grapevine and Facebook, she had found someone new, had a couple of kids. I didn’t know whether she still lived in this town. There was a good chance that even if we met, we wouldn’t recognize one another. I knew Lily solely through album photos 30 years old: blond like me, beaming on her wedding day, watching TV, relaxing at an Independence Day barbecue.

I wondered if I’d passed her house, whether she’d be coming to the show. Maybe we’d bond unawares in a Dunkin line, commiserating about abundances of caution and shutdowns.

The only person I saw outside was a man with his dog. Back at the playhouse, with about 15 minutes to spare, there was the usual chaos. Hammers banging, people talking, a portable radio playing oldies, the smells of coffee, fresh paint, dust. I looked around for someone to tell me where to set up. The director, Brian, an energetic man with a beard, rushed over. “I’m so sorry, rehearsal’s cancelled for tonight.  There was a text…”

I checked my phone and found a message about 25 minutes old.

“Stick around if you want, there’s going to be a board meeting in a few minutes and we’ll have more information for you.” Traffic back home would be terrible; I stuck around. The stage crew continued managing the million-and-one last-minute details, moving a Victorian-style sofa back a few inches. The male lead  huffed in, asking if there was any way to reverse the board’s decision.

The Keyboard 2 player had also missed the text. He was unhappy to find that he would have to move all his gear, which we’d schlepped upstairs after the first rehearsal, back to his car. We were a tiny pit, just three players. Charlie, the music director and Keyboard 1, offered to help. On the sidewalk outside, he pulled both of us aside. “I’m sure we’re not going up next week,” he said. “I’ll let you know about new dates.”

“I hope I‘ll be able to play,” I said. I already had the next couple of months’ worth of shows booked, plus Sonny’s senior recital and graduation, and Easter, bunches of stuff. I left the book with Charlie just in case my schedule didn’t synch and then screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked about compensation for that afternoon’s drive. Charlie conferred with Brian conferred and agreed to pay half a service.

“Guess I’ll see you in a few weeks! I hope you don’t have to cancel the show,” I said.

“There is no way we’ll cancel,” Brian said. “I have a budget to meet.” He shook my hand. Out of an abundance of caution we were supposed to be bumping elbows, instead, but nobody in musicals land had adopted that precaution.

“You’re home early,” said Dave.

“Yeah, let me tell you about my evening…”

Over the next week or two I practiced the parts for upcoming shows, sourced toilet paper, and fretted. I started blogging pandemic diaries. The then-president intimated that by Easter things would be opening up, but the emails warbled a contradictory counterpoint. Sorry, they said, out of an abundance of caution the gig’s postponed! Then: we’re rescheduling to June! Then: Sorry, we’ve canceled.

Brian did manage to put on a skeleton production of the show. Just before Labor Day the company performed the musical outside, in that pretty little park. Charlie accompanied on keyboards in a one-man socially distanced pit. No word on how the budget turned out, but no checks were ever mailed in my direction. I never got another chance to run into Lily at Dunkin.

Sometimes it feels like it was yesterday when I packed my instruments into the car and headed for that gig, but most of the time it feels like a decade’s passed. A few venues are starting up shows again; out of an abundance of caution, the musical accompaniment involves backing tracks or musicians who can wear masks while playing. Wind players are too risky for the close quarters of a pit. In an abundance of caution, we remain on the sidelines, where we watch our embarrassment of riches dwindle ever further.

Being off the road gives me an abundance of time to check social media, which is packed right now with anniversary tales about the week when our industry folded in on itself. This is mine.

More like a polar bear, IMO

It was the phrase on every weather person’s lips this week: “In like a lion, right?” An arctic blast that was supposed to last a day had enjoyed its visit to Boston so much that it stayed through the whole week, bringing with it the lowest temperatures of 2021. The weather people are promising a warmup on Tuesday. We’ll see.

At the moment, most of the warmth is radiating from my cabin fever. “How is it out there?” I asked Sonny on sunshiney Thursday. He’d been walking for an hour.

