Announcement

I have decided to unclutter this blog... some.

I set out trying to make this more current-events-in-the-lives-of-Nikki-and-Daniel than random-thoughts-from-the-mind-of-Nikki, but as I sit down to write, I often find that the other part of me -- the part that is determined to just keep writing -- takes over. It's very hard for me to compartmentalize the stuff of our lives well enough to decide what is newsy/current/relevant enough to deserve a post on this page. But, I am going to endeavor to do it because I think I will find it freeing (I tend to not write a lot of things I want to write here because I don't think they fit) and several of you will find it less tedious to plow through some of my more abstract posts!

I have created yet another blog for the irrepressible writer in me, and I will try to bring this one back into focus a little bit. The new blog is my space for writing whatever I want as frequently as I wish, and this one will be reserved semi-regular posts about things that arguably connect to our lives here a bit more tangibly, for those who prefer Dan and Nikki in more measured doses.

So, if you happen to be someone who, for whatever reason, enjoys reading what I write regardless of topic and relevance, I invite you to visit my otherwise good blog. If not, you'll still find bits from our lives here in this space... and knowing me, this space will still be rather eclectic!

What Curiosity Did

Well... as of yet, it didn't kill our cats, but it did shorten our lives by adding to our stress.

If you've seen the pictures of our yard, then you know how this little 1/2 acre of North Carolina must look through a cat's eyes. In a word: irresistible.

While we are not the sort to let our cats run free, especially in a county with leash laws and newly-enhanced animal control, we have been known to take the cats on what we affectionately refer to as "supervised prison yard walks". This means both of the humans take up posts in the yard, after boarding up or otherwise obstructing the most obvious escape spots, and let the kitties out in the fenced portion to nibble on grass and explore the interesting sights and scents.

Our cats never cease to amaze me with their ingenuity, and this move has taught us things about both of them that we didn't know before.

Case in point: MooMoo is a door darter. MooMoo stays close to the ground. MooMoo is not a climber, indoors or out. MooMoo is timid and something of a cry-baby, though not to be trifled with if you happen to annoy her, because she manages to put all of her 7 pounds into a swat. However, MooMoo also apparently reserves the right to break her own behavioral rules in order to climb 20 or 30 feet up into our willow tree. Twice, so far.

Once up in the tree, she cries inconsolably and climbs further out onto the slender branches in a sadly misguided effort to get down. Monte? Well, he sits at the base of the tree, watching her with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, disdain and bewilderment.

The first time, "daddy" met her halfway by climbing a good 7 or 8 feet up a ladder so she could come to him -- this after attempting to lure and coax her down for about an hour in every way we could imagine. Unlike MooMoo, we learn from our mistakes. The second time, we ignored her, wished her well, and figured she'd find a way to come down when she got hungry enough. Sure enough, she did. She hugged the tree and shimmied down tail-first, crying and scolding the whole way.

Monte, on the other hand, shows a very different brand of resourcefulness. He's not a tiny, slender thing like MooMoo, so he doesn't climb trees and slip through fence slats with ease. He, however, climbs chain-link fences... much in the same way a human would, minus the benefits of opposable thumbs. It's rather remarkable to watch, if a bit distressing when you happen to want to keep him IN the yard and you are on the other end.

Given their naturally opportunistic nature and the fact that no yard or human vigilance can keep a determined cat fenced indefinitely, the inevitable happened this past week. They both got out into the wild world... the how of it is a long story and hardly matters once the cats have scattered to the 4 winds. We tracked them at first, but we soon realized that there was no catching them and that our following only drove them further away. So, we retired to the house, leaving the doors open, and waited for hunger, a big frightening deer or the desire for a nice scratch to bring them back.

They returned long enough for capture a few hours later. We knew they were here when we heard cats growing and yowling. They had company -- a neighborhood cat that had decided to invade our cats' territory. Bad idea. Although the last fight Monte picked nearly cost him his life because of secondary infection, he fights to win. Even through his fever and post-surgical drug-induced fog, you could catch a glimmer of his "you should see the other cat" satisfaction. Having seen his freshly-sharpened claws recently, I would not want to be the other cat. As for MooMoo, there is no alpha male of any size or description that she won't take on.

