Letters! We get letters!

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

I’ve just finished reading The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner (Page Stegner, Ed.) and have begun reading The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, Eds.).  I have several other collections of letters – those of J. R. R. Tolkien, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bruce Chatwin, and Dylan Thomas come immediately to mind without scrutinizing my library shelves more carefully – and I tend to read them leisurely, one author at a time, and never in a single sitting.  They fascinate me for the view they give into a working mind, especially into the mind of a favorite author.  The glimpse they give into a private world is so much more accurate than that of an author’s published works, for the art of writing for publication effectively masks what is and what isn’t an author’s true thoughts.

And the good writers are also good letter writers, with even their juvenile material being of interest.  I have only scratched the surface of the hefty book of Willa Cather’s letters, but I have already learned that she couldn’t spell worth a damn as a youngster and took pride in her failure.  In one of her poorly spelled letters to a close friend while in high school, she even adds a postscript purporting to copyright her unusual spelling and grammar usage.  It is by such personal touches that you learn something much deeper about a person, in this case that the rather stern looking, exceedingly private author of the classic Death Comes for the Archbishop had a silly sense of humor that she kept from her reading public, and that the depth of her humor extended to laughing at her own foibles and shortcomings.  I have long collected her work for its literary merit and I am now able to appreciate it more fully, given the knowledge she could be silly even while attending to the serious business of writing literary fiction.

I have often wondered why collections of letters fascinate me, and I have come to the conclusion that they do so because they are the closest thing we have to a lens into the inner workings of another’s mind.  No one particular letter can offer such a glimpse, because the reader cannot be certain of the purpose of the specific letter, of the circumstances which provoked its composition, or of the mindset of its author at the given moment of its creation.  But a collection of letters written over several years certainly does, for in the sequence of letters you glimpse strains of consistent thought as applied to a variety of subjects, viewing those thoughts from a variety of angles until you can gain some confidence in how the author thought and how his or her thinking changed over a lifetime of accumulated boredom, calamity, and joy.

I have come to believe that letter collections are the only medium offering a glimpse of what really goes on behind closed eyes.

But I wonder if future generations will have the luxury of  collections of similar contemporary materials.  Of course, the volumes of collected letters already in print will continue to be available in libraries, in used book stores, or even in reprinted versions in new book stores, but is there contemporary material from which to draw future, similar collections?  I am skeptical that the digital age will produce much of merit in this regard, and whether the joy of published collected letters is almost a thing of the past.

Email is a thing usually written in haste, often about mundane details of a life that say more about the culture in which a person moves than his or her reactions to that culture.  Much email is not only poorly written, it is written cutely and tells nothing of the inner workings of a mind.  I am not complaining about the use of email, for I use it daily; I am only complaining that it is ephemeral, non-revealing, flimsy, mass-produced stuff that will not likely stand up for the most part to the scrutiny of future readers seeking to understand the inner workings of a contemporary mind.

Some small portion will, of course.  For example, I exchange emails of a more serious sort with my friend and co-blogger, Eliot Mentor, and these I keep safely in a separate file on my computer – the modern equivalent of the oak and redwood hinged boxes in which I used to carefully store the tangible evidence of my memories, the kind of boxes it is becoming harder to find due to the lack of materials to put into them.  Whether or not a future generation might find them of interest, these email exchanges are enjoyable for both of us, for they require thoughtful responses in consideration and examination of the subject matter before hitting the ‘send’ button.  They further our understanding of one another in ways that an entire accumulation of emails merely confirming a dinner or luncheon location or sending along the joke of the day could never do.

But if our emails were ever to be of interest to anyone other than ourselves, were ever to be published in a collection, I would have had to remember to save them in the first instance, for so much of what is written in such haste and with such frequency in this society is not saved except upon a server somewhere, a server to which most of us will never have ready access.

As an aside, if a fascination for reading the emails of modern-day authors becomes a future fad, the undue interference with private communications exhibited by our very own government may prove a boon.  Imagine the kinds of FOIA requests such a practice might eventually make possible for future editors and biographers.  J. D. Salinger would have had nowhere to hide in the light of that sort of day!

Please don’t read this as a lament by an older man about things modern.  While this is a lament of a sort, the lament is over the failure of most of us to take the time to record our unvarnished thoughts while negotiating our way through a society that doesn’t provide much time for reflection, doesn’t provide a meaningful medium for doing so, doesn’t seem to place much value on anything other than the stream of rude consciousness.  I don’t lament the convenience of modern communication methods; I only lament their cost.

But costs of this kind can be dealt with, if only one will take – or find – the time to do so.  So take this, instead, as a plea for you to take the time to record your innermost thoughts in something other than that next email to your aunt Vickie or your friend Sarah.  You might actually take pen in hand and write a real, by-God letter to a close friend, the kind of letter that takes thought and a good while to compose, an envelope in which to place it, and a stamp by which to mail it.  You could keep a written diary, the kind of thing I also like to read when finally released to the light of day due to someone having lived an interesting life and through the miracle of posthumous publication.

Or, you could even keep an electronic blog, and publish your thoughts in contemporaneous time for some unknown person to find and read if they have sufficient interest – as I’m about to do after I’ve re-read and edited this piece sufficiently for me to feel it safe to be released into the ether.

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Of Autumnal Light

Posted on August 31, 2013 by C. (Gaius) Charles

The light softened – or, rather, I noticed that it had softened – as of around 7 or 8 o’clock the evening of August 17th.  As is always tradition (at least in the “whoops, I almost forgot about this but notice every year” sense), I keep my eye out for that point where the harsh light of summer begins to fade into autumnal hours, and only because of a friendly competition between good friends to see who notices the change first. This change, you see, is rather important for artists; the softer light lends itself better to artistry in general, and thus is more desirable for certain types of artistic endeavors than the harsher (some might say colder) light of summer. Most pleasingly, it happened right as I was walking around and taking photos, so it was only appropriate that I heralded this event as I also practiced one of the reasons for why it was a benefit.

