Happy Mother's Day

To the mothers in my life and everywhere:  this is your day.  Have chocolate, eat eggs and potatoes, watch hockey and baseball, have a nap, do something you've really wanted to do all week.  

My mothers:  Adair, gone so long; Veda, mother of the fantastic Ken; Fran, Midge, Barbara, Kathy, Jean, Linda, Shelly, Mary Beth, Bern, Jackie, Jill, Judith, Cathy, Mary Ann, Lucy, Lisa, Julie, Erica, Jennifer, Karen, Millie, Marilyn, Nancy, Jane, Linda, Eileen, Maryann, Jane, Marda, Linda, Candace, Yvonne, Barbara, Denise, Jan.  

A word about Ken.  As you know, he is the best.  He's given us fresh evidence today.  A lovely MD card, complete with his 'faces'.  And a gift card to Studio One, my hair cutting place, just down the street in Cherry Hill Plaza, across from the True Value Hardware.  I have an appointment for a cut/color on Thursday and Ken did what we have long wanted men to do:  he listened to me and took action based on what he heard.  It is awesome.  He is awesome.  I'm actually not sure I deserve this, but I appreciate him totally today and, hopefully, every day.   

Today, we begin prep in earnest for our Dutch artists, who arrive May 25 and leave June 14.  We will be housing them in the Larson/Stadtfeld wing, with us in an outpost on the ground floor.  Ken will be gone during the week pretty consistently, and actually we will be gone on all but one of the weekends they are here.  They are making a movie that will be part of the 400th Hudson up the River anniversary celebration in the fall.  Having them here will be very interesting and I am looking forward to it.  But today, we think very concretely about having people in the house and how we can allow them a space.  

We played yesterday, going down to the USMA in West Point for a Patriot League baseball playoff.  Army beat their opponent Holy Cross soundly the first game, but lost on errors and pitching in the second.  The rubber game is today and it will go on without us.  As a lifelong peacenik, my affection for the USMA is a little surprising, but the campus moves me in ways I cannot articulate.  That we live so close and that it is so accessible is but one of the many pleasures of the Hudson Valley.   

A last word about B & H Dairy, on 2nd Avenue between 7th and 6th Street in Manhattan's East Village:  go for breakfast, go for lunch, go for dinner, go for a snack, go for soup, go for eggs and potatoes (a theme here?), just go.  We were in town for The Public's production of "The Singing Forest," ended up staying the night on Friday and ate dinner, then breakfast at the restaurant (a grand word for it).  We would have gone back for lunch on Saturday, but it seemed a little excessive.  Their Lima bean soup inspired Ken to make a pretty good facsimile (let's hear it for fresh dill), and we had toasted cheese sandwiches based on their model.  

Enjoy the day. 

In celebration of Brahms

Not long ago, Brahms was just another name in a list of distant, uninteresting composers whose music appealed to many, but not to me.  Ah, but things change, and the Brahms German Requiem is now among my all time favorites.  I mean all time, and I have spent a fair amount of time on this earth.  The concert April 26 has taken its place among the high points of my long-ish life along with the commencement at Hill Auditorium in 1983, our wedding in the Arboretum on 08/08/80 and the day I got a job offer from Steve Poskanzer in June, 2006.  

Ken, my good friend Kathleen from Michigan and my good friend Dr. Marsha from Delhi were in the full house (well, church) who enjoyed (I hope and think) the concert, which featured a large orchestra (maybe 8 violins, led by the talented Carole Cowan), and the combined Community College Chorale and the Concert Choir.  The GR has 7 movements, and is about the human condition.  It is based in the Bible, but has lessons for us all:  "Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras (For all flesh is like the grass)."  I started out loving movement 1, which we sang in the fall, but then moved to enormous enthusiasm about movement 6, the climax ("Tod, wo ist dein Stachel," "Death, where is your sting?"), then came to an appreciation of 2, with its sequentially soft and blasting statements about Fleisch.  Movement 5 also resonated, with its line "...wie einen seine Mutter trostet," "...as one whose mother comforts him."  

I think I knew this piece better than I have in the past, because enjoying performing is all about knowing whatever you are performing.  I focused on Ed Lundergan, our enormously talented conductor.  I listened to Kate, the most talented alto.  I opened my mouth and sang and smiled and loved each of the 90 or so minutes the whole concert took.  At one point, inverting the saying 'from God's mouth to my ear', the sentence appeared full blown in my mind:  I am the luckiest person on this (transitory) earth.  

I hope you all 'rabbit, rabbit-ed' this morning.  Happy May.  The end of the semester and the 2008-2009 academic year.