He shrugged off his winter coat and hoodie. “It’s not too bad,” he said.

I grabbed my coat, headphones, and mask and headed to our back door. The doorknob–on the inside of the house–sent a chill through my fingers. I opened the door halfway and stuck my head outside. Nope.  “Not too bad,” indeed. I should have considered the source. Sonny had been wearing both his coats, whereas he usually just walks around in his hoodie. His cold tolerance is much better than his parents’. Dave and I spend fall and winter bundled up in sweaters, thermal socks, and slippers. Sonny lives in short-sleeved T-shirts.

Yesterday I felt restless, annoyed with myself for being such a weather weenie. I added layers and headed outside. Four or five minutes of shivering and then I’d feel okay; that’s what usually happens. The sidewalks were about 75% free of snow and ice,  the remaining bits melted into ridges that were relatively easy to dodge around. I stomped on a few of the bigger snow piles, hoping they’d melt faster. After twenty minutes my fingers, feet, and cheeks were still feeling frozen. Back inside for me.

Comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb. I thought the line might come from a poem—it had that feel. Some poems have indeed been made from the idea, but the saying seems originally to be an old English weather-adage. Something along the same lines as “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning” or “Ring around the moon, rain real soon.”  “March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb” is the way the proverb is phrased in Thomas Fuller’s 1732 classic Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs, Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British. Which you can buy in hardcover on Amazon, if you have a spare $30.95 handy. What surprised me was that in some versions, the proverb is phrased conditionally: “If March comes in like a lion it will go out like a lamb.”

Well, well, well.

Modern interpretations state that the saying aims to reinforce a sense of order and balance in the universe. Rough weather will be followed by mild. Spring will come. We all know that the timing’s questionable, but I’m happy for some reassurance. My tolerance for snowstorms and sub-freezing temperatures is at its nadir in March.

The day I love most happens sometime in April, when suddenly I notice that the winter-bare branches are now covered with buds. I’m not in synch with that T.S. Eliot quote, “April is the cruelest month.” The little green buds, they are on their way.

Every month has some aphorism or quote associated with it, so I assembled this commonplace calendar.*

          *   *   *  *  *

“People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”  —Anton Chekhov

“January, month of empty pockets!” —Colette

“February is a suitable month for dying.”   —Anna Quindlen

“March is the month of expectation.”  —Emily Dickinson

“The first of April, some do say,/Is set aside for All Fools’ Day./But why the people call it so,/Nor I, nor they themselves do know.” —Poor Robin’s Almanac, 1790

“All things seem possible in May.”  —Edwin Way Teale

“This is June, the month of grass and leaves.”  —Henry David Thoreau

“Never trust a July sky.”  —Folklore

“August rushes by like desert rainfall.”  —Elizabeth Maua Taylor

“By all these lovely tokens/September days are here,/With summer’s best of weather/And autumn’s best of cheer.”  —Helen Hunt Jackson

“I have been younger in October/than in all the months of spring.”  —W.S. Merwin

“November comes/And November goes,/With the last red berries/And the first white snows.”  —Elizabeth Coatsworth

“I speak cold silent words a stone might speak/If it had words or consciousness,/Watching December moonlight on the mountain peak…” —Robert Pack

 At least in March the birds are back. They start singing before sunup. They peck at the the cherries in the tree next to the kitchen, flash between its branches. Yesterday Dave and I watched a flock of starlings, moving as if with one mind in a Nike swoosh from the garage roof, to the grass, to the oaks, to the sky.

* Sources of these quotes:  Michael Garofalo “The Spirit of Gardening,” gardendigest.com and The Old Farmer’s Almanac, almanac.com

The dog-paddler

Around the time of Sonny’s autism spectrum diagnosis our family life was very busy. He had homework, social skills groups, birthday parties, tae kwon do, art classes, etc. I taught private music lessons and did medical transcription to have a schedule flexible enough to take Sonny to his appointments, help with the homework, all the parent things. For a few years I was too busy to participate in music groups. Gradually I realized this was making me miserable. Even though the  schedule was still crazy, I began taking baby steps back into playing in a group. It felt great: I was playing clarinet with other grownups! It felt crappy: I hated my sound! I had way less control of the instrument than I wanted. I needed to find a teacher.

