Saturday, October 24, 2015

This Song Existed: "Music Box Dancer."




I can play this song on piano, by heart.

I must have first heard this song in 1978, when it came out. I can remember the 45 record it came on, with a red label.  I can remember playing the record on the 'hi fi,' the one that was 8' long, a sort of ivory color, with sliding panels on the top that on the right opened to reveal the record player and on the left would slide back to show a row of 33 and 45 rpm records.  The hi-fi was modeled after, I think, the Acropolis, if the Acropolis had been waist-high and in our dining room, where we only ate on New Year's Eve.

I learned "Music Box Dancer" from my second piano teacher, Mrs. Loppnow, in her house across from St. Charles Church.  It's not that difficult a song, actually, to play on piano. I probably learned it at age 8 or 9 or 10 or so.  Maybe a little older, but either way, it's just really the same melody played over and over, an octave higher or an octave lower or so, with four chords for the left hand.

I can't tell you what the chords are, now, sitting here in Mr F's room waiting for him to fall asleep, listening to the song and typing this.  I can't even tell you what notes are for the melody. But I know them, like I know my own name. If I sit down at a piano, I can start playing the song without thinking about it.  It works better if I don't think about it, in fact. If I start to think about what I'm doing, concentrate on it, I'll stumble.  I can play the song on a sort of runner's high, watching my hands just go through and do it.

At least I think I can.

I haven't played piano in, probably, five years.  That's not by design. We have a piano in our house, Sweetie's old piano that she played growing up, which she had delivered down from her parent's house 15 years ago as an anniversary present for me.  It's still semi-tuned, but getting it tuned is on the long list of things we may do someday. Someday.

Even when the piano was in better tune, though, I was drifting away from it.  When I used to play piano for fun, back 5 or more years ago, I could play this song, and Chariots of Fire, and Bach's Toccata and Fugue In D Minor, which was one of my favorite songs to play: it's phenomenal. Everyone knows it.



The song itself is also kind of simple, at least the version I learned. But what's so fun about it is it looks amazing when you play it.

I started wanting to play piano when I watched a piano player on TV. I was about 7 or 8.  It's one of the earliest things I can remember: sitting in our living room watching the big old TV.  Entertainment in those days was solid: televisions, hi-fi stereos, they were massive.  I've got an Ipod the size of a matchbook and I watch TV mostly on my laptop, which weighs about as much as a spiral notebook and is about the same size.   When I was a kid, televisions couldn't be moved, hardly. They were huge.

I don't remember who played the piano on TV. I just remember watching his hands as they played on the keys, the way the keys dipped up and down and danced around, the way his fingers flew back and forth.  I was mesmerized.  I couldn't look away.  I wanted to do that.

I never really had that skill, never that knack.  I was best when I could memorize a piece of music, like I did with the few songs I can still play, nearly 40 years later.  When I could memorize them, songs like The Entertainer or the first movement from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or Fuur Elise, I could play them the way I wanted to, my hands moving and me just watching, using that part of my brain that lets me walk or breathe or see, the automatic part that knows how things are done. That was my favorite part: just watching my body do something effortlessly, the way my brain and hands worked together to make music.

It was always work for me, until I memorized it. I practiced piano, though, first because I had to and then because I wanted to.  It didn't seem like practice. It seemed like learning, which was somehow different. I like learning. If I worked on something long enough, it became a part of me, something that would never leave me.  Decades later, my body would remember how to play those songs.

That's amazing, to me, and also sad, a bit. The human body is constantly replacing itself. We are all an experiment, a Ship Of Theseus, slowly rebuilding ourselves.  For years and years and years my body rebuilt itself and everytime it did, it kept the part of me that could play those songs, hardwired into my DNA like I could pass it on to my children.