Fight narrowly averted, Daniel marched them both inside, expressed his displeasure, and slammed the doors shut. Thus ended their first foray into the forest. We're sure this won't be the last... it's the way of cats and curiosity. However, we remain hopeful that curiosity will never finish its murderous work here.

Nothing better to do

There I sat. The bench was hard and cold. The light, inadequate. Still, it was just enough to read by if I held my music at the proper angle. When I realized that, I suddenly deeply regretted lacking the foresight to bring along my library book. Rehearsal had been over for about 10 minutes, and Daniel had been gone for about 40. I was growing bored and needed something to do, so I picked up one of my many sheets of music and debated whether to attempt to sing some Charpentier under my breath.

The only light actually situated in the room was several feet away, at the opposite corner, above the desk where the guard, an off-duty sheriff, tan uniformed, a bit thick through the middle, distinctly bored, and rather obviously gun-carrying, also sat and waited. For him the wait was about the hands on the clock. At 10:30 he could lock up. For me, the wait was about something a bit more difficult to pin down. Sometime in the next hour Daniel would reappear, having picked up a friend who was fresh off a plane from Los Angeles.

The guard and I had already discussed his plight and mine. It was decided that since it really wasn't safe for me to walk anywhere else to wait, and since waiting outside wasn't any safer, if Daniel hadn't appeared by 10:30, the guard would drop me off at a pub nearby that might keep late enough hours that I could duck inside and out of harm's way to finish my wait. I would call Daniel and tell him where to find me, and it would all work out somehow.

In the meantime, I waited there in the foyer of the old Arts building. It was roomy and mostly made of glass. It had the look of an edifice intended to make an impression -- large, angular, strong lines that promise strength and beauty. There was plenty of glass and metal. Lately, the only impression the interior of the place gives is that it really needs some care. The hard lines have gone soft with age. The carpet is worn and ragged. The walls have taken on an institutional pallor more fitting for a hospital than a theater or gallery. A sign at the doorway leading into the rest of the building proclaims the intent to refurbish. In the meantime, though, the place is somewhat gloomy.

My bench was up against one of the glass walls to the exterior of the building, and the light that I read by was that of a street lamp filtered by the leaves of a tree. My eyes strained to distinguish the notes in the dappled light. I had decided to sing as quietly as I could, but the little bit of noise I was making soon became uncomfortable for me. Although I had needed to raise my voice to make myself heard by the guard when he had asked me some inane question moments earlier, I felt too exposed to muddle through the baroque masterpiece with an audience, even one as unlikely to listen or even hear as the present company. When I glanced up, I noticed that most of the time he was lost in his thought, staring off into the distance behind me, and his look varied between boredom and pain. He was aware of my presence, but I was clearly the least of his worries.

Determined to keep my mind and hands occupied, I settled on whispering rhythms, gently tapping my hand or my foot to keep the beat steady as I navigated the eighth and sixteenth notes with the dexterity and subtlety of an elephant climbing stairs. Thus I remained, drilling the more difficult passages in fits and starts, until the last people had trickled out of the building and the pale blue display on my cell phone indicated that 45 minutes had passed and 10:30 had come.

I lowered my music to my lap and looked expectantly up at the guard. For his part, he wandered near me and inquired as to when I had last heard from my husband and when I thought he would arrive. My wait was perhaps just 10 minutes longer, so the guard decided to wait there with me. Just the two of us, tired and bored in a big, empty building, with nothing better to do than wait.

"How long have you been married?"
I started a little, wondering at the simultaneously personal and casual tone of his question.
"Five years last month."
"My wife just left me after 23 years."*
"Oh. I'm very sorry." What does one say?
"Her name is Kelly. Look out the window behind you there."
I turned, and there on the next building over was the name of some business "Kelly ..." I didn't catch the rest. The rest hardly mattered. Speechless, I looked back at him and put my music down on the sloppy pile next to me.