This year, though, I elected not to confirm my findings with the friends who share this particular endeavor with me, keeping one eye open for this softening. It was enough to know that I had recognized it, albeit perhaps a bit slower than I might normally notice. It was a bit of a surprise, though, standing out by the waters of Humptulips County; it seemed too early for such a shift, not quite the right time of year, as if it had simply decided it had enough and gave up the ghost of summer before summer was ready to acquiesce. Not a throwing up of the hands in surrender and that sense of “ok, fine, I’m done”, but rather, more of the elongated sigh, the type that you hear out of someone who has well and truly given up but at least isn’t being too much of a jerk about it.

So, yes, it is autumn, at least according to the light.

It is interesting how such an event heightens your ability to notice the other autumn signs: the fallen leaf or two off the tree that hangs over the back porch, the browned pine needles covering the car as you leave from work, the return of the steady drizzles that often grace Humptulips when summer has passed its crown. Yes, autumn is here, if not in name, at least in behavior. Unlike some residents, I look forward to the rains and the cold and the snow to come; the rain because I enjoy the sight and the smell, the cold and the snow because it heralds family. Thanksgiving and Christmas are the two reliable times of the year where I have always been with those closest to me. Some years, I have narrowly made these arrangements due to weather, but so far, it has always happened. I look forward to the hot coffee as we gaze out the window at the cold of December; to the ham and turkey dinners that gather us all around the dining room table, sometimes just the family, and others with close family friends; to the opportunity to catch up, to renew our importance to one another.

While I know that, once Christmas has come and gone, I will pine for the next year’s holidays, I can at least enjoy now: we are not there yet. The first heralds of autumn have only just barely begun to sing, the orchestra tuning in the pit whilst the audience finds its seats.

Lead on, Maestro.

~ C. (Gaius) Charles

Posted in Humptulips County, Our Place in the Firmament | 1 Comment

Summer Is A-Fadin’ Away

Posted on August 31, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

While it isn’t the last weekend of summer according to the calendar, it certainly is in accordance with our shared culture.  The long Labor Day weekend has always marked summer’s conclusion in the United States, for the school years in districts across the land have either begun by then or will begin the following week, and offices and factories always return to full intensity in September, an intensity with which they will operate until the conclusion of the afore-mentioned school year.  In short, our society’s focus is back on tight beam, or soon will be after a week or two of remembering how to bear down.  To put it another way, we are standing in the shallow end of the trench that is our usual rut, and dipping our toes into its waters as we await the full immersion that is but a week or two away.

But I’m not.  For the first September since I turned 6, I do not have to return to school or to work.  For I have aged like a fine red wine past its time of drinkability; I have aged to the point of becoming truly feckless and irrelevant to the common cause.  For I have well and truly become an Old Fart, and intend to wear that honor with distinction, if only I can figure out what it is Old Farts are expected to do.

I have had ample time for reflection on this issue, for Humptulips County’s summer this year has been exemplary: the weather has been nigh on perfect; the days were sweetly lived and appreciated to the full; time’s passage was a regular, steadfast affair, and not the hasty rush to judgment it so often was during my working years; the evenings were replete with the lengthening shadows that succor my heart and my soul, routinely occurring, as they did, under unclouded skies open to the heavens’ various lights.  Coming as this summer did upon the heels of our European river cruise, it was simultaneously the perfect antidote for weary travelers, and the perfect pick-me-up cocktail for the impending fall.  This summer was, for me at least, a re-education as to what it means to be unencumbered, a lesson in the joys of non-commitment.

This is not to say that I have nothing to do.  In fact, there is much on my plate, ranging from active service on the boards of several charities serving purposes near and dear to my heart, to an attempt to create the book that each of us says we will write some day – the book I am actually writing, the proto-book now in its fifth draft, the incipient tome which has developed a life of its own and which demands most of my mornings.  And I still offer occasional advice to a few close friends, advice worth just as much as the fees I am not charging for its offering.  For I’ve found the best fees for services rendered are those for which I don’t have to take the time and trouble of preparing an invoice; the kinds of fees which are best paid in the coin of friendship.

But summer still has Labor Day Weekend to keep it alive a bit longer.  On this, the first day of that weekend, I can only stop to count my blessings: relatively good health; a staunch and caring family; a loving wife and companion; good and true friends; a beautiful farm requiring just enough maintenance to keep muscles from atrophying; a plethora of interesting challenges which take enough of my time to keep me from intellectual boredom; an abundance of books yet to be read and at least one whose writing is yet to be completed; flocks of goldfinches feeding regularly at our outside feeder; three love birds in a cage in our sun-room providing enough noise and play to make lively what would otherwise be an inordinately quiet home and a humdrum existence; and four cats who tolerate our existence as long as we remember to keep them well served with food and water and to appreciate them on their terms, not ours.

Life is good, for the accumulation of these items surely beats a partridge in a pear tree any day of the week, and I don’t have to wait for the holiday season to enjoy them.

Posted in Humptulips County, Our Place in the Firmament | Comments Off on Summer Is A-Fadin’ Away

Fat Finches And Fantasies

Posted on August 17, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

“Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin’s-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, “If you build it, he will come.”

The voice was that of a ballpark announcer.  As he spoke, I instantly envisioned the finished product I knew I was being asked to conceive.  I could see the dark, squarish speakers, like ancient sailors’ hats, attached to aluminum-painted light standards that glowed down into a baseball field, my present position being directly behind home plate.”

W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

The willow goldfinch is hereby designated as the official bird of the state of Washington.

Revised Code of Washington, Section 1.20.040

During a visit to our local supermarket several weeks ago, we happened down the aisle which includes wild bird seed.  We have one older bird feeder we haven’t used for a while, since our former cats (now deceased) used to park themselves under it in hope of a free meal.  They were more successful at realizing their fantasy than we liked, so we discontinued using the feeder and I was contemplating reviving it since we no longer have the pleasure of the cats’ company.

While inspecting various seeds on offer, I noticed a thistle feeder set off to one side and, on impulse, bought it.  I have long enjoyed the goldfinches nesting on our property, often encountering them in the early morning lined up along the top of the chain link fence bordering our pasture, only to watch them startle at my presence and fly away to nearby, higher pine boughs in erratic, episodic flight patterns.   Goldfinches love thistle seed, so I grabbed the box, read its back hastily, and put the feeder in our shopping cart – only to discover upon our arrival home that it didn’t come equipped with seed.  So a second trip to the store was necessitated, one that took two days to accomplish, one that fed my impatience to begin up close goldfinch watching in earnest.