I can't play all the songs anymore.  I can still play Music Box Dancer, and Chariots of Fire, and Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.  That's the fun one, like I said: at one point your hands cross over each other, playing notes in rapid-fire succession in and out of the fingers of each hand. It's almost impossible to describe how that feels. When I played that part, I would feel like there should be an audience and when I finished the run without a mistake, they should stand up and applaud, cheering and clapping.

I never knew I would grow old. It was only recently that I started to feel like I was getting older. My hair is getting wispier and in one picture not long ago I had a bald spot.  There's a lot of gray. My feet hurt all the time and I don't wear jogging shorts to go to the library anymore.

None of that bothers me. What bothers me is losing parts of me I cared about.  I can't go jogging anymore; I can't hardly exercise at all.  Sometimes I have trouble getting the word I want to come up with, and I pause while I'm talking, trying to remember a name or a song or a book.  I sing along with songs using the wrong lyrics without even realizing it.



And I can't play all the songs I used to know by heart. Little pieces slipping away, borne off into the past: dark winter nights sitting at the piano in the living room, plunking away at whatever new piece I was supposed to be working on that week, doing my 20-30 minutes of new stuff so that I could get to the parts I liked, the songs I knew not just by heart but by mind, and play them the way I wanted to.

When the last of those songs is gone, I'll be someone entirely new, I suppose. When I finally sit down at the piano one of these days -- if Mr F wasn't still awake I'd have gone down to try it now, but he hates if I leave his room before he falls asleep -- when I finally sit down to try them, someday, and can't play any of them, then I guess the last part of that kid will be gone, and a new person, an entirely new person, will have been built in his stead.

Because with everything that goes, something new comes in. That's how it works.  I put Music Box Dancer on Youtube tonight, because the song had popped into my head.  Along the right hand side of  the screen, as it played, I saw other songs by Frank Mills.

"You know?" I said to Sweetie, "I know this will sound kind of dumb, but I've been listening to this song, Music Box Dancer, for nearly forty years. I've always loved it. It's one of my favorite songs of all time.  And yet, in that entire time, it never occurred to me that the guy who wrote it, Frank Mills, might have written other songs that I liked."

This song existed as a single entity in my mind: it was born on a vinyl record playing on the hi-fi, and then transformed into sheet music that I laboriously worked at, over and over, over and over, over and over. I learned the melody. I learned the chords. I put them together. Suddenly the song was there, on my piano, and I had lifted it out of the record and off of the paper and into the air in front of me. From there, I breathed it in and made it a part of me, embedded for a half a lifetime so deeply that I can, as I sit here, move my hands over the laptop as though it is a piano and I am playing it.

The song existed as just that: a single song, taking up its spot.  Now, years later, as the song itself fades away from me, leaving room for something else, as note-by-note it is carried off into the ether, I am able, while missing it, to replace it with something else and see how that feels.

I am not -- we all are not -- for very long the person we think ourselves to be. We are constantly changing, in big and small ways. Maybe that's why we hold on to some things, like favorite songs: to not let too much of ourselves be swept away at once, to make sure that we can always recognize ourselves.

After I listened to Music Box Dancer, I played this one:



Then I hummed that as I took Mr F out for a walk down to the vacant lot, where we threw some rocks in the lake and looked at the cloudy night sky.

I bet that new song would be fun to play on our piano.


Friday, October 23, 2015

(A) I'm glad I was born into the kind of life where I was able to go to college and (B) I am going to have to stop shopping at Amazon...and everywhere else.

Jeff Lockhart took a warehouse temp job because it was the best opportunity he could find....

...Sometime around 2 a.m. that January morning, Jeff took his 30-minute “lunch break.” Most days, he would clock out and go out to his Suburban in the parking lot. He would pull his lunch from his cooler and grab his phone, which, under warehouse policy, wasn't allowed on the floor. He always at least texted Di-Key, who found it hard to sleep while her husband was away at work. On this particular morning, he called her. He asked how her braids had come along, told her that he loved her and that she should get some sleep. Then he said he needed to get back to work.