I feel similarly at the moment about writing. A bit stuck. Maybe I need to rebuild my process? It was in this spirit that I (re)started The Artist’s Way (by Julia Cameron) a few weeks ago. I’m still trudging through the book, doing the morning pages and exercises. No sense of magic or renewal has surfaced, though. That’s possibly because I find Cameron’s writing persona off-putting. I’m thinking about looking for a writing coach, somebody who could help me the way that my music teachers have.

I’ve taken private music lessons on several instruments—piano, flute, voice, clarinet—off and on for much of my life. One of the things that I value most is the personal interaction with the teacher. I’m always fascinated by my teachers’ lives and their homes, which are usually on the maximalist side, a cheerful clutter of instruments, scores, books, and pets. My own students seem to enjoy the pictures in my studio, the Beethoven action figure who guards the pencil cup, the mobile, Trapeze Quartet, that hangs from the ceiling. They eye the bookcases. “Wow, you have a lot of music!” they say, these kids whose sum total of music books consists of a couple of method books and a band folder. Yes.

My first clarinet teacher, Bob, principal clarinet in the local symphony, lived with his wife in a house in the swanky end of town. He had a little brown dog who skedaddled into the kitchen (where his wife would be fixing dinner) when we took out our instruments. His music stand was stacked with orchestra parts and excerpt books. A butcher block table nearby was covered with purple boxes of Vandoren 5s, screwdrivers, sandpaper,  pencils, an ashtray, and a coaster for his martini. Our lessons were at five p.m., and Bob liked a smoke and a drink before dinner. I’d play my Beethoven six assignment to an accompaniment of clinking ice and rattling pans, the air filled with the smells of tobacco and meat.

Several of my clarinet teachers have been smokers. That seems counterintuitive for wind players, but cigarettes have a calming effect and are notoriously hard to quit. The teacher I found during my midlife clarinet crisis, Mark, was a smoker, also, though unlike Bob, he would never smoke during our lessons.

He lived in a first-floor apartment on a quiet street in Jamaica Plain with cigarette butts in the garden. His studio had a workbench and built-in bookcases that stretched to the ceilings, loaded with books and music. Instrument cases were lined up along one wall. His two cats, unusually for the species, seemed indifferent to clarinet acoustics and would often hang out with us while we were playing. Mark had contracts with some big music companies, Selmer and Rico (now D’Addario), was a professor at a conservatory, and had performed as a soloist all over the world. The day of our first lesson, it took me several minutes to work up the courage to ring his doorbell, but he was warm and welcoming.

Mark was also uncompromising. He had a ferocious musical mind and an incredible ear. He was supportive while also being picky. Really picky. Earlier in my life, when I perceived any flaw as an indictment of my worth as a human being, I would have fled after a couple of lessons. With my previous teachers, I had cultivated a self-protective ambivalence, practicing some weeks and then other weeks rehearsing excuses instead of my pieces. Deprivation had made me desperate enough at last to work hard and consistently, even with the possibility that I would fail. This mindset kept me going with Mark as we changed everything: my breathing, embouchure, hand position, articulation, finger action, pitch, phrasing, rhythm. As is true of many big changes, things often sound worse while the new technique is forming. Some days, picky would turn waspish. Those were hard days for me and my neuroses. I suspect that both of us wished for a cocktail and cigarette. However, by the time our lessons ended, Mark having moved to New York, I was a different, and much better, clarinet player.

I’ve expressed my worries about writing a few times in this blog. Fear that trying for real will just prove that I’ve been wasting time, that the disapproving voice in my head has been right all along. I remind myself that things didn’t work that way with Mark, who was and always will be a much better clarinetist than I. He helped me swim in the deep end, even if I’m dog-paddling while he’s  doing the backstroke.

Off to google writing coaches.