I had already assembled the feeder in anticipation of getting the seed and located a vacant cup hook outside our living room window on which to hang it when we arrived home with the seed.  I immediately filled the feeder, hung it, and returned to my seat on the living room couch to see whether the feeder’s placement was successful from the standpoint of viewing parameters.  It was, and so I sat down and waited.  And waited.  And waited.

Nothing happened that first day, nor did anything occur on the second.  The feeder had begun to look lonely swaying back and forth in the light breezes of late July and I, impatient as always, began to believe the idea had been a waste of faith.  All bird feeders, after all, owe their existence to the notion so clearly expressed by W. P. Kinsella in Shoeless Joe as quoted above, a line that became famous courtesy of the motion picture based on the book, Field of Dreams.

On the afternoon of the third day as I was engaged in my favorite post-retirement afternoon activity – reading a good book while nodding off; a very possible activity which you shouldn’t scoff at without first attempting – Helen sat down across from me and said there was a goldfinch on the feeder.  I looked around quickly, thinking a feeding bird a true rarity given the previous two days lack, and there was a female goldfinch happily taking seeds from the feeder’s clear plastic tube.  The scant movement I made to twist my head in the feeder’s direction was enough to cause her to fly away, so I only caught a momentary glimpse.  The feeder resumed its idle swaying, still full to the brim with seed, the single female not having noticeably reduced its content.

The remainder of that day passed without another visitor, or at least no other visitors that we caught in flagrante.  But on the morning of the next day it seemed to me that the level of seed had declined somewhat.  Things such as the relative level of seed in a thistle feeder are always suspect, for I never remember to mark where the level began and am reduced to wondering if the current level is really anything other than it was when first filled.  I finally convinced myself that in my eagerness to watch goldfinches up close I had imagined a reduction in level, since the difference, if any, was too miniscule to measure.

The next morning – the morning of the fourth day – the level of seed was appreciably lower and I began to imagine one very fat female goldfinch weighing down the end of a pine bough somewhere along the line of pines that follows the driveway from the communal lane to our house.  I began to imagine that she was Super Finch, an 800 ounce female finch dominatrix bossing around all the little male goldfinches in the area.  I never took this notion to the point of actually looking for her, but it tickled my fancy and so I tucked it carefully away in my imagination.  Surely, if Ray Kinsella, the hero of Shoeless Joe, can have conversations with Shoeless Joe Jackson in an Iowa cornfield years after Shoeless Joe’s death, I am entitled to contemplate the existence of a bossy female finch-gorilla directing all the goldfinch traffic on our farm.

Alas, I was wrong, but the reality was so much better than my fantasy.  That same afternoon Helen once again sat down opposite me and said: “Have you noticed all the goldfinches on the feeder?”  I emerged from deep within my book – I have a habit of getting lost in whatever world an author has created – to find that every perch on the feeder was occupied by male and female goldfinches.  As I watched in wonder, I could see other goldfinches alighting on our roof, looking down impatiently on those feeding beneath them, anxious for their turn at the trough.  And not all of the interest was being shown by goldfinches, for there were a few foreigners in evidence.

And so began what has turned into weeks of enjoyment, watching birds come and go, watching them stretch out their necks to assess the threat level at any given moment, watching non-feeding birds fly at feeding birds in hopes of an abandoned perch on which the flyer might dine.  We not only have gotten to see the beauty of their plumage close up, we have begun to recognize patterns of behavior, to recognize the more aggressive birds and the shyer ones.

We have also noted the downsides of having a feeder hanging over our deck – the pile of seed husks and uneaten seeds which must be vacuumed up with regularity, the scat of something bigger, something mammalian, which is obviously making a meal from the deck’s seed pile in the night, the cost of the seed which we are now constantly buying to replenish the feeder each day.  These downsides were somewhat diminished by my discovery of a dead snail buried under a weight of seed and seed husks the first time I vacuumed the pile from the deck.  I may well write a future blog piece on the satisfactions of snail euthanasia by dint of bird seed.  After all, if I’m not to be allowed 800 ounce female finch dominatrices, I can at least satisfy my flights of fancy by being heralded as the discoverer of a new, organic method of dispatching hated garden pests.

Goldfinches know a good thing when they see it, and we have discovered from books and from personal viewing that they feed in flocks.  A single refill of the feeder now lasts little more than one day, and when the seed level gets too low the feeders upper perches no longer yields seed to questing beaks and the fighting among the diners for a lower perch only increases.  So each morning before I shower and dress for the day, I dutifully take a bag of seed out to the deck, watch the morning’s diners fly off as I approach, and refill the feeder.  By the time I return inside, it is once again happily occupied, with one bird quickly becoming two, three, or often up to the allowable maximum of eight.

So consider this as a paean to impulse buying – or as a paean to the feeding habits of goldfinches, if you prefer.  It matters not which you choose, since the result is the same to me for I am enjoying close-up views of one of nature’s beauties and my faith in the chasing of fantasies has been renewed – no matter how big or small my fantasies may turn out to be.

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The Joys of Friendships Arising From Sharing Risk

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

While I enjoyed practicing law for many years, I recently retired.  I never lost my zest for serving others, but the administrative requirements of modern law practice finally got to the point where I was no longer having fun – the dictates of being a business having overwhelmed the pleasures of being a member of an honored profession.  Having said for years that I would practice as long as I was having fun, I chose to honor that statement and made my escape.

I haven’t really missed law practice as I have much to do in retirement.  I still serve on charitable boards and have many hobbies – such as keeping this blog – that keep me fully occupied.  My retirement has also freed Helen and me to do some things we never seemed to have time for when I was working, such as our recent European river cruise.  All in all, I haven’t missed practice, and that has been somewhat surprising to me considering all the fun I had for many years assisting others in chasing their dreams.

What I have missed, however, is talking to my friends.  For my former clients largely fit into two classifications: friends of mine who needed legal services of a kind requiring effort beyond those of simple courtesies and who turned to me for assistance; or business clients who began as clients but became friends with the passage of time due to our communal strivings.  There were a few clients that I never considered as friends, but they were rare birds indeed.  The vast majority of my former clients were friends and remain friends to this day.  I have missed speaking to them on a regular basis and keeping current with their personal stories and sagas.