Less than an hour later, a worker found Jeff on the third floor. He had collapsed and was lying unconscious in aisle A-215, beneath shelves stocked with Tupperware and heating pads.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Throwback Thursday: Catbugs, Revisited

Back in 2010 I used to post weekly about the Saturday Adventures, outings for me and the twins and Sweetie.  Here's the one I posted on October 22, 2010.  Any comments in red are ones I added today.

Catbugs

Somebody needs to invent a new kind of pants. We've got sweatpants, dress pants, and blue jeans, and none of them is good for doing things like "walking around outside on a borderline-temperature fall day."

"Borderline temperature days" are those days when it's just a little bit too cold for shorts, and a little bit too warm for pants-- so that no matter what you do you're going to be a little uncomfortable. That's what happened to me last week, on the Saturday Adventure, when Sweetie and I took Mr F and Mr Bunches on

The Catbug Trail Nature Walk!

On this particular day, I opted to wear blue jeans, because I'm not going to walk around in slacks,

Nobody born after 1952 should ever use the word "slacks." It's like calling a couch a davenport, like my Grandma used to. She also had a fold-out bed davenport, which she called the "Dabble Bed." 


for Pete's sake, on a nature trail, but I didn't want to be too cold, either. That was a mistake, as you'll see. But before I knew it was a mistake, we set out optimistically, bringing along the soon-to-be-obsolete double stroller because it's about a 1 and 1/2 mile walk to our destination, the highest point in Middleton, Wisconsin. You can see it in the exact center of this picture:


And, no, I don't know it's officially the highest point in Middleton, Wisconsin, but I don't not know that, either, and is it really worth debating?

That hill in the middle of the picture is the "Mountain" that led to "Little Park On The Mountain" being called "Little Park On The Mountain." But, weirdly, this mountain is not the mountain Little Park is on. I know, I know. Nothing I say makes sense. You know, if you've got like a JILLION years and want to read another long post you could read "The Naked Boy And The Mountain That Isn't.

To get to the point where we took that picture, though, we first had to walk up the giant hill that leads away from our house. To get to or from our house, you have to go uphill. I know that sounds like the kind of story your grandfather

who wore slacks

 told you, but it's true: If we walk anywhere, the walk begins and ends with a strenuous uphill walk, because our house sits off to the side of the top of a tall hill, so you have to drive or walk up that hill, turn onto our road, and then go back down a hill to get to us.

Which means I was already tired and a little hot in my jeans when I took that first picture, and we still had over a mile to go. Luckily, I had a chance to rest and deperspirate (that's a word I invented for when you stand really still until the perspiration on your legs evaporates and your jeans don't stick to you anymore) when we passed a playground on the way; the nature trail goes along the edge of a park for a portion of it, and Mr Bunches wanted to take a moment to go down the slides. So we let him do that, while I rested, before heading on to the rest of the nature trail, where we came across what could be described as a thundering herd of these:


... if caterpillars thundered when they herded around. The trail was full of caterpillars -- all of them trying to head east across the gravelly, sandy trail. It made me wonder what was coming from the west. Was there something they knew that we didn't? A caterpillarocalypse?

It could have been. The actual term for a group of caterpillars is "army." An Army Of Caterpillars.

I picked up one of them to show Mr F and Mr Bunches. Mr F wanted to hold it but I wouldn't let him -- he's kind of rough and I didn't want him to hurt it. Mr Bunches looked and said: "Bug."

I said "Caterpillar."

He said "Catbug."

So that's what they are now.

We were closer to our goal, but it didn't seem that way. Here was where we had to park the stroller to go up the part of the hill where strollers aren't allowed:


Sweetie said "Is it safe to leave it here?" We were in the middle of a nature reserve, with nobody around. "Who's going to steal a stroller?" I asked, forgetting my upbringing, when I learned that everyone in the world is a thief (which is why I was carrying my wallet in my front pocket even on the nature trail.)

(I don't know why I brought my wallet.)

It didn't really matter is someone did steal the stroller.