"We met some new people. They have money. Lots of money. I don't. One of the women is young and worth millions. She goes both ways, if you know what I mean. Well, Kelly started hanging out with the woman more and more. Fine, I thought. She's found friends... and one of the men, I think, though I can't be sure... I think she may have left me for ..."

"I didn't see it coming. I had no idea... We were childhood sweethearts... we'd known each other since we were in third grade...

"I've never lived alone before... the house is so quiet..."

I interjected into his story now and then a quiet concerned murmur or a reflective question, as he filled in the details of the house, the kids, the bills, the history ... he talked on like nobody had listened in a long time. Perhaps nobody had. I was a captive audience, and he was in need of one.

"I think that may be your husband now." It had been eight minutes. He gestured to a car just pulling up outside. Indeed, it was him, with our friend, just as expected. I gathered up my things and left out the door that he had opened for me. "See you next Monday," he said.

"Yes, uh, I suppose you will. Take care."

I walked out to the car to join my faithful, constant husband who had, as he always does, come for me as promised. The guard went about the business of closing up for the night, before driving in silence to his empty house.

I'm not sure why. Sometimes it mystifies me. But I seem to be the hearer of stories everywhere I go. Stories like this one -- so often offered freely, unsolicited. Ordinary stories about ordinary people made extraordinary only by the details that separate each one of us. It has happened countless times. Almost without fail, whenever I sit or stand alone with nothing better to do, someone comes to me with a story to tell... usually a sad one.

Listening is powerful, too, it would seem. Once, in college, I listened to a stranger selling magazines, who then proposed marriage on the spot. He'd take me to Arkansas with him. We could leave right away.

I declined.

Sometimes listening is uncomfortable, but I don't have the heart to silence the storytellers. I feel too much for them and understand all too well the need to unburden one's soul through words. Simone Weil says, “Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.” Difficult, yes... but somehow freeing and cleansing. For both, perhaps. I'm not sure if this, listening when perhaps nobody else will, is the gift I offer other people, or if this spontaneous trust is somehow their gift to me. Perhaps it is a gift we give to each other.

I do know one thing. When the sun goes down in my life, as from time to time it does, I pray someone will be there, sitting quietly in the darkness... with nothing better to do than to listen to me.

*The details have been changed.

Inconvenient truths

I've been doing some reading lately. Well, more precisely, I have done a bit of it when I can bring myself to read more. So much of my work time is spent with words, that sometimes a book seems more like labor than like a musty paper-ensconced friend that is ready to chat whenever I sit down long enough to engage in quiet conversation.

Strangely enough, this week, even at the height of my work-induced reading, when I read a rather stale-to-me magazine cover-to-cover at least once per day as part of my routine, I've still reached for a book when the clock has wound its hands around to time to for me unwind and sever myself from my work umbilical cord (a.k.a. my Dell and the wonder of the Internet). That's been rather mysteriously true even though most days of late that bewitching hour has come just before midnight and I have, in opposition, developed a habit of turning into a pumpkin earlier and earlier. Sometimes I end up feeling a bit like Cinderella at the stroke of 11, when the shoe has dropped: torn between the urgency of the moment and the need to get home before everything, principally my sanity, unravels. The work will always be there, the thought goes, but if I plow through a bit more tonight, maybe it won't be there with such immediacy when I roll out of bed tomorrow.

I have been wending my way through a self-help book, which is enlightening if not enrapturing, but I have also made time for several "pleasure" reads. From Bradbury (October Country) to Steinbeck (The Pearl) to Maguire (Son of Witch), I have had not a shortage of vicarious lives to live and moral lessons to learn. Somehow no matter how fanciful or distant the lives -- whether they be talking Animals, witches or halflings, carnival freaks, dream creatures or impoverished Mexican oyster divers -- they expose the best and the worst of a very ordinary human nature: my own. I find it interesting how even my "pleasure" reads can induce a moral-thought-funk or plenty of mind-dizzying spin when it's time to sleep. I also find it curious that I am drawn to continue reading books I couldn't even claim to "like" in any sense.