Yesterday, I hit the jackpot.  Helen and I had dinner scheduled with one long-time client and there was some possibility he and his wife might be come to the house afterward, so while Helen went over to her mother’s house to help prepare it for sale, I stayed home to clean and straighten.  Just as I was hanging a picture I’d finally found a place for in the Library, the phone rang.  I answered to discover the caller was a long time Canadian client who has been retired for three years.  He was calling to see how I have adjusted to my own retirement and to catch up on the news.

We talked for 20 minutes or so, mostly about mutual friends, personal interests, past and future travels, respective family matters and sorrows, and the joys of retirement.  During our conversation, I realized that these sorts of conversations were what I missed most in my retirement and began to wonder why I hadn’t been the one to reach out and initiate the conversation.  After all, each of our telephones is equipped with a means of dialing the other’s number.  But he has the advantage of me; he has been retired longer and has developed the rhythm of calling old friends to keep in touch.

Dinner last evening with my other former client and his wife was equally joyful.  We ate at an excellent small bistro and were surprised by a bottle of wine ‘phoned in’ by his mother by way of a thank you for a small something I’d done for her daughter.  It hadn’t occurred to me not to assist or to demand payment, for I am a friend of the extremely extended family and one simply helps one’s friends: the mother was – and is – active in the family business, as is a daughter, an ex-wife, and two spouses (the one at dinner and the one attached to the ex-wife).  This was a special dinner in other ways as well, for it was the first time all of us had gotten together in something other than a business setting – something we had both promised the other to do during our last, business related meeting.  We have long enjoyed our business conversations, but simply hadn’t yet taken the relationship to a new and different level.  Last night we began that journey.

Both of these men are good friends and their friendships are of the kind that come from successfully going through difficulties together and arriving on the other side with joy in a shared success.  But the friendships might not have happened if we hadn’t shared similar backgrounds. None of us began life as scions of wealthy, successful families.  To the contrary, each of us began life with nary a dime and, through a combination of brains, grit, energy, focus, desire, and education, were able to succeed at careers we came to believe in and love.  There is a singular joy attached to being able to accomplish something of this sort, of knowing you can spread your wings and fly on your own, of realizing that you can fly with others toward a common goal.

For me, there was the added joy of helping other’s to spread their wings, for being of service has always had special meaning for me.

I received yet another call yesterday, this one from my blogging partner, Eliot.  He called during a break in an elder hostel program on opera to tell me of something he’d learned by listening to a lecture on The Marriage of Figaro, something that reminded him of an event that occurred years ago when we were law partners.  We had agreed to chair a segment of a firm planning session – Eliot refused to call these sessions retreats, maintaining stoutly that he’d never retreated in his life – and we’d decided to hold an Oxford style debate on the following topic: “We (lawyers) are servants, and highly paid for the privilege.”  Eliot and I were both largely successful in our legal ventures, but the fates conspired to deny us success with this one.   The reaction in the room upon our unveiling the topic was deadly, with almost everyone strongly adverse to the notion that lawyers were servants.  One lawyer we both highly respected pounded emphatically on the table in front of him while declaring: “I went to law school for three years.  I am no one’s servant.”

But, alas for him, we were servants – as, indeed, almost anyone in the world, regardless of occupation, wealth or position, is during at least some portion of his or her life.  And why those in that far off room didn’t understand that to be of service is both a privilege and a joyful act is beyond my comprehension.  How else could I have helped last evening’s dinner companion develop his start-up enterprise to the point where it could be sold for a sum that guaranteed all involved a full retirement?  I had neither the funds to invest nor the expertise to assist directly in his business operations, but whatever legal savvy I provided was of material assistance to the team that made the success happen.  How else could I have helped the morning’s caller grow an already substantial Canadian family owned business to become even larger and deal with the dreaded issue of family succession?  Neither he nor I were owners of the business except in the sense that we each felt a sense of ownership and urgency, the kind of ownership and urgency which arises out of the privilege of service: his feelings arising from being the first non-family member to be asked to be the CEO of the company; mine arising from the honor of having been given responsibility, from having been asked to be the family’s US counsel, at a time when I had practiced law less than 10 years.

I enjoyed heady business years with both of my friends, years in which we overcame many obstacles together, years in which we fashioned many successes together.  I always had to be cognizant that my friends were running the risks using their own capital or directing the family’s business operations, and that they knew the basics of their respective businesses far better than I.  My job was to assist with legal concerns, to cooperate with the other service professionals who felt toward these clients as I did from their own, respective viewpoints.  And so it was that all of us – owners, executives, and fellow service professionals alike – were part of a group taking on life one challenge at a time and having a great deal of fun in the bargain.

Eliot appreciates both the joy of serving – for he was superb at his work, level-headed, calm, supportive, and capable of delivering practical solutions to difficult issues – and the irony of good lawyers not understanding that they were, by definition, in service to others.  His call was motivated both by the collective head shaking each of us has engaged in over the years since that long ago planning session and by a new thought about what we might have said to achieve a different result than the one we ‘enjoyed’.  I was inclined in yesterday’s conversation to think that we did try the tactic he was suggesting and told Eliot so.  On reflection after our call was completed, I realized that Eliot, at age 90, was still being Eliot – still worrying the issues, still looking for and suggesting solutions, still caring in ways that only friends can care for one another, still seeking for a way to reach the blockheads incapable of comprehending the joys of service.

Yesterday was a banner day for me, for many old friends were heard from outside of the context of business.  We spoke with one another, we broke bread with one another, we bantered with one another – all for no reason other than the simple joy of friendship.  Each of our friendships has surpassed a relationship based upon nothing other than the conduct of business, primarily because of the joy of engagement that each of us shared while engaged in those self-same business matters. Â We like each other due to our shared successes in the joys of the communal hunt.  We respect each other because each of us has the ability to make something happen; we respect each other because each of us understands that the others perfected their ability to make something happen by pulling themselves up from humble beginnings with their own bootstraps; we respect each other for coming to understand and believe that hunting in packs is far more interesting, far more complex, and far more enjoyable than hunting alone.

And in the end, it is our friendships that sustain us, not the long ago challenges of business.  For in friendship we serve one another by making life a thing of joy rather than a thing of desperation.