I miss that stroller so much. Not only was it great for getting through crowds, but it was far easier to go somewhere with the boys before Mr F was a 120-pound linebacker who frequently changes direction, or trys to, without any warning, leaving the person in charge of him with a separated shoulder
 The Babies! are 4 years old now, and getting a little big for it; it serves mainly as a way for them to rest if we go somewhere like a nature walk, and it's usually more trouble than it's worth, especially since Mr Bunches, who sits in front, can put his feet down and touch the ground and if he does it hard enough he'll stop the stroller dead in its tracks.

Mr F:
enjoyed the walk up the hill, but that's because he's supermuscular. He likes to jump on Sweetie's exercise trampoline for hours, and as a result has legs that would be the envy of an Olympic high-jumper.

This is still true. We are about 2 weeks away from Mr F being stronger than me. He still jumps, plus he has one of those exercise balls that you sit on only he bounces on it, too. His core is a thing of wonder. He is the most solid, stable kid I know. He's like a block of iron suddenly developed muscles and a strong urge to go that way right now.

The walk up the hill posed no problem for him.

It nearly destroyed me, as the temperature continued to hover around "You won't be able to make up your mind what to wear" degrees, and I got sweatier and sweatier in my jeans.

Things got a little worse when, near the top of the hill (which is about a 1/2 mile uphill climb) Mr F and Mr Bunches both got tired and I had to carry each of them about 200 yards uphill to get to the top.

I used to be able to do that! I once walked a mile carrying both of them, to avoid a fox that was stalking us through a back road. That's a true story, every bit of it. These days, when I try to do yoga only to have an asthma attack so severe that I have to go to the doctor, I think back to those days and tell myself:  I WAS ONCE A SUPERHERO.
But we made it there -- sweaty jeans legs and all -- and were rewarded with this view:




That watertower in the upper left side is where I took the first picture from, just to give you a sense of perspective.

We hung around a few minutes up there, but there's really nothing to do once you've looked out at the scenery and said "Wow, what a view" and "Boy, that's a long walk" and "My legs are sweaty," so we headed back home. I paused to take this picture just before we left:


Because I've always liked the pattern of stark branches against a blue sky.

____________________________________________________________

So there wasn't much to that adventure, I suppose, but, there you go. That's what I was doing five years ago today.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Update On God: God is sort of like a defense attorney or life coach I guess.

The Atlanta police investigating
the double murder of two men
by Ray Lewis and his friends.
A 2013 poll showed that 27% of Americans believe God directly intervenes in the outcome of football games. (30% of Americans, meanwhile, believe there is no point in planning or trying to do much of anything because their fate is in God's hands.)  But God apparently does directly intervene in people's lives, or at least in the lives of (allegedly) murderous NFL player-turned-commentator Ray "That Ain't A Knife/This Is A Knife" Lewis.  In his new biography Ray says that after he was arrested for obstructing the investigation into a murder that 'happened' right next to him in a fight he was in:


 I heard God’s voice. I did. he came to me from somewhere in the darkness of that holding cell—said, “Can you hear me now?” And underneath this voice, in the middle of that darkness, there was a message—came in clear and loud and true. The message: whatever much and more I had to slog through in that jail cell in Atlanta, it would strengthen me. Whatever shadows there were now, hanging over me and my family, it would strengthen me. Whatever dirt these people in law enforcement were determined to do to my name, my standing, my pride, it would only strengthen me. Can you hear me now? Oh yes—yes, I can hear you! Yes!

Ray had been arrested for interfering in the investigation into two as-yet-unsolved murders at a nightclub in Atlanta, a nightclub Ray was at; the two men were in a fight with Ray and his group.

Ray Lewis didn't say whether God had previously told him to hide his bloody white suit in a dumpster outside the hotel, or whether God's advice was that Ray tell everyone in the car to shut up and not talk to the police.  Ray was also silent, in his book, about whether it was true his two friends had gone to buy knives the day before the murders, and didn't comment on whether God had any advice about how to deal with the victims' blood being found in Ray's limo.