That, it seems, is some of the magic of books. Perhaps we read because it's just easier to confront ourselves collectively or as individuals in the guise of fictional people so obviously unlike ourselves, I don't know. Then again, maybe I'm alone in my need to pull from every tale, no matter how frivolous, some lesson, some feeling, to wrap up into my life in a way more important than a foggy and inconsequential memory of a book-spun yarn. Whatever the case, I find myself thinking long and deeply about the people I have met in the books -- the people who are disturbingly like me in some ways and regrettably unlike me -- which is to say, I regret not being more like them -- in others. They carry with them inconvenient truths, sometimes explicitly stated in dialog, sometimes obscured in the folds of the fabric of their lives, but always hidden from immediate apprehension by their cloak of ink on paper.

Among those truths, is this one, tucked on page 324 of Son of a Witch, a book whose pages I kept turning to the end paper, but that I cannot really claim to like, yet. It seemed well-timed, somehow, springing into my life on the heels of 9-11 remembered: The colossal might of wickedness[...]: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

Indeed.

How inconvenient.

However, I am pleased and heartened to think there is a flip-side. The good in the world also is a product of what we do between breakfast and bedtime, though its ultimate font is He who is Good. That, I think, is reason enough to keep rolling out of bed, whatever may await on the to-do list. Because it isn't too late to tip the balance in my own life each day toward the good, even if it is equally inconvenient to keep trying.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

Autumn is just around the corner, and nature is preparing to welcome her. Temperatures are dropping and breezes have picked up, causing the fluttering willow leaves to dance all day and inviting open windows in the morning and evening. The weather is more balmy than suffocating, and the insects are becoming less plentiful. Our herbs have taken root, flourished and are, many of them, starting to go to seed. The trees are beginning to contemplate shedding their adornment, turning yellow in patches as if to try out the new color before committing to the new seasonal look. The stream is low, but clearing -- its bottom visible through the less muddied and algae-clotted water. Minnows swim, and squirrels frolic, but the deer and other four-legged visitors have become less frequent. The small patch of green beyond the stream, as if overnight, exploded into wild yellow blooms. The sun still shines, but it sometimes rests behind the clouds.

There are things I miss about California, but this place holds incredible charms for me. It's really quite lovely. I feel very blessed. I love to call such a place home.

Let the Flogging Begin!

The long-awaited email arrived today, in both of our in-boxes: "I am very pleased to offer each of you a place in the Choral Society of Durham--congratulations!"

Knowing how many people received invitations to join from the number of addresses in the "to" field and how many were scheduled to audition as of a little over a week ago, it looks like about 1 in 3 auditionees were invited to join - about 5 women and 6 men. We're both thrilled to have been among the chosen. Now, to get our hands on the music...!

Musical Spankings

"Whenever I am feeling musically superior and need to be taken down a notch, I need to come here." Daniel, on the topic of the Choral Society of Durham. "More like 18 notches for me." Nikki, in response.

Last week we privately auditioned for the Choral Society of Durham, and this week we, out of obedience, attended the first rehearsal, though we have not yet been notified as to whether we have been accepted in the group. My theory is that they require this first rehearsal as a filter: allowing the director to see which of the auditionees are serious enough about the group to show up, and making sure that the auditionees have had an experience of the group that will allow them to decide for themselves whether they feel the group is a good fit when invited to join. It serves another purpose for us: a way to increase our disappointment if we should happen to not make the cut.

This was not our first exposure to the group, as we had gone to a sing-through rehearsal a few weeks ago. Our overall impression of this group was that if there is any way they will have us, we want in... though I hasten to add that neither of us feels quite up to the task. These people can sight-read spots on flypaper and respond to direction well, quickly and accurately. They manage to sing together with nice tone and blend, even with 150 voices, and with some respect for dynamic markings, all during the first read of a piece of music. Add to that the fact that they are warm and welcoming of new people and you have a dream... or a nightmare, if you stare unflinchingly into the face of your musical inadequacies.

We now know there is a choir in the area we would like to be a part of. What we don't know is whether they would like us to be a part of them. We decided to cancel our North Carolina Master Chorale auditions and hang our hopes on this group, so strongly did we connect with its vision, people and direction. If this does not work out for us, we will keep looking for a singing opportunity together, but we'll both be not-so-secretly disappointed.

Joining this group would not be without cost, personal and financial. There is a lot of music to buy, concert dress to procure and lots of personal commitment to muster. Durham's a good 45-minute drive from home for us. Getting there on time, which is absolutely expected without exception, would be a challenge, and getting there at all will cost us in gas.

As for personal cost, I, for one, would absolutely have to carve out time to spend with the music at home. I simply cannot read with the speed and accuracy of the majority of the choir. During the audition, my voice was labeled "lovely", but the reading portion of my audition was not my brightest hour.

It was also not so dismal as my failed reading test for a large, showy choir in Southern California which shall remain unnamed, in large part because the Durham director seemed more concerned with determining if I know the rudiments of reading music, if I am teachable and if I can take direction than he was with discovering whether I already possess immaculate musicianship. So, rather than consigning my paperwork to the nearest round file without a second thought when I misjudged intervals and botched rhythms and then accusing me of already knowing the piece of music that I had never seen before when I actually succeeded at reading (as happened in the other case), this director worked with me on the passage from Bach that I had so badly mangled on my first abortive attempt, asking me to isolate and fix trouble spots and acknowledging that I had managed to get some things right on the first pass (what they were, I have no idea!). It was about as painless as a music reading test could be for me, knowing how sadly that aspect of my musicianship is lacking. I did, before I left the office, have the opportunity to remark that reading is not my strong suit. Working very hard to learn what I need to learn is. We shall see if that is sufficient.

Daniel, on the other hand, gave what the director called the "best reading yet" in this series of auditions. That is an excellent start. However, he had a cold at audition time and his voice was not at all in top form. That, and Daniel's voice is not as trained and honed as those of many of the choir members' voices are sans cold. We discussed beforehand whether mentioning the cold was wise, and we settled on "no excuses" as the best approach. So, Daniel didn't feel particularly confident in the vocalizing he did in the audition, but he didn't offer the singer's bane: "I'm not singing well today because...". Singers are never in top form. There's always something wrong. So, just shut up and sing.

Together, we have enough raw material to make one rather talented singer. Alone, we each have plenty of room for growth. That is how it actually works out, too, because we come as a pair. This is something we do together, so... if they want my "lovely" voice and Daniel's excellent sight-reading, then they also get my bumbling reading and Daniel's not-so-trained voice.

We've been looking at what we did well in hopes that we find enough that is bankable. We hope that another thing in my favor, since my reading is sorely lacking, is the rather respectable list of solo opportunities I have had in the past, thanks mostly to the marvelous Scott Farthing, whom we miss terribly, and who trusted me to perform as a soloist on several challenging classical pieces. We hope that list of solos will say, "someone gave her multiple opportunities to be featured in a very exposed way. This must indicate an ability to rise to the occasion, even if she cannot quickly and accurately sing a piece on sight." Speak, musical resume... speak!

This choir feels to us like the perfect opportunity. They consistently choose programs of the music we like to sing. The choir would force both of us to grow. It would provide opportunities to get to know local musicians. It would provide us the chance to sing with a group that has an excellent reputation and with a director who is respected and talented.

That said, I think it is time we are both taken down a notch or 18. Either way it will happen. We'll find ourselves unworthy of invitation, or we will be invited and find ourselves in need of repeated smacks in the musical rump, in the form of weekly reminders of how much we need to grow as musicians. We'll see which spanking is in order. In the meantime, we've both had fun!

Sadness

I found out today that a child I read about on the news several days ago was the son of someone I know. The story had made me cry as it was, back when it was just an anonymous child that had no connection to anyone I care about. I only knew his mom by first name, and her name wasn't mentioned in the news coverage, so I didn't put the two of them together when I read what had happened. I talked to her online today and she told me about him.

Here's a picture of James that I have had on my computer for at least a year. This was in early 2006, so he had grown a bit since this picture was taken.

I can't claim to understand this sort of thing at all. It seems so very unfair.

Rest in peace, little guy.