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Kinship

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Eliot Mentor

My friend, Gavin Stevens, recently happened upon a doe and fawn, and the sighting inspired significant thoughts about life, its fragility and the physical and delicate fragility of deer as a sign of beauty, which, of course, it is.

I see the same beauty in leafless boughs reaching to a darkening sky; occasionally in a spider’s web that stretches across what must be a gaping chasm to the spider that wove it; in a spindly fern sparkling with the morning’s dew; with ancient pilings, the skeletons of bygone fish landings, their tops rotted and broken, poking up into a morning’s mist that rises slowly like a drifting cloud from a quiet river.

Quite different from all of this and Gavin’s coming upon a doe and fawn, was a one time experience of mine with deer that created a linkage, in the most subtle way, and brought to my mind that we are all of the same spirit, sprung from the same source, brothers, or at least distant cousins, in a sense.

I was alone down river on the Columbia.  A warm, gorgeous summer day.  It was the kind of a day when there is something holy about being by one’s self, drifting with the current of the river and with the current of life.  I motored out of the moorage at Cathlamet, raised the sails and headed downstream.  It was mid-morning and still windless, and I drifted with the current.  The first landmark of consequence below Cathlamet is the little town of Skamokawa.  There a small stream empties into the Columbia, and the flat marsh lands and meadows below Cathlamet end.  The land suddenly rises quite dramatically, becoming steep, forested slopes.  At the base, here and there, a fringe of pebbled beach joins the water.  Lewis and Clark had paddled through this stretch of the river long ago.

As I said, it was a warm, lazy day, and I was content to drift with the river’s current and let my thoughts turn over slowly in keeping with the day’s tempo.  I had hove to so that the boat kept its heading, and it and I meandered along indifferently not too far from shore.  As I sat there in the cockpit, letting the goodness of the sunshine infiltrate my being, a flight of several little birds – swallows, I believe – flew close and twittered, almost as if they were hailing me and trying to get my attention.  I was sitting near the end of the mainsail boom, and as they spun by, their tiny wings fluttering at high speed, their chirps and calls drew my eyes and sight along the boom toward the shore almost as if it were a pointer.

I stared unbelieving because the boom pointed toward several deer on the shore.  It was almost as if those little birds had called to me to look.  I changed the heading of the boat and drew very close to the narrow beach and the deer, remaining as quiet and motionless as it is possible to be in a moving vessel.  The deer observed me but apparently saw no cause for alarm.  They continued to browse or drink or do what they had been doing before I came upon them.  Occasionally one of them would raise its head, turn its soft eyes upon me and, I felt, acknowledge my presence.

After a few moments, the river’s current took me past, and they were gone from my vision and I from theirs.  Downstream, time moved on.  I broke out a cold beer and a sandwich.  Not too long after, the wind picked up from the northwest as it does in those parts in summer as a day progresses.  I headed back upstream with a breeze at my back.  Coming near the slopes and the beach where I had spotted the deer I cruised close to the shore.  Amazingly, the deer were still there.  They saw me, of course, seemed to nod in recognition, almost as if they had awaited my return.  Then, having greeted me, they turned and disappeared up the slope into the trees.

Gavin saw beauty when he chanced upon the doe and fawn in the roadway.  I saw beauty, too, with those deer on the shore, but I also felt a kinship, a connection, distant, perhaps, but real.

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Of the Intersection of Fragility and Beauty

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

Yesterday, tired from three days of travel and the consequent catching up on chores around the Farm, we decided to go out for pizza and ignore the restrictions of our respective diets.  As we turned the corner from one of the lanes that leads to the Farm to enter the second, we saw, in the hollow ahead of us, a doe and her small fawn standing in the middle of the lane.  We stopped the car several yards away to watch them.  The doe gazed idly at us, not spooked because our hybrid is silent and we were not moving, and then casually walked into the underbrush surrounding an empty field.  The fawn took two steps, sniffed the ground, and then slowly, nonchalantly followed its mother.  By the time we reached their point of entry into the heavy brush alongside the road, there was no sign of either.

This was not an unusual sighting around the Farm.  In fact, we have seen this doe and this fawn before, as they have become regular visitors and probably live in the field into which they disappeared.  The mother is always hovering about the fawn, the fawn still being of small size and not yet wise in the ways of deer etiquette or survival skills.  They are not the only deer to live on the Farm or its environs.

The importance to Helen and me of last evening’s encounter was a reminder of the fragility of all life.  Deer are beautiful animals, but to look at them is not to be convinced of their sturdiness.  Their beauty is in their fragility – the long, thin, stick-like legs, the sharply pointed snout, the slender head, the daintiness of their slower movements as they place each hoof in a place of carefully considered choice, and the speed and grace of their panicked bounding as they run from danger.  While this is not an animal that could stand up to anything substantial, their ubiquity says much about their survival skills.

I’ve often wondered whether deer were, in fact, truly corporeal.  Helen commented last night as we passed their entry point into the brush that she often wondered how deer found paths through such heavy undergrowth.  I countered that I sometimes thought they simply turned and vanished, sifting through the leaves like smoke.  In truth, their ability to do so probably lies in their very daintiness, in their ability to high step carefully through any environment.

The beauty of fragility is much on our minds at the moment, for our recent travel was to Ft. Worth, Texas to celebrate Helen’s sister’s birthday with other family members.  Mary, Helen’s sister, has been determinedly battling cancer for some months.  She is tired and frail from chemotherapy and the illness, but undaunted in her pursuit of treatment.  The indomitability of her spirit is evidenced by the set of her jaw as seen in profile, her lucidity of thought and purpose, and her physical grace and steadfast sense of humor.

On Monday, we walked to a nearby restaurant for a late lunch prior to going to the airport to return home.  Mary and her husband Gregg were walking ahead of me in 97 degree heat, a hot wind blowing in each of our faces. Mary was holding Gregg’s arm not as a crutch but perhaps for steadiness, holding his arm proudly as if a woman being escorted to the theater, head held high, back perfectly straight, elegantly dressed, will power evident in her every movement.  At that instant she reminded me of someone I was unable to identify, and I began worrying over who it might be.

At home the next morning, I realized that Mary had reminded me of Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond.  I am not thinking of Katherine Hepburn as the character she played in the movie, for I cannot even recall her character’s name.  I am thinking, instead, of Katherine Hepburn, the person, the person she was at the time On Golden Pond was made – older, physically impaired, the very quality that had always defined her – her voice – wracked, cracked, and tired, but, nonetheless, a beautiful, graceful, proud, indomitable woman, unashamed of being older, determined to play a role that other, less able, actresses of similar stature would likely not have attempted, preferring, instead, to rely upon their previous body of work for their reputation, to stand upon their legacy rather than to try again in such a public display of diminished capacity, to rest upon their laurels.

The movie and play are not masterpieces, but passable, feel good entertainment.  It was Katherine Hepburn’s personal qualities at the time that made the movie memorable.  It succeeded because of her perseverance and strength of character in the face of her evident fragility, of her obviously diminished capacities; it succeeded because it rendered manifest her qualities as a person,  rather than because a fine actress made an otherwise forgettable role believable.  It succeeded because she had been stripped down by age to her essence as a real person and as a fine actress, all the fripperies removed to reveal who she truly was underneath.

I realized Mary reminded me of Katherine Hepburn’s character and determination, of her physical and inner beauty.   And there was always Hepburn’s smile, a smile I saw successfully imitated by Mary and her sisters on several occasions over the weekend.

I have long thought each of us was inherently fragile in the face of nature.  I grew up under a prairie sky, and there is nothing like a prairie sky to remind us of our place in the grand scheme of things.  Such a sky is a vast, uninterrupted, god-like thing that stretches from here to there, delimited only by the curvature of the earth.  Anywhere you stand under such a sky will be under the midpoint of a set of curving, invisible ridgepoles keeping the sky at bay while allowing it to droop to the horizon in every direction.  For such a sky moves with you, moves with the shifting of the horizon; it defines a tented world with you as its center pole.

And under such a sky, we come to realize our place – as a single, identifiable something amid a vast variety of other single, identifiable somethings that need one another for survival.  If we were standing on the top of a hill, surveying a valley below us prior to assuming our individual role in the ecosystem lying below, in the  massive interdependency on display under an overweening, prairie sky, we would have no choice but to acknowledge our individual fragility in the face of the overwhelming odds on display, the same fragility that is the essence of every living thing seeking to endure.  But there is something within us – something shared by every living thing, whether animal or vegetable – that accepts inherently long odds and insists on taking the chance at life.

So fragility seems to be the essence of the beauty of all living things – a beauty shown by the remarkably ugly, fat yellow toad that hopped unexpectedly up the Farm’s driveway last month, by the graceful deer of last evening’s drive down the lane servicing the Farm, by the tiny, acrobatic goldfinches that regularly dine at the thistle feeder placed outside our living room windows, by the remarkable cinematic presence of an ailing Katherine Hepburn, by Mary’s indomitable endurance and grace under fire.

It is a privilege to be in the presence of such beauty – whether among relatives in Ft. Worth on a hot July day, in a crowded movie theater together with dozens of others, or here by ourselves on our Farm in Humptulips County.  For their fragility reminds us of ours and teaches us the means of graceful endurance.

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Who Is That Old Broad, Anyway?

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly.  It’s  as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed.  But it has  its value, I think.  The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.

Mark Twain, “A Humorist’s Confession,” The New York Times, November 26,  1905

Age to me means nothing. I can’t get old; I’m working. I was old when I was twenty-one and out of work.  As long as you’re working, you stay young.  When I’m in front of an audience, all that love and vitality sweeps over me and I forget my age.

George Burns

I recently posted what would be generously described as a ‘quip’ on a friend’s Facebook page, only to receive a prompt scolding from someone I barely remember (let’s call her Bertha – not her real name) for having the audacity to think the way my post suggested.  My friend had posted pictures of people he’d encountered at our 50th high school reunion.  My quip was about being old: questioning why my friend was hanging around with old folks – i.e., those of our certain age – when he could be hanging out with someone his own age.  My friend has taught college classes most of his life, and he has a warped sense of humor and doesn’t act his age.  Hence, the quip was intended as gentle fun with someone who would appreciate its irony.

Admittedly, my quip wasn’t the stuff of high humor and perhaps was simply unamusing when judged on a standalone basis.   I understand my own limitations as a humorist, so I promise to stick to my day job.  After all, I’ve only recently discovered that being retired  requires full-time effort.

Bertha’s reaction was instructive, for she posted, with evident shortness, that we were all the same age.  The only thing her comment lacked in asperity was an exclamation mark at its end!  In short, she failed to recognize my quip as an attempt at humor.  I suspect, given what little I know about her, that she wouldn’t have recognized a good joke if I’d quoted Henny Youngman, instead.  For example, she might have missed the point of this, choosing to comment instead upon Grandmother’s lack of hygienic principles.

My grandmother is over 80 and still doesn’t need glasses.  She drinks right out of the bottle.

Henny Youngman

But I digress, for this is not a piece about Henny Youngman or any other comedian you care to name.  This is a piece, instead, about the importance of a sense of humor in life, no matter what success one might have in telling jokes.

Somewhere during mid-career as an attorney, I began to notice that my most successful clients and referral sources all had a vigorous sense of humor in their approach to life and business.   And the most successful of all were those that had the ability to laugh with abandon at their own foibles and failures.  I have often wondered why that was, and have come to believe there are two principal reasons.

The first is related to their personalities.  Successful people routinely take risks.  Risk taking is necessary to turn a profit, since profits are nothing more than the marginal gains earned upon risks assumed and undertaken.  In other words, one must assume risk if one is to be successful, and this axiom holds true regardless of the field of endeavor in which the successful person is engaged.

I see humor as another form of risk taking, and, if I am correct in this analysis, it stands to reason that the more successful someone is, the greater the sense of humor he or she is likely to possess.  And I will stipulate that there are, no doubt, exceptions to this rule.  I am as certain as I can be that there are prominent examples of successful businessmen who lacked anything vaguely resembling a sense of humor, and if I am correct many of them sat for photographic portraits in the late 1800’s – no one in any of the portraits I’ve seen from that era ever seemed to mug for the camera. In their defense, perhaps mugging for the camera hadn’t yet been invented.  After all, the camera was still a new fangled device at the time.

That an attempt at humor is the taking of a risk seems obvious to me.  In making my quip about age on my friend’s Facebook page, I had to think first about whether I cared that other mutual friends our age might be sensitive about getting old and whether I might, accordingly, offend someone.  I decided I didn’t care about that risk – not because I had a wish to offend anyone else, but because my personality is such that if someone is offended by something I do, I figure it’s their problem and not mine.  The person to whom I must be true is me, not them.  While I have no wish to offend, if my motive in making any remark is not to offend but to have fun, someone who takes things in such a way as to be offended hasn’t my sympathy.  Living one’s life in a state of perpetual gloom isn’t for me, isn’t the source of any joy – despite the humor of Al Capp’s Joe Jtbfsplk.

Jokes can fall flat in the same way a business venture can fail, and the successful person learns from his or her business failures as well as from his or her failed attempts at humor.  And the learning comes from having tried and failed, from having accepted the sort of challenge that might affect posterity, from having taken a risk in spite of its apparent chances of success in the offing.

The second reason most successful people seem to possess a sense of humor is their ability to stay young in outlook.  Let’s face it, getting old isn’t for sissies as the common lament states.  I have often opined that the aches and pains associated with getting older are God’s way of reminding us of portions of our anatomy of whose existence we have taken for granted or seem to have forgotten.  If you give in to these aches and pains, life becomes dismal at best, for why would anyone in their right mind want to contemplate having to endure them for the remainder of whatever time is left to them?

My belief is that I – indeed, anyone – can stay as mentally young as I want for as long as I want, for as long as the time allotted to me, notwithstanding the associated aches and pains of true physical age.  For mental age is, at some basic level, merely a matter of viewpoint.  I truly believe that I acted older at age 25 than I do now at age 68, and in so saying I am not arguing that my life is going backwards but recognizing that I had far more reasons then to be serious than I now have in retirement.

Successful people are young in outlook.  How else can one explain a former client of mine who, at my age, is undertaking the risk of a new business venture requiring a significant capital investment?   He didn’t sigh and pass upon the opportunity because he wanted to spend his declining years swaddled and cosseted.  He recognized the opportunity as an intriguing challenge and set out to decipher the riddles that stand in the way of its success.  And he is currently consulting with me about the possibility of yet another, wholly unrelated, investment opportunity, while still in the thrall of getting the first venture off the ground.  His is an energy I appreciate and admire, especially when his tales of his business trials are accompanied by the crystalline purity of his laughter.

The funniest comment ever made to me about getting older came from my mother.  She was in her late eighties and suffering from Parkinson’s Disease when she told it to me.  “When I look in the mirror now each morning,” she said, “I have to ask myself: Who is that old broad, anyway?”  Like all great humor, her statement recognized a truth, admitted to a reality.  For who among us doesn’t have a mental image fixed somewhere in their mid-twenties?  For who among us of a certain age isn’t startled by our outward appearance, when inside we are as young as we wish to be?

And Bertha?  Well, I resisted the impulse to bite back on Facebook and chose, instead, to allow her scolding to stand without rebuttal.  For while we may be the same physical age, I take delight in my immaturity of view, in my sense of humor.  For while I am proud to be a juvenile at my age, I have no reason to offend: I learned long ago to forego some of the aspects that are juvenile trademarks; to act my age while employing only the best attributes of theirs; to treat others as nicely as I can while remaining true to my own philosophy

After all, I am the one who has to like the person in the mirror – regardless of his outward appearance.

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Languor in a Summer’s Afternoon

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter

and the cold
have been illumined

with
pointed green

by the rain and sun —
The strict simple

principles of
straight branches

are being modified
by pinched-out

ifs of color, devout
conditions

the smiles of love —

. . . .

until the stript
sentences

move as a woman’s
limbs under cloth

and praise from secrecy
quick with desire

love’s ascendancy
in summer —

In summer the song
sings itself

above the muffled words —

William Carlos Williams, The Botticellian Trees

It is summer here in Humptulips County, the days are hot and torpor reigns.

A few days ago, I took my afternoon tea to our front porch to drink.  As I settled into my chosen chair in the corner’s shade, I instantly became part of a universally shared, absolute stillness – no birdsong, no insect flutter, no wind, nothing to disturb the languor, nothing for me to do but drink my tea in sips and contemplate matters of the mind.

Everything from willpower to fate hung upon the cusp of late afternoon’s metamorphoses into evening.  Every living thing, sentient and non-sentient, lay motionless, lay silent, lay waiting, lay as still as circumstance and genetics allowed.

Except for the butterfly.

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To Each His Own Mélange

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

Some people move through our lives and then they’re gone like the morning rain.
Some stand with the stillness of a soldier at their post and never change.
Some dance along the waterline like waves against the coast.
Some forever haunt you like a ghost.

Amy Speace, Ghosts

Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away
Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away

Mentor Williams, Drift Away

I have no idea who it was that first said life is a layer cake.  When you Google the phrase, you get a million hits, none of which purports to trace the phrase to a specific source.  Or, if there is such a hit, I don’t have the patience to wade through all of the resulting mess to find it.  I suspect it’s one of those phrases that has existed for a long time, the person having had the original idea lost to history.  It doesn’t really matter in any event, since the notion possesses just enough truth to have the requisite staying power necessary to make it a  cliché.  But I don’t much care for this sweet and sugary image, for not all of us live happily ever after.

We are all the creatures of both our genes and our experiences.  There is a great philosophical debate as to which of these ingredients provides the greater part of who we are at any given moment, but, in the end, does it really matter if it is a 60/40 split or a 50/50 one?  For me, the debate is not very useful and amounts to little more than a philosophical pissing match.  It is clear that both effect who we were and who we become.  It is probably not even safe to say that at the moment of birth only our genes control who we are, because there now is evidence that things going on in the world surrounding the fetus in a womb affect that fetus in a variety of ways.  Suffice it to say that whoever we are at any particular moment in time, we are a mixture of our heritage and our experiences, a mélange of life, culture, and chromosomes.

It is more interesting to me to think about which of our experiences have more input into who we become over time.  In my case, I am certain that music has been the primary input, the primary leavening agent.  For music has always been a part of my life, even if I don’t play an instrument, even if I no longer sing in a choir as I once did.  Whenever I am taking a walk – whether on a crowded downtown street, or down a private country lane with only the wind and birdsong for accompaniment – there is always music playing in my mind.  Always.  While natural occurring sounds are evident to me during my walks and may inform my choice of internal melody, there is music playing in my head and my memory is at work recalling appropriate lyrics.

Music became important to me as a young boy in the small eastern Washington town where I grew up.  I was never happy in the town, for it was too restrictive, too confining, too controlling.  The town wanted me to be and act a certain way, a way it determined was appropriate for me, taking into account my parent’s background, our family’s relative wealth (or, better put, our absolute lack of cash), and our relative newcomer status in a town whose older families could trace their presence back over 150 years.   I didn’t understand why these constraints were appropriate, for they felt like shackles.  After all, I was young and full of the American spirit.  I believed in their preaching that I could be whomever I wanted to be if only I had the necessary gifts and if only I worked hard enough.  So why they were busy trying to shut me into the box they wanted me to occupy?  That they were constantly doing so was a mystery to me and a direct, head-to-head challenge to my survival instincts.

Music freed me from the town’s restraints.  Initially, it provided mental freedom from the confining world a child inhabits, the kind of freedom that sometimes comes to long-term, unjustly confined prisoners through means of reading or of meditation.  Songs do have wings, after all, and on them I flew away from my constraints.  I can recall working in the pea fields and mentally hearing Bobby Rydell’s version of Volare (Franco Migliacci and Domenico Modugno) as I rode a loader pulled behind a Caterpillar tractor.  The song freed me from the drudgery of a repetitive task, while allowing me to pay attention to the needs of the job.  It wasn’t love that gave me wings at the age I then was, for the very idea of girls scared me to death; it was the song’s melody and the notion that one could rise and fly away up to the clouds, fly away from the Valley in which I was then trapped.  This song, among many others, provided a pathway to a future that didn’t include the boxes that others insisted I occupy.

I grew up in an age when music was changing.  I was born in the mid-Forties when big bands and crooners held sway.  By the time I entered junior high school, early rock-and-roll, doo wop, and pop music were coming into prominence, and their youthful exuberance helped me cope with other’s expectations, helped free me mentally from the chains others attempted to forge for me.  Dion helped me understand that I could wander if I wished (The Wanderer, Ernie Maresca), whiled Frankie Ford invited me on a Sea Cruise (Sea Cruise, Huey P. Smith).  Martin Denny took me to a quiet village somewhere other than my valley (Quiet Village, Martin Denny), and Ricky Nelson preached the power of becoming a Travelin’ Man (Jerry Fuller).  Along with Fabian, I crooned “turn me loose, turn me loose I say” (Turn Me Loose, Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman) as I headed mentally for the exits from the valley that would only open for me after I’d turned 18 and had graduated from high school.

And along with these mental images, music eventually gave me the necessary energy to fly free when the valley’s gates opened at last, gave me the beat to which to live my own life, gave me the creative rhythm needed to fashion a life of my own devising.

Then music changed again, becoming the Voice, the anthem of an angry generation haunted by Vietnam, haunted by the stupidity of those in authority who insisted young men of my age should fight and die in a war devoid of purpose, devoid of meaning.  Bob Dylan helped me ask the necessary questions, telling me that the answers were blowin’ in the wind (Blowin’ In The Wind, Bob Dylan); Gene Pitney invested in me the concept that a law book might be the answer to the point of a gun, and helped power my efforts to go east to attend law school (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence), Burt Bacharach, Hal David).  Barry Maguire and P. F. Sloan reminded me that we were on the eve of destruction (The Eve Of Destruction, P. F. Sloan) and helped give me the incentive and the courage to fight an unlawful draft order in a federal courthouse in Detroit, Michigan; Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang my song, the song of a poor boy who hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest (The Sound of Silence, Paul Simon).  Pete Seeger reminded me that we were waist deep in the big muddy and that the big fool, Lyndon Johnson, was pressing on nonetheless (Waist Deep In The Big Muddy, Pete Seeger); Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers reminded me that despite everything life threw my way, I should stay forever young, I should always be light of heart, my heart should always be joyful, a song should always be sung (Forever Young, Bob Dylan).

And so I still sing music in my head as I walk down life’s streets, both the music of then and the music of now.  And every once in a while, one of the gods of my youth returns to remind me that he or she isn’t done yet, to fill my life with yet more music.  Dion did so in his 2000 album, Deja Nu, reminding me through the strains of Shu Bop (Dion Dimucci) of the first time I heard doo wop sung, of its power to make my heart ache with longing.  In a single album, Dion returned doo wop, at his then-current age of 61, to an art form, an art form no longer restricted to groups of young men singing on the stoops of 1950s Brooklyn.

And just last year, Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys returned, reminding me that rock-and-roll has a place for people my age, reminding me that old bands can have staying power, reminding me that old voices can still be heard as if for the first time and not just through the constant repetition of their old hits, reminding me that:

Old friends have gone
They’ve gone their separate ways
Our dreams hold on
For those who still have more to say

Brian Wilson/Joe Thomas, Jon Bon Jovi, Summer’s Gone

Music has played a seminal role in who I’ve become and will continue to help fashion who I’ve yet to become: always present; integral to my thinking, my education, my experiences, my walks down life’s roads; constantly thought-provoking and always soothing.  While new friends may be made, and old friends may go in the passage of fickle time; while old friends may metamorphose into someone other than whom they once were, and old friends may die: the music will always play on.  For friends are transitory and music is not.

And so, while I don’t particularly care for the notion that life is a layer cake, I don’t mean to imply, instead, that life is always dark. For I believe that we should not look askance at whatever dark surprises life delivers; we should embrace them instead.  Everything we make happen, everything that happens to us, can have a positive side, even those events that mark our darkest hours.  All we have to do – hard as it is to do – is to first discover and then learn the lessons taught by our darker moments.  In so doing, we will improve our futures, especially if we do so to the strains of music.

Accordingly, I prefer to think of life as a casserole of scalloped potatoes rather than as a layer cake: as a basic, life-sustaining mélange of starch, improved by the spices, the cheeses, the ingredients we add to it by means of living a long, eventful life – in my case, a composition heavily spiced with music in all of its magnificent variety.

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