There is a statue of Ray Lewis put up by the Baltimore Ravens. Ray says he prays every day that God ease the pain of "anybody who was affected by that whole ordeal." His book doesn't say if God answers back.

Ray's victims do not have a statue in their honor.


15 Things To Know About The Second Amendment, Guns, And How America Thinks

A while back I posted a link on Twitter:


And got this response:


When I asked Mykro for actual details, he provided me a link to an article posted on October 3 by a man named Eugene Volokh.

Volokh offered what he said were examples of ordinary civilians armed with guns stopping mass killings, 10 of them. The examples included an Uber driver who fired six rounds into a crowded intersection, to stop a man who was also shooting into the crowd.  There is no information on where the gunman got his gun, but he apparently did not hurt anyone -- the only person injured was the first shooter.

This West Philadelphia barbershop shooting is short on details in the article cited. Volokh didn't mention, though, the other Philly barbershop shooting in which a rifle-wielding man sprayed the block with bullets, killing one and injuring two.  I didn't go investigate the other 8 in Volokh's list; the state of news reporting and political discourse these days means that all you find are page after page of the same report, with no reporter looking into questions like whether the guns used by mass killers were obtained legally or not.

There have been 10,615 gun deaths in the United States already this year. Volokh, who apparently supports concealed carry, was able to find 10 instances where gun violence was avoided, or shortened, by another gun-wielder.

Imagine this:

i

is a person.

Here are how many people were killed by guns each month this year:

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Here's how many gunmen stopped violence, the entire year:

iiiiiiiiii

I think seeing the actual numbers is helpful. I'd have done the full 10,000+ people who died this year but you get the point.

Here are ___ things to know about guns, and the Second Amendment.

1. Until 1939 the 2nd Amendment was interpreted collectively, rather than individually: that is, it provided a collective right, to a well-regulated militia, rather than an individual right to own something that could spray a street in Philadelphia with bullets if you didn't like your haircut.

2. In 2008, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the 2nd Amendment to provide for individual rights, while leaving an exception for weapons that could not be used for "law-abiding" purposes. This let the 1939 precedent, which allowed Congress to ban sawed-off shotguns, to stand while letting people own a gun that could spray a street in Philadelphia with bullets.

3. In 2001, the US manufactured 2,900,000 guns.

4. In 2010, the US manufactured 5,500,000 guns and imported another 2,840,000.

5. Since 1998, the government has processed 156,577,260 applications for legal gun purchases. That would be enough to give every soldier in every army in every NATO country 50 guns.

6. The National Rifle Association has spent about $36,600,000 in lobbying since 1998. In 2015 so far, it has spent about $1,700,000.

7. Put another way, the NRA has spent about $170 per gun death this year.

8. The top 10 recipients of gun-lobby money are all Republicans. The top 10 recipients of anti-gun money are all Democrats. But five big-name Democratic senators got lots of money from gun lobbyists, and voted against expanding background checks.

9. In April 2014, New York Mayor Bloomberg promised to spend $50,000,000 on anti-gun lobbying. That would be 2 1/2 times the amount the NRA spent in 2012.

10. There are only two products in the world which, when used exactly the way they are intended to be used, are fatal: guns and cigarettes.

11. Every year, over 60% of gun sales are to civilians, with the other 40% going to government and/or law enforcement.

12. Only 6% of people in the United States hunt.

13.  What are the other 54% doing with their guns?

14. Gun manufacturers make in excess of $993,000,000 profit each year.  60% of that comes from regular people buying guns. That means US civilians spend $595,800,000 per year on guns.

15. That is, we as a country spend $1,000 per minute on guns.

16. That number, $993,000,000 is almost exactly the amount of money the United States plans to cut from assistance for family and children in fiscal year 2016.

17. In America, you would be better off asking someone to buy you a gun than to buy you